"Uninteresting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... misrepresentation in various passages of the Prolegomena and Notes to his last edition of Shakespeare. (London, 1858, 6 vols.) The misrepresentations refer so purely to matters of textual criticism, and the exhibition of even one of them would involve the quotation of passages so uninteresting to the general reader, that we shall ask him to be content with our assurance that these disgraceful attempts to injure a literary opponent and former friend assume severally the form of direct misstatement, suppression of the truth, prevarication, and cunning ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... the story was about, Lloyd walked around to the other side of the deck, only to find another long uninteresting row of sleepy figures stretched out in steamer-chairs, and half hidden in rugs and cloaks. She turned to go back, but paused as she caught sight of a girl, about her own age, standing against the deck railing, looking over into the sea. She was not a pretty girl. Her face ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... very lonely. The kaleidoscope that is theatrical New York had altered since she left it. Only one or two of her former friends remained, and she found them uninteresting and narrow with the narrowness of their own absorbing world. She had forgotten that the theater was like an island, cut off from the rest of the world, having its own politics, its own society divided ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... coquet, so sure she was of his abject slavery to her whims; and, moreover, as must be confessed with regret, so unforgiving was she in her heart toward his blank eye. She merely consented to make him useful, much as she might a convenient and altogether doting but uninteresting grandmother. To all the other members of the camp—except the Boss, whom she regarded with some awe—she would make baby-love impartially and carelessly. But it was Red McWha ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... antipathy as he cast about for some common ground of interest in the little reception-room of the house shared by Bernard Graves and his mother. It seemed to the waiting caller a drab and lifeless home, uninteresting in its appointments, and out of keeping with the wealth known to have been inherited by the widow and her son. The young man's study was visible down the vista of a series of low-ceiled apartments, and Shelby saw that it was crammed with books. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... without speaking, shrugged his shoulders. Obviously he knew what to do with the Tchalikovs, but the treatment would have been so coarse and inhuman that he did not venture to put it into words. And the Tchalikovs were to him so utterly uninteresting and worthless, that a moment later he had forgotten them; looking into Anna Akimovna's eyes, he smiled with pleasure, and his face wore an expression as though he were dreaming about something very pleasant. Only, now standing close to him, Anna ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... powers of its author. Those who, like Dr. Johnson, have blamed it as a drama, have admired it "as a series of lines," or as a lyric; one writer, who has found that its characters are nothing, its sentiments tedious, its story uninteresting, has nevertheless "doubted whether there will ever be any similar poem which gives so true a conception of the capacity and the dignity of the mind by which it was produced" (Bagehot's Literary Studies). Some who have praised it as an allegory ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... more in the coming years. And over German also French has many advantages. In spite of the numerical preponderance of books published in Germany, it is doubtful if the German reader has quite such a catholic feast before him as the reader of French. There is a mass of German fiction probably as uninteresting to a foreigner as popular English and American romance. And German compared with French is an unattractive language; unmelodious, unwieldy, and cursed with a hideous and blinding lettering that the German is too patriotic to sacrifice. There has been in Germany a more powerful ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... Warburton? Norbert Franks is successful and rich, or going to be; I am a poor struggler. Of course, in painting London, it's atmosphere one has to try for above all. Our sky gives value, now and then, to forms which in themselves are utterly uninteresting." ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... Behar, Patna, and Benares Opium, being strictly in the hands of Government, no adulteration can take place, without a most extensive system of fraud; but it will not be uninteresting to trace the progress of the opium from the hands of the natives, to the condition in which it is delivered to the public ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... time he conducted in person no fewer than twenty-three military expeditions, besides entrusting three or four others to a favorite general. It would be a wearisome task to follow out in detail these numerous and generally uninteresting campaigns, where invasion, battle, flight, siege, submission, and triumphant return succeeded one another with monotonous uniformity. The style of the court historians of Assyria does not improve as time goes on. Nothing can well be more dry and commonplace than the historical literature ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... whole, the book has a value. It is fairly well printed, is adequately illustrated, and is readable. Although much of the information given is not now uninteresting it will in the course of time serve as a ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... have a cultivated mind, to be able to see things on many sides, to have wide sympathy and the power of generous appreciation,—is most desirable, and without something of all this, not only is our life narrow and uninteresting, but our energy is turned in wrong directions, and our very religion is in ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... be—of an Irish regiment; a very poor aggregate, we should think. But my lord duke wanted something livelier than the command of a band of Hispaniolized Milesians; and having found the military career somewhat uninteresting, wished to return to that of politics. He remembered with gusto the frolic life of the Holy City, and the political excitement in the Chevalier's court, and sent off a letter to 'His Majesty James III.,' expressing, like a rusticated Oxonian, his penitence for having been so naughty ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... of very great interest to me," said Mr. Manley. "You see, the victim of the crime, if it was a crime, was such an uninteresting creature. Nature, as I've told you before, intended him for a bull, changed her mind when it was too late to make a satisfactory alteration, and botched it. You must admit that the bull man is a very dull kind of creature, unless he can make things ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... open-armed and close-fisted, slapping senators on the back and keeping a sharp eye on the coppers; taxing the latrinae, and declaring that money had no smell; yet still, in comparison with Claud and Nero, almost the ideal; absolutely uninteresting also, yet doing what good he could; effacing at once the traces of the civil war, rebuilding the Capitol, calming the people, protecting the provinces, restoring to Rome the gardens of Nero, clipping the wings of the Palace of Gold, throwing open again the Via Sacra, over which the ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... evil, never facing a problem more exciting than those of Euclid. But now something began to stir in the unknown depths of her nature. For the first time in her life she had had a blow. There rose before her a vision of endless maidenhood. She saw herself as she had seen other women—uninteresting women, she had thought them. Now they seemed to her like tragedies—women whose lives did not count, either to themselves or to the world, middle-aged, somber, unrelated. To be childless, to eat and dress and wear the semblance of womanhood, ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... now seem without it! The Monument, recording the delusions of faction, and the Tower, with all its gloomy associations, were visible in the reach of the river. Of Churches there appeared a monotonous groupe; while the houses presented a dingy and misshapen mass, as uninteresting at the distance of seven miles as an ant-hill at the distance of seven feet. Indeed, any wretch capable of setting his foot upon an ant-hill, and of destroying it, because it made no palpable appeals to his sympathy, might at this distance, by parity of feeling, let fall a mill-stone ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... those who go after us in this way because of the swing of our hips, or the mass of hair gleaming on our neck, or a shapely shoe under a lifted skirt, are uninteresting; and among all the coarse, silly or timid admirers whom a woman can encounter in the street there are perhaps one or two at most who will leave an ineffaceable mark on her memory. But why not always admit ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... Roundheads found that what they had mistaken as gaping mouths of cannon on the fortress were nothing more dangerous than innocent churns placed in positions of pretence, not defence. The bogland from Fethard to Thurles is uninteresting; the intermediate stations are Farranalleen, Laffan's Bridge, and Horse and Jockey, at which collieries are still being worked. At Thurles we meet the main line of the Great Southern and Western. Thurles, originally a Danish town and the scene of the battle between the Norsemen and Irish, ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... gratification of fancy. Many of the people she read of were strange to her; many of the incidents related seemed to her mere lies; some tales which treated of people in her own sphere she found profoundly uninteresting. In one of the cheaper magazines she chanced upon a fashion plate; she glanced eagerly through all the others for a like revelation until she got a dozen together, when she promptly relegated the remaining literature to a corner and oblivion. The text accompanying ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... this our concluding lecture. I cannot admit it to be wanting either in importance or in interest. Unimportant it certainly is not, but might well engage, as it often has engaged, the attention of those with far higher acquirements than any which I possess. Uninteresting it may be, by faults in the manner of treating it; but I am sure it ought as little to be this; and would never prove so in competent hands{228}. Let us then address ourselves to this matter, not without good hope that it may yield us both ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... the coast is rather dull and uninteresting, although the sands are fine, until we reach Blyth, at the mouth of the little river of the same name. This town is growing rapidly in size and importance; the export of coal has greatly increased since the harbour ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... the key fitted. The panel swung open, and inside was a little cupboard with two shelves. What was on the shelves? There were old laces and old embroideries, old jewelry and old silver; there was money, and there were dusty old papers that Tavy thought most uninteresting. But mother did not think them uninteresting. She laughed, and cried, ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... the 6th January, we marched to Berguette station and boarded a long train of cattle trucks, leaving at 4.40 p.m. The first part of the journey was uninteresting, but after passing Paris, the train seemed happier, went quite fast at times, and did not stop so long between stations. The weather on the 8th was lovely, and the third day's travelling under a hot sun was ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... Greek islands. He married her, barely delaying his marriage long enough to write me that he was bringing home a bride. She was young, hardly more than a child, indeed, and marvellously beautiful"—Keith moved impatiently; he found these family details tedious and uninteresting—"a radiant soulless creature, whose only law was her own selfish enjoyment, and whose coming brought pain and bitterness to La Glorieuse. These were her rooms. She chose them because of the rose garden, for she had a sensuous and passionate love of nature. She ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... hands, which looked moist, one over the other; she was always wetting her lips, and coughed with a little dry cough. But in her these signs of nervous exhaustion suggested overwork in a close atmosphere, bending too close over the sewing-machine. Her uninteresting hair, like a rat's pelt, was eked out with a false addition of another color. Some threads had ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... themselves, partly by the mixture of black blood with the white, and greatly owing to the effects of the most terrible complaint of the blood in existence—universal in Brazil—partly, too, by the dull, uninteresting, wasted lives they led and the poverty of their nourishment, were reduced to a state of semi-idiocy. The men hardly seemed to have the strength and energy to walk or even stand up—although I must confess, to my regret, that they had not yet lost ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... uninteresting. On one side was a wood of "old-field pines"—pines of recent growth and little value, that spring up on the old abandoned tobacco fields—and on the other a stretch of underbrush, with here and there a tree of tolerable size, but from which almost all the valuable ...
— What Might Have Been Expected • Frank R. Stockton
... of parts, for the use of men of parts. Weak minds will not like it, even though they do not understand it; which is commonly the measure of their admiration. Dull ones will want those minute and uninteresting details with which most other histories are encumbered. He tells me all I want to know, and nothing more. His reflections are short, just, and produce others in his readers. Free from religious, philosophical, political and national prejudices, beyond any historian I ever met with, he relates all ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the ordinary way, I would not say another syllable. But he has not done so. He has gone off into topics quite remote from all connection with revenue, commerce, finance, or sub-treasuries, and invites to a discussion which, however uninteresting to the public at the present moment, is too personal to be ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... mother's, and how this latter fondled it with quiet little caresses, while the minister, as fully aware as I was of this tender pantomime, went on talking in a happier tone of voice about things as uninteresting to him, at the time, I very believe, as they were to me; and that is saying a good deal, and shows how much more real what was passing before him was, even to a farmer, than the agricultural ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... gentleman apparently thought the contrast was to the advantage of this poor, dear Helen. At any rate, instead of devoting himself solely to the Widow, he happened to be just at that moment talking in a very interested and, apparently, not uninteresting way to his right-hand neighbor, who, on her part, never looked more charmingly,—as Mr. Bernard could not help saying to himself,—but, to be sure, he had just been looking at the young girl next him, so that his eyes were brimful of beauty, and may have spilled some of ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... pets, whose habits he had carefully studied. One was a Gila monster from the plains of Arizona, another was a horned owl, the third was a rat, and the fourth was an opossum. If you can imagine more uninteresting subjects than these you are more imaginative than myself, and yet he thrilled me and held three thousand people in breathless interest. Oh, my brethren, if I believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and as a Savior able not only ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... prompting, quite unrecognised by the person who feels it, and who would indignantly deny it if rallied on the subject, but which leads girls of her age to seize opportunities of observing the men, even if of an uninteresting order. Still they are men, those curious beings, that unknown race, and little bits of knowledge about them may, perhaps, be picked up by a ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... drop!" (upon which fact the matter of giving, or not giving, seemed to turn). He threw him a piece of money, saying, as he did so, "look out, my friend, or that quarter will get you into the calaboose." Next morning it so happened that your grandfather was called to that useful, but uninteresting place, to bail out a colored servant, who was prone, occasionally, to get into scrapes, which subjected him to temporary imprisonment, when, whom should he find there, safely ensconced in one of the ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was as different as possible. For instance, the pictures on the wall next the fire seemed to be all alive, and the very clock on the chimney-piece (you know you can only see the back ...
— Through the Looking-Glass • Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll
... uninteresting to mention here, that there are no quarantines and no choleras in Bohemia ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... sorts of art to make an artistic world, as it takes all sorts of people to make the human world: a world with only classic art in it would be as uninteresting and unthinkable as a world in which every one was of the same character, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... a condition at present to meddle nationally in any war; that we wished particularly to cultivate the friendship of Portugal, with whom we have an advantageous commerce. That yet a successful revolution in Brazil could not be uninteresting to us. That prospects of lucre might possibly draw numbers of individuals to their aid, and purer motives our officers, among whom are many excellent. That our citizens, being free to leave their own country individually, without ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... there is nothing to say, except that popular rumour has it that its minute and uninteresting church (the antithesis of Climping) was found one day by accident in a bed ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... we have drawn him only as an outward figure, and left unnoticed that internal structure that would delight, astonish, and improve. And then, when we compare the life of such a man with the more active one of a soldier, a statesman, or a lawyer, we pronounce it insipid, uninteresting. True;—the man of study has not fought for hire—he has not slaughtered at the command of a master: he would disdain to do so. Though unaccompanied with the glaring actions of public men, which confound and dazzle by their publicity, but ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... advance of funds by the Dominion government for the purchase of the claims of the persons who had held the lands of the island for a century. The land question was always the disturbing element in the politics of the island, whose history otherwise is singularly uninteresting to those who have not had the good fortune to be among its residents and to take a natural interest in local politics. The ablest advocate of confederation was Mr. Edward Whelan, a journalist and politician who took part in the Quebec conference, but did not live to see it carried out by Mr. J. ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... conversations with natives, on the subjects which my narrative seemed to embrace; and the whole will, I hope, interest and amuse you and the other members of our family; and appear, perchance, not altogether uninteresting or uninstructive to those who are ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Preston. "I never knew before what an uninteresting thing a featherbed is—when you are obliged to hold it in your arms. Everything in its place, I find. I used to have ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... after they brought Mr. Tyler's body off the Toreador, we steamed out into the Pacific in search of Caprona. There were forty in the party, including the master and crew of the Toreador; and Billings the indomitable was in command. We had a long and uninteresting search for Caprona, for the old map upon which the assistant secretary had finally located it was most inaccurate. When its grim walls finally rose out of the ocean's mists before us, we were so far south that it was a question as to whether we were in the South Pacific or the Antarctic. ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... correspondents on this subject have only left the opportunity for a few stray gleanings in the field of their researches, which may, however, not prove uninteresting. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... with our pipes and coffee went to the music room. The lads, excited by my criticisms and good cheer, were eager for a demonstration at the keyboard. So was I. I let them play first. This is what I heard: The dark-skinned youth, who looked like the priestly and uninteresting Siloti, sat down and began idly preluding. He had good fingers, but they were spoiled by a hammer-like touch and the constant use of forearm, upper-arm, and shoulder pressure. He called my attention to his tone. Tone! He made every individual wire ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... "business woman" has a hard sound, and stands for a character precise, selfish, and uninteresting. That is not what we intend by it at all. Is a girl to be less loveable, less gentle, less charming, whenever we cease to say of her, That girl, in regard to all the ways of business, is a perfect simpleton? ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... and mild, and the Baron was communicative and instructive. His utterance is rapid and vehement; but with a tone of voice and mode of action by no means uninteresting. We talked about the possession of Munich by the French forces, under the command of Moreau, and he narrated some particulars equally new and striking. Of Moreau, he spoke very handsomely; declaring him to have been a modest, grave, and sensible man—putting his ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the life-interest as well. It really seems as if we were looking into their houses, seeing the way they lived and worked, and listening to their words. Never afterward do we regard the great names in music as uninteresting. The most charming and attractive pictures cluster about them and it all gives us a new inspiration to be true to music, loyal to the truth of music, and willing to do as we see others have done, and to learn by doing. The lesson we get from the life of every man is, that ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... uninteresting place also, for the most part peopled by hangers-on of the Court. So we were not sorry when we crossed the river by a high-pitched bridge, where in days to come I was destined to behold one of the strangest sights ever seen by ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... had been "larked" till they were grown as cunning as magpies; and the Dean had set up a divinity lecture at two o'clock, and published a stringent proclamation against rows in the Quad. It was, in short, in a particularly uninteresting state of things, with the snow falling lazily upon the grey roofs and silent quadrangle, that some half dozen of us had congregated in Bob Thornhill's rooms, to get over the time between lunch and dinner with as little ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Campbell in mentioning this circumstance makes it appear as if Smith chose the latter subject of his own motion, in accordance with a rule of the society whereby the chairman of one meeting selected the subject for debate at the next meeting; and it would have been a not uninteresting circumstance if it were true, for it would show the line his ideas were taking at that early period of his career; but as a matter of fact the rule in question was not adopted for some time after the second ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Lichts also did valorous deeds at the Battle of Cabbylatch. The farm land so named lies a mile or more to the south of Thrums. You have to go over the rim of the cup to reach it. It is low-lying and uninteresting to the eye, except for some giant stones scattered cold and naked through the fields. No human hands reared these boulders, but they might be looked upon as tombstones to the heroes who fell (to rise hurriedly) on ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... curious drawing of an ancient powder "flaske," both in form and ornament, may not be uninteresting to the readers of your valuable MIRROR at the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... most frivolous and vexatious manner. Then Cowper's "Task," or "Paradise Lost," as school-books, with notes, seems arid enough to a school-boy. I remember reading ahead, in Cowper, instead of attending to the lesson and the class-work. His observations on public schools were not uninteresting, but the whole English school- work of those days was repugnant. One's English education was all got ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... picture postcard led to disappointment. Uninteresting towns clamoured, as ill-favoured spinsters in a photographic studio, to ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... truth we employ a misleading standard of judgment. We misunderstand the limited nature of news, the illimitable complexity of society; we overestimate our own endurance, public spirit, and all-round competence. We suppose an appetite for uninteresting truths which is not discovered by any honest analysis of our ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... depressing, though equally uninteresting—a paper novel or two on the big Bible upon the table combined, indeed, with a costly piano in one corner, to strike a note that was entirely modern. The white crocheted tidies on the chair-backs, elaborated with endless ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... mention my birds, and of them I can merely say that they went on as before; they bathed constantly, at the right season they laid eggs, the male birds caught fish and brought them to the cabin, and they were just as stupid and uninteresting as they were at first; however, they never left me, nor indeed showed any intention to leave me, after the first season of the birds returning to the island. They were useful but not very ornamental, and not at all interesting to one who had such an ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Anne's chamber were not uninteresting. She had been looking out on the first day, and was duly amazed to see a naval officer in full uniform promenading in the path. Finding it to be Bob, she left the window with a sense that the scene was not for her; then, ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... is because they rejoice in its force, and when they draw it inactive, it is because they rejoice in its repose. But Michael Angelo and Raphael invent for it ingenious mechanical motion, because they think it uninteresting when it is quiet, and cannot, in their pictures, endure any person's being simple-minded enough to stand upon both his legs at once, nor venture to imagine anyone's being clear enough in his language to make ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... falsehood, in a brief victory of blood and shame. So ever does wrong action beget its own retribution, punishing itself by itself, and wrecking the instruments by which it works. The letter which Pole wrote from Paris to Henry will not be uninteresting. It revealed his distaste for his occupation, though prudence held him silent as to his ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... themselves. I do not think the plan I am going to describe a wise one; but I do think that the teacher, while trying it, must have been interested in his intellectual experiment. His business, while pursued in such a way, could not have been a mere dull and uninteresting routine. ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... they will never flee. But if they do flee after a day's tarry, do not complain. You protest against turning your house into a hotel. Why, the hotelry is the least irksome part of the whole business, when your guests are uninteresting. It is not the supper or the bed that costs, but keeping people going after supper is over and before bedtime is come. Never complain, if you have nothing worse to do than to feed or house your guests for a ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... department Calais is neither the chief town nor capital. It has scarcely a third of the population of Boulogne, and not much more than half the population of Arras, which is the seat of the prefecture; and though it is by no means so dreary and uninteresting a place as the casual traveller, seeing only the landing-pier, and the new station, which bears the name of the heroic Eustache de St.-Pierre, is apt to take it to be, it cannot compare, in point of beauty and interest, either ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... postillion, as you see; yet, as I have seen a thing or two, and heard a thing or two of what is going on in the world, perhaps what I have to tell you connected with myself may not prove altogether uninteresting. Now, my friends, this manner of opening a story is what the man who taught rhetoric ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... had business which kept him in London. He was in treaty with Lord Gerard to buy his uninteresting house in an uninteresting square. The only thing that pleased me in Grosvenor Square was the iron gate. When I could not find the key of the square and wanted to sit out with my admirers, after leaving a ball early, I was in the habit of climbing over these gates in my tulle dress. This ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... of her father's friends at their house, the conversation was uninteresting, if not disgusting; for it was about goods and merchandise, money and speculation, occasionally interrupted by politics, which were to her of as little interest. How different was the demeanour, the address, and the conversation of the young Englishman, who had been bred ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... consideration of the times in which I and my readers have come into the world, and the modes of thought at present existing among us, and had attempted to depict nothing but the purely ancient characteristics of the men and their times, I should have become unintelligible to many of my readers, uninteresting to all, and have entirely failed in my original object. My characters will therefore look like Persians, Egyptians, &c., but in their language, even more than in their actions, the German narrator will be perceptible, not always superior to the sentimentality ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... use. Now, while Gussie liked well enough to handle a needle and thread when something showy and fanciful was to be evolved thereby, she almost rebelled against the plain sewing, it was such dull, uninteresting work; it made so much difference if the sharp little instrument held Berlin wool, floss, etc., or the common cotton thread, which, though so useful, was too prosaic ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... be out of place here to enter into the details of all that was said on both sides, but it may not be uninteresting to state that, during the discussion, both the palefaces and the red men became so intensely absorbed in contemplation of the vast region of comparatively new thought into which they were insensibly led, that they forgot for the time being the main object of the meeting, namely, ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... William Morris, but mutilated and patched up by the other two, bears the imprint neither of his style, nor that of Shaw, but reminds one rather of mid-Victorian dining-room furniture, solid, respectable, heavily ornate, and quite uninteresting. Happily there ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... the Thursday before Easter, to clothe as many poor persons as equalled the number of years which he had completed on the preceding birthday; and by examining the accounts still preserved in the archives of the Duchy of Lancaster, the details of which would be altogether uninteresting in this place, we are led to infer that Henry Bolinbroke was born on the 4th of April 1366. Blanche, his mother, survived the birth of Bolinbroke probably not more than three years. Whether this lady found in John of Gaunt a faithful and loving husband, or whether his libertinism caused ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... river, before we reach the mountain, we have to pass over absolutely level cultivated plains, without a single eminence in sight. To most they would appear dull, monotonous, uninteresting. There is no horizon to which the eye can wander and find satisfaction in remote distance. There is no hill to which to raise our eyes and our souls with them. The outlook is confined within the narrowest ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... polite inquiries for the Marquise de Chargeboeuf and other matters really uninteresting but about which politeness assumes that we are keenly interested, it dawned on Monsieur d'Hauteserre that the old gentleman had come to warn his young relatives against imprudence. He remarked that times were changed and no one ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... the haughty queen rose upon her wings with her two frightful dragons close beside her, and settled down upon the largest bowlder of them all in the exact center of that side of the amphitheater which is reserved for the dominant race. Here she squatted, a most repulsive and uninteresting queen; though doubtless quite as well assured of her beauty and divine right to rule as the proudest monarch of ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... most insignificant things, I hear, went for big prices; one patriotic lady, I'm told, even going to L5 15s. for a faded photograph of a veteran in the clothes of a most uninteresting sartorial period. It was in a cheap wooden frame, of a pattern that is quite out of the movement. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... is heavy, cheap, and uninteresting, and coming down to the latest productions of Ingenieros, Manuel Ugarte, Ricardo Rojas and Contreras, this is true ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... full relief this powerful head. He wore the well-known cassock of black cloth, fastened round his waist by a black cloth belt with a brass buckle, which became thenceforth the distinctive dress of all Calvinist ministers, and was so uninteresting to the eye that it forced the spectator's ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... were characterized by a noted absence of stiffness. It was evidently expected that the prestige which Wilson possessed among the masses would evaporate in this inner council; but nothing of the kind was apparent. It was not uninteresting to note that when a point was raised every one looked involuntarily to see how it would be taken by the President; and when the delegates of the smaller Powers appeared before the Council they addressed their remarks almost directly at him. Lansing spoke ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... somehow to have faded out of him. Perhaps he had been bleached. As he leant over the taffrail, gazing down with open mouth and vacant stare at the water, I took a good long look at him. He interested me much—because he was so exceptionally uninteresting; a pallid, anaemic, indefinite hobbledehoy, with a high, narrow forehead, and sketchy features. He had watery, restless eyes of an insipid light blue; thin, yellow hair, almost white in its paleness; and twitching hands that played nervously all the time with a shadowy moustache. This shadowy ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... and it is only on account of the effect which this and other occurrences of like nature had in bringing about the final event of our history, that we take the trouble to narrate matters so trifling and uninteresting; for it appeared that every incident of the kind was carefully registered in the memory of the Erinnys of this devoted household, whence it came out magnified and distorted into a brutal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... the unknown democracy, and he has had some vogue in Germany mainly owing to his naturalism. His own countrymen, however, steadily refuse to accept him as representative of themselves, and his naturalism is uninteresting to them, while on the other hand a group apparently increasing in critical authority treat his work as significant. It is, in general, only by those few fine lyrics which have found a place in all anthologies of American verse that he is well ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... woman, and who allowed her beauty to compensate him for many other things. When she failed to understand what he said to her he smiled and looked at her and forgave her at once, and when she began to grow uninteresting, he would take up his hat and go away, and so he never knew how very uninteresting she might possibly be if she were given time enough in which to demonstrate the fact. He never considered that, were he married to her, he could not take up his hat and go away when she ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... more of a trouble than you would think for a lady in precarious health that before each meal, eggs, butter, milk, preserves, and pickles have to be unfrozen. Unless they are kept on the stove, there is no part of the room in which they do not freeze. It is uninteresting down here in the Foot Hills. I long for the rushing winds, the piled-up peaks, the great pines, the wild night noises, the poetry and the prose of the free, jolly life of my unrivalled eyrie. I can hardly ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... MARKYATE STREET (31/2 miles S.W. from Luton, Beds) is a village on the high road from St. Albans to Dunstable. The church, a little N. from the village, in Cell Park, is small and uninteresting, with a chancel added in 1892. The mansion called Markyate Cell, a little farther N., is old, and occupies the site of the old Benedictine nunnery built by Geoffrey de Gorham, sixteenth Abbot of St. Albans, at the instigation ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... of Montreal the St. Lawrence continues, in varying breadth and considerable depth, to Sorel, where it is joined by the Richelieu River from the south; thence opens the expanse of Lake St. Peter, shallow and uninteresting; after twenty-five miles the Great River contracts again, receives in its course the waters of the St. Maurice, and other large streams; and 180 miles below Montreal the vast flood pours through the narrow channel ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... some similar honor for the head of their Church as the harbinger of peace: under a canopy of silk, borne by the first gentlemen of Milan, the Pope received the hosannas of a people who had driven into shameful flight their Caesar-king; and it is not uninteresting for the English traveler to remember, as he walks through the vast arcades of shops, in the form of a cross, by which the Milanese of to-day express their triumph in liberation from Teutonic rule, that the "Baldacchino" of all mediaeval religious ceremony ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... "for that portion of it," because I print but 48 out of the 96 pages of the original. These contain, however, all that is of general interest; all that pertains to the ancient history of the nation. The remainder is made up of an uninteresting record of village and family incidents, and of a catalogue of births, baptisms and marriages. The beginning of the text as printed in this volume, starts abruptly in the MS. after seventeen pages of such trivialities, and has no separate ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... window spaces, whence both glass and sash had long departed. It was ruined, but not a ruin—a typical Californian substitute for what are known to guide-bookers abroad as "monuments of the past." With scarcely a glance at this uninteresting structure Jaralson moved on ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... corner with such verisimilitude that we are pleased with the representation, admiring the solidity of the figure, the texture of the clothes, and the human aspect of the features, is so difficult that we loudly applaud the skill which enables an artist to imitate what in itself is uninteresting; and if the imitation be carried to a certain degree of verisimilitude the picture may be of immense value. But no excellence of representation can make this high art. To carry it into the region of high art, another and far greater difficulty must be ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... the pack has been comparatively uninteresting from the zoologist's point of view, as we have seen so little of the rarer species of animals or of birds in exceptional plumage. We passed dozens of crab-eaters, but have seen no Ross seals nor have we been able to kill a sea leopard. To-day we see very few penguins. I'm afraid there can ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... scene was indisputable, and yet it was a beauty less wild and majestic, and more unequal, than that of the Cauterets Gorge. The heights on the left had frequently the barest and most uninteresting appearance, when on the other side the eye was enchanted with the varied spring tints on the trees massed together up the slopes from the river, whose limpid green pools or foaming rapids gave such a charm to the picture. The ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... the life at Brynbella, or at Bath,—and the society that Mrs. Piozzi now saw was made up chiefly of new and for the most part uninteresting acquaintances. The old Streatham set, with a few exceptions, were dead, and of the few that remained none retained their former relations with its mistress. But she suffered little from the change, was contented to win and accept the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... words he resumed his uninteresting conversation with the equally uninterested Rawlins, and the undenominated passenger subsided into an admiring and dreamy contemplation of them both. With all his principle and really high-minded purpose, Hale could not help feeling constrained and annoyed at the sudden subordinate ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... creepers, and backed by huts, sheep-yards, and all the usual concomitants of a flourishing Australian sheep-station. This is Toonarbin, where Mary Hawker is living with her son Charles as happy and uninteresting an existence as ever fell to the lot of a handsome woman yet. The old dark days seem like a bad dream. She had heard of her husband's re-conviction and life sentence—finally death, and George Hawker is as one who ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... between her non-committal family name and the Julia given her in christening, was of the ordinary slender make of American girlhood, with dull blond hair, and a dull blond complexion, which would have left her face uninteresting if it had not been for the caprice of her nose in suddenly changing from the ordinary American regularity, after getting over its bridge, and turning out distinctly 'retrousse'. This gave her profile animation and character; ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... lay eastwards through the Strait, some twenty-five miles in width, which runs between the low, rather uninteresting scarp of White Island to the south, and the beautiful slopes of Erebus and Terror to the north. This part of the Barrier is stagnant, but the main stream in front of us, unchecked by land, flows uninterruptedly ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... valuable things. These form a part of the votaries of Real Life in London. This however," said he (observing his cousin in mute attention) "is but a gloomy part of the scene; vet, perhaps, not altogether uninteresting or unprofitable." ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... alive, after a hurried crucifixion, must have been due to supernatural causes, and supernatural causes only! It will be easily seen what a number of threads might be taken up at this point, and followed with not uninteresting results. For the sake, however, of brevity, we grant it as most probable that St. Mark meant the young man said to have been seen in the tomb, to be considered as an angel; but we must also express our conviction that this ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... world, she should have been unable to appreciate, or even to discover the hidden happiness of her quiet cloistered home. No wonder that the days should have seemed long the observances wearisome, the duties monotonous, and uninteresting. But, oh! the wondrous power of prayer which draws down grace from heaven to refresh the soul, as the mountains attract the moisture-laden clouds to fertilize the earth! Separated in person from the object of her holy affection, ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... me very uninteresting, I dare say. Young ladies who do not dance are generally so considered. Allow me to present you to some ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... weekly. The man was a disciple of Ernest Psichari, the soldier mystic who died so superbly at Charleroi in the dreadful days before the Marne. From him I learned something of the French conception of the idea of war. It was not uninteresting to compare the French point of view with the German, and we talked late into the night while the ship was plunging through the storm. An article in the review, "La Psychologie des Barbares," was ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... fields, such as cooking, sewing, teaching, the care of children, and household management, woman's greater knowledge and understanding of conditions furnish her with topics that are vital to other women and often not uninteresting to men. The entry of women into occupations hitherto open only to men is bringing new experiences to many women, and is furnishing women writers with additional fields from which to draw subjects and material. Ever since the beginning ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that when we have carried selection as far as we can by rejecting from the list of eligible parents all persons who are uninteresting, unpromising, or blemished without any set-off, we shall still have to trust to the guidance of fancy (alias Voice of Nature), both in the breeders and the parents, for that superiority in the unconscious self which will be the ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... side, as he looked down at her, was surprised at his own excitement. His heart was beating, his hand trembling—before this plain, ordinary, unattractive girl! Unattractive physically—but not uninteresting. One of the most interesting human beings whom he had ever met, simply because she was utterly unlike any one else. He felt shame before her, because he knew that she would believe every word that he said. In that she was simple, but "he would be bothered if ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... the city of Jaunpoor there is not much to arrest notice, saving its very durable bridge, dating from the time of Akbar, and the Atala Masjid, a mosque deformed from a rather ancient Hindoo temple; and the rest of the district of Jaunpoor which my route lay through was altogether uninteresting. The borders of the district crossed, after traversing a narrow strip of Oude I came again to British territory. This fragment formed a perfect island, so to speak, the domains of the nawab hemming it in on every side. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... bald skull. The situation of this hill is not precisely known. It was certainly on the north or northwest of the city, in the high, irregular plain which extends between the walls and the two valleys of Kedron and Hinnom,[2] a rather uninteresting region, and made still worse by the objectionable circumstances arising from the neighborhood of a great city. It is difficult to identify Golgotha as the precise place which, since Constantine, has been ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... had been based on flimsiest hearsay. The chances were that Michael Lanyard was an utterly uninteresting ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... philosophical eminence than among us moderns. When the "Clouds" of Aristophanes was exhibited before the assembled deputies of the towns of Attica, these personages, as AElian tells us, were unanimously of opinion, that the character of an unknown person, called Socrates, was uninteresting upon the stage; and Seneca has given the substance of an authentic letter of Epicurus, in which that philosopher declares that nothing hurt him so much, in the midst of all his happiness, as to think that Greece,—"illa nobilis Graecia,"—so far from ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... word I almost fancy I hear the rustle of an audience composing itself to endure what it foresees must be a dull and uninteresting address. "Religion! he can't make that interesting." Now, why is this? What is religion, that in the eyes of so many clever and intelligent and well-educated young people it should be ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... faint, excited curiosity that Teen found herself at the door of the house of which Liz had given her the address. It was a one-roomed abode, three stairs up a tall tenement, in one of these dreary and uninteresting streets which are only distinguishable from one another by their names. In answer to her knock, a shrill female voice cried, 'Come in,' an invitation which the little seamstress somewhat hesitatingly obeyed. It was now after sundown, and the freshness of the daylight had faded, leaving a kind of ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan |
