"Uninteresting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... health, the command of the Beagle was entrusted to the author of the following pages; and as, by a singular combination of circumstances, no less than three long and hazardous voyages of discovery have been successfully completed in this vessel, some account of her here may not be wholly uninteresting. The reader will be surprised to learn that she belongs to that much-abused class, the 10-gun brigs—COFFINS, as they are not infrequently designated in the service; notwithstanding which, she has proved herself, under every possible variety ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... trees, when there is a flock of pine grosbeaks in the neighborhood, you may expect to find a pair of birds diligently feeding upon the seeds and berries. No cheerful note escapes them as they persistently gormandize, and, if the truth must be confessed, they appear to be rather stupid and uninteresting, albeit they visit us at a time when we are most inclined to rapture over our bird visitors. They are said to have a deliciously sweet song in the nesting season. When, however, few except ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... almost waking up now. 'That's good again. It's so very difficult to find young men nowadays, able to write, who take a genuine interest in politics. They all go off after literature and science and aesthetics, and other dry uninteresting subjects. Now, what does your average intelligent daily paper reader care, I should like to know, about literature and science and aesthetics and so forth? Well, he'll do, I've very little doubt: at any rate, I'll give him a trial. Perhaps he might be able to ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... subject, it may not be uninteresting to my readers to receive some desultory anecdotes that I have heard concerning one or two of the leading monsters, by whom the horrors upon which I ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... intended to represent Berkshire," or he pronounced it Barkshire. With all due deference to the taste of the author of "Vathek," and his admiration of this picture, which he compared to a Wouvermann, it is in my eyes a very uninteresting scene, though certainly strictly natural. "I don't in general like Lee's pictures," he said, "but that is an exception." In the corresponding recess is a fine sea piece by Chambers. On the opposite side of the room are rows of the most valuable books, ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... choosing a husband, it seems that you've always got to decide between something tame and uninteresting, like a gold-fish, and something wild and fascinating, like a ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... precaution of turning my back and letting him overtake and pass me on his way back through Duke Street. At the end of the street he mounted an omnibus going east, and I took another seat in the same vehicle. The rest was uninteresting. He went direct to No. 150 Hatton Garden, and there remained. I read his name on the door-post among a score of others, and after a twenty-minutes' wait I returned to my rooms. I had no doubt that it was the meeting in the brougham that Hewitt wished reported, and I remembered ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... a week before the Lhari ship went into warp-drive, and all that time Bart stayed in his cabin, not daring to go to the observation Lounge or dining hall. He got tired of eating synthetics (oh, they were nourishing enough, but they were altogether uninteresting) and tired of listening to the tapes the room steward got him from the ship's library. By the time they had been in space a week, he was so bored with his own company that even the Mentorian medic was a welcome sight when he came in ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... job and good music to play, music into which one can put some soul, some expression, and which one must study to understand. Dance music, of the frivolous, frothy kind deemed essential to soirees, is trivial, easy, uninteresting. ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... his way to school and thinking of nothing so uninteresting as watching his steps, Peter Rabbit stubbed his toes. Yes, sir, Peter stubbed his toes. With a little exclamation of impatience he turned to see what he had stumbled over. It was a little ridge where the surface of the ground had been raised ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... a certain time, or beyond a certain degree, becomes either uninteresting or intolerable, and the musician is obliged to break it in one or two ways: either while the air or passage is perpetually repeated, its notes are variously enriched and harmonized; or else, after a certain number of repeated passages, an ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... understood that, standing before the Baptistery of Florence, one has by its side Giotto's very beautiful belfry. Looking at them turn about, one finds that the Gothic boldness of light and shade of the Campanile makes the windows, pillars and cornices of the Baptistery seem at first very flat and uninteresting. But after the first time, and once that sense of flatness overcome, it is impossible to revert to the belfry with the same satisfaction. The eye and mind return to the greater perfection of the Baptistery; by an odd paradox there is deeper ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... (1758-1760), which contain papers on manners and morals. He intended to model these papers on the lines of The Tatler and The Spectator, but his essays are for the most part ponderously dull and uninteresting. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... at the basis of all success and happiness, nothing can be more important in the education of the child than the subject of practical hygiene. It has been the custom in our schools until recently, however, to give the child a difficult and uninteresting text book dealing with physiology and anatomy, but containing almost nothing on hygiene and ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... include exclusiveness. Exclusiveness is deadly to originality. The exclusive woman is seldom of service to the race, and she is not always a congenial or an agreeable person. She may live so much to herself that she is uninteresting as well as selfish. She touches nothing vital excepting books and has nothing ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... Abbe Faber, one of the vicars of the parish, is sure that twice out of three times he will find no penitent before his confessional, and has only to hear, for the most part of the time, the uninteresting confession of some good women. But he is conscientious, and on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, at seven o'clock precisely, he betakes himself regularly to the chapel of St. John, only to make a short prayer and return should ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... "only I'm perfectly sure that everybody will know every time I look at Anthony that he's the one man in the world for me. You can't imagine how uninteresting other men seem beside him—and then his manner, isn't ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... and straightened his white tie. Vronsky walked into the middle of the stalls, and, standing still, began looking about him. That day less than ever was his attention turned upon the familiar, habitual surroundings, the stage, the noise, all the familiar, uninteresting, particolored herd of spectators in ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... ten we had reached the 'Half-way House,' where we were not expected so early, and where we had ample opportunity to observe the native ways of living, while waiting for our midday meal—an uninteresting mess of stewed fowl and taro, washed down with weak tea. After it was over I made an unsuccessful attempt to induce the woman of the house to part with her orange-coloured lei. I bought some tappa and mallets, however, with some of the markers used in colouring ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... that Shirley's hands might not be spoiled, and did the mending when the weekly wash came back. Shirley set the table, sewed on jabots and did yards of tatting. Her "work" consisted of presiding over the reference room of a public library, telling shabby uninteresting young men where to find works on evolution and Assyrian temples and Charlemagne. This position was hers because her rich aunt's husband had political influence and her salary, together with the checks from Aunt Clara—not so big as the latter would have had ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... Broadway houses have done this chiefly because it has paid them, and so I mean no disrespect when I state that to me the thing became rather stale. I sighed for novelty. A man may stand stewed veal for several years, but banquets consisting exclusively of stewed veal would become uninteresting after a century or so. A man would want something else. The least particular man, it seems to me, would desire to have his veal "biled," by way of a change. So I, tired of the threadbare pieces at the Broadway ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... a great deal about the condition of the colored people in Louisiana, I decided that it would not be uninteresting to have an authentic statement of that condition by some person fully capable of furnishing the desired information. I therefore addressed a letter to the Hon. Theophile T. Allain, a colored member of the Louisiana Legislature for Sweet Iberville parish, ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... south-east, where you can set the castle in outline against the sky. Then it takes on something of the romance of a Norman ruin, with its tumbling masses of ivy, its broken battlements, and the mixed greys and ochres of its masonry. The interior is uninteresting, except for the sad little carvings left by prisoners on the walls, among them a crucifix, a hermit, St. Catherine's wheel, and St. Christopher. If St. Christopher was not exactly the patron saint of prisoners, he was the kindliest saint to carve on a dungeon wall. If you ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... tone that seemed to waive the subject as uninteresting. "I shall work away at the first thing that offers. I suppose one gets a habit of doing ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Justice, but he lacked that bonhomie which so endeared Sir John Macdonald to the multitude. I do not think that Sir John's pre-eminence in that direction ever gave Sir Alexander much concern. My impression is that he regarded the multitude as an assemblage of more or less uninteresting persons, necessary only at election times; and if Sir John could succeed in obtaining their votes, he was quite welcome to any incidental advantages that he might extract from the process. It was alleged by Sir Richard Cartwright that in the year 1864 a movement was started in the Conservative ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... knocking about, and I can't kill him. I told you in my last letter I would give you some idea of what Ottawa was like, but now the time has arrove for the ordeal, I don't like it; descriptions of scenery are not my forte, and they're always uninteresting both to write and to read. By-the-bye, before I begin, how's old Frank's ear, poor old chap, I suppose he growled away by himself, till it was found out by accident by some of you. I hope it will soon be all right again, and that he will be able to let me know ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn
... town climbed in straggling fashion up a sharp hill rising out of the plain at the back of the station, and was crowned by the twin towers of the ruined cathedral peeping over the summit. From the station itself it looked uninteresting and modern, but the fact was that the mediaeval position lay out of sight just beyond the crest. And once he reached the top and entered the old streets, he stepped clean out of modern life into a bygone century. The noise and bustle of the crowded ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... It would not be uninteresting to point out the causes of the pleasure given by this extravagant and absurd diction. It depends upon a great variety of causes, but upon none, perhaps, more than its influence in impressing a notion ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... voluminous work of Mr. James Prior, who had collected and collated the most minute particulars of the poet's history with unwearied research and scrupulous fidelity; but had rendered them, as I thought, in a form too cumbrous and overlaid with details and disquisitions, and matters uninteresting to the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... and it is as feasible and important to plant in the fair as to plant out the otherwise. Also, in making my grove paths, I had noticed that to cross this ravine where at one or two places in its upper half a contour grade would have been pettily circuitous and uninteresting, and to cross it comfortably, there should be either a bridge or a dam; and a dam with water behind it seemed pleasanter every way—showed less incongruity and less inutility—than a bridge with ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... body active, it 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
... willow swamps of old Babylon and such-like improbable spots, we might at least have expected better things of our modern spiritualists. Why should their apparitions content themselves with announcing the decease, at the Antipodes, of profoundly uninteresting relatives? Alas! I begin to perceive that spirits of the right kind, of the useful kind, have yet to be discovered. Our present-day ghosts are like seismographs; they chronicle the event after it has happened. Now, what we ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... talked of, and which a native promised to show to us; so large, he said, that when he stood on one shore he could not see the other. Although this sea turned out to be a pure fiction, the journey was not entirely useless, nor altogether uninteresting. As this sea was probably not more than 200 miles distant from York, according to the reckoning of the native, who said it was "ten sleeps off," I judged that one month's provision ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... after something beyond it. The element of color begins to mingle with his work, and in the first efforts to reconcile his intense feeling for it with his careful form, several anomalies begin to be visible, and some unfortunate or uninteresting works necessarily belong to the period. The England drawings, which are very characteristic of it, are exceedingly unequal,—some, as the Oakhampton, Kilgarren, Alnwick, and Llanthony, being among his finest works; others, as the Windsor from Eton, the Eton ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... following day, and the Address was moved and seconded; but there was no debate. There was not even a full House. The same ceremony had taken place so short a time previously, that the whole affair was flat and uninteresting. It was understood that nothing would in fact be done. Mr. Gresham, as leader of his side of the House, confined himself to asserting that he should give his firmest opposition to the proposed measure, ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... the car close, stuffy, and uninteresting. Ten years on the road had taught Emma McChesney to extract a maximum of enjoyment out of a minimum of material. Emma McChesney's favorite occupation was selling T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats, and her favorite pastime ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... not, perhaps, prove uninteresting to our readers, or quite irrelevant to the subject, to close this brief account of the marriage of Anne Boleyn, with the copy of a letter from that queen to "Squire Josselin, upon ye birth of Q. Elizabth," preserved among the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... and uninteresting as she seemed to many, had a hold on my heart that no newer acquaintance could boast, and for dear George Gaston, where was there another like him? I have known no one so gifted, so spiritual, so simply affectionate, as this child of genius and physical misfortune, whose short but ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... running chiefly between forests of birch and fir-trees, with few or no hills to vary its monotony. The journey, however, was far from uninteresting. They passed various parties of traders with their waggons going to the fair; also a group of exiles on their way to Siberia, already weary and footsore, though they had performed but a short portion of their ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... Grundy? Why, because love is popular; because nine-tenths of the people who read smile to see the first and faintest hint of the tender passion in what they read; because a story without love is like bricks without straw; because a life without it is a life no doubt comfortable to lead, but uninteresting to hear. Love is your only democrat; Ethelinda in Fifth Avenue, glittering with the clear splendor of diamonds, and rustling like a white-birch-swamp with pale silks, gleaming through the twilight before an opera, and looking violets at Sydney ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... unusual sound. It was a "Coo-ee," but so thin and faint that it came to him like the cry of some small bird. Seth heard it, too, and he turned and gazed over the rotting sleigh track which spring was fast rendering impassable. There was nothing in sight. Just the gray expanse of melting snow, dismal, uninteresting ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... near there was an air of suppressed excitement about the little house on "D" Street, where the three lived. All day long "little sister," who was never very well and did not go to school, sat and looked out of the window on the uninteresting prospect of a dusty thoroughfare lined on either side with dull red brick houses, all of the same ugly pattern, interspersed with older, uglier, and viler frame shanties. In the evening Hannah hurried home to get supper against the time when Bud should return, hungry and tired from his drilling, ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation, and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days! The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... them was pleasant and easy. Asking so intimate a favor from the sour-faced tutor whom he so much disliked was neither easy nor pleasant. But Dickie did it. And the tutor was delighted to set him to learn a particularly hard and uninteresting piece of poetry, beginning— ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... canal, we go out into another river: a bright spot breaks upon us—a lumber station with new, fresh-looking piles of sawed lumber. The banks of this stream are just as low, marshy and uninteresting as the one we have passed through, and more crooked. There are perhaps a few more trees—some oaks, and we observed a tree with its crimson and yellow autumn foliage, backed by a clump of pines, looking beautiful against the dark green, like ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... harp on the same string; drag its slow length along, drag its weary length along. never hear the last of; be tired of, be sick of, be tired with &c adj.; yawn; die with ennui. [of journalistic articles] MEGO, my eyes glaze over. Adj. wearying &c v.; wearing; wearisome, tiresome, irksome; uninteresting, stupid, bald, devoid of interest, dry, monotonous, dull, arid, tedious, humdrum, mortal, flat; prosy, prosing; slow, soporific, somniferous. disgusting &c v.; unenjoyed^. weary, tired &c v.; drowsy ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of St. Olave, or Olaus, a hallowed Danish king from whose name that of Tooley was most ingeniously corrupted, for the sake of knowing that we were in the parish that sweet Priscilla Mullins, and others of the Plymouth colony came from. The church is an uninteresting structure of Wrennish renaissance; but it was better with us when, for the sake of the Puritan ministers who failed to repent in the Clink prison, after their silencing by Laud, came out to air their opinions in the boundlessness of our continent. ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... bare and melancholy walls he was leaving. But no such contradiction came. Instead, he appeared to read confirmation there of the landlord's plain and unembittered statement. The dull blue paper with its old-fashioned and uninteresting stripes seemed to have disfigured the walls for years. It was not only grimy with age, but showed here and there huge discoloured spots, especially around the stovepipe-hole high up on the left-hand side. Certainly he was a dreamer to doubt such ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... went to Rhyl last Thursday, and on Saturday I joined them there, in company with O'Sullivan, who arrived in the Behama from Lisbon that morning. We went by way of Chester, and found S——- waiting for us at the Rhyl station. Rhyl is a most uninteresting place, —a collection of new lodging-houses and hotels, on a long sand-beach, which the tide leaves bare almost to the horizon. The sand is by no means a marble pavement, but sinks under the foot, and makes very heavy walking; ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... America, 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 known and highly ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to call on Ginkel. I found him after work in his room. He was a short man, over 30, and looked uninteresting. I told him that we should be able to get some sort of story out of his ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... moment had not yet come, and I subdued the momentary impulse and proceeded with my scrutiny of the people about me. The jury looked tired, with the exception of one especially alert little man who drank in even the most uninteresting details with avidity. But they all had good faces, and none could doubt their interest, or that they were fully alive to the significance ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... a sober face. She had intended to tell Gladys the story of The Golden Doorway, and about the Spectacle Man, but she had not had a chance, and now she felt that these things would probably seem tame and uninteresting to a young person of ...
— The Spectacle Man - A Story of the Missing Bridge • Mary F. Leonard
... very dark; three sides were covered with uninteresting-looking law books, and after gazing out of the window, which overlooked a quiet little church-yard where the monuments and headstones were falling into decay, the three boys were at a loss what to do with themselves. Charlie and Selwyn would have liked ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... improbably farcical, would please children here, as children are entertained with stories full of prodigies; their experience not being sufficient to cause them to be so readily startled at deviations from the natural course of life[58]. The machinery of the Pagans is uninteresting to us[59]: when a Goddess appears in Homer or Virgil, we grow weary; still more so in the Grecian tragedies, as in that kind of composition a nearer approach to Nature is intended. Yet there are good reasons for reading romances; as—the fertility of invention, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... historians stop when they come to the year 1284, and sometimes give a hasty outline of a few rebellions up to 1535. They then give the Welsh a glowing testimonial as a law-abiding and loyal people, and find them too uninteresting to write any more ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... sat face to face with such an uninteresting menu. But she devoured it—opening the tin of salmon after great effort with the knife—devoured it every bit. Then she noticed the newspaper in which the provisions had been wrapped. It was part of that ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... uninteresting at first. They may turn out to be perfect darlings, when we know them better. I dare say they drove away saying the same thing of us, for we behaved like a couple of marionettes, sitting dressed up in ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... stronger wills, more definite purposes, but less genial and less versatile natures. But it remains true, that when he tried to represent a character totally different from himself, the result is either unreal or uninteresting. Marino Faliero, begun April, finished July, 1820, and prefixed by a humorous dedication to Goethe—which was, however, suppressed—was brought on the stage of Drury Lane Theatre early in 1821, badly mangled, appointed, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... present. It is told with much spirit; and is altogether so curious, from the light it throws on the characters of the parties, that I have thought the following translation, which has been prepared for me, might not be uninteresting to the ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... fashion, especially female fashion. I had often wondered what it might be like out there, and was rather disappointed to see only some large flat fields close to the highroad, with a long line of low, uninteresting sheds ranged side by side. It did seem as if airmen, who must be brimming like full cups with wine of romance and imagination, ought to have invented sightlier houses for their beloved machines. But the very thought that the ugly ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... soil by excluding the waters from grounds which they had permanently or occasionally covered, or to resist new encroachments of the sea upon the land. [Footnote: Some notice of great works executed by man in foreign lands, and probably not generally familiar to my readers, may, however, prove not uninteresting. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... three days in the week, and at other times is open to students and to strangers, upon their producing their passports. On public days, all descriptions of persons are here to be seen. The contemplation of such a mixture is not altogether uninteresting. ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... so many years, and in view, also, of the fact that sometimes the world seems to us older women to be almost turned upside down, it may not be uninteresting to speak of some of the books which were familiar to me during my school days. One of the first I ever read was "Clarissa Harlowe" by Samuel Richardson. "Cecilia," by Frances Burney, was another well-known book of the day. Mrs. Amelia Opie was also a popular authoress, and ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... courtship, I am inclined to think it must have been uninteresting to a third party; but there is no denying the fact that to us it was most soothing, and well calculated to develop our ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... cousin' ever since they first entered the house. The turkeys and chickens she sent had been described in their hearing till they thought they had eaten them. From the conversation of her relatives Harry concluded her to be a spinster or widow of an uninteresting age. However, the threatened arrival created a new employment for him in the shape of holding purse-silk for Miss Maria to wind; and owing perhaps to the quietness of this employment—perhaps to its occupying so long a time—the awkwardness ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... the writer cannot know the exact words, or where the exact words are unimportant, or lengthy and uninteresting, the Third Person is preferable.* Thus, where Essex is asking Sir Robert Cecil that Francis Bacon may be appointed Attorney-General, the dialogue is (as it almost always is in Lord Macaulay's writings) in ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... the five orders, a building beautiful, as it were, in its own despite. They added a smaller curiosity of the same sort, at Merton; they added Wadham, perhaps their most successful achievement. Their taste was a medley of new and old: they made a not uninteresting effort to combine the exquisiteness of Gothic decoration with the proportions of Greek architecture. The tower of the five orders reminds the spectator, in a manner, of the style of Milton. It is rich and overloaded, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... through a few of its most characteristic stages from the simplest living beings up to man. This will be our work in the three succeeding lectures. And to these I must ask you to bring a large store of patience. Anatomical details are at best dry and uninteresting. But these dry facts of anatomy form the foundation on which all our arguments and ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... collector. More than 18,000 works, it has been calculated, left the press before the end of the fifteenth century. All of these cannot possibly be of interest, and many of them that are "rare," are rare precisely because they are uninteresting. They have not been preserved because they were thought not worth preserving. This is a great cause of rarity; but we must not hastily conclude that because a book found no favour in its own age, therefore ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... rather uninteresting events of the next two or three days. Nothing of consequence happened, unless you are willing to consider important two perfectly blissful nights of sleep on my part. Also, I had the pleasure of taking the Countess "out walking" in my courtyard, to use a colloquialism: once in the warm, sweet ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... assistance of any idea that presented itself. Ovid, not content with catching the leading features of any scene or character, indulged himself in a thousand minutiae of description, a thousand puerile prettinesses, which were in themselves uninteresting, and took off greatly from the effect of the whole; as the numberless suckers and straggling branches of a fruit-tree, if permitted to shoot out unrestrained, while they are themselves barren and useless, diminish considerably the vigour of the parent stock. Ovid had more ...
— English Satires • Various
... have knelt and stood mechanically, for the service was ended. The pulpit was occupied by an elderly uninteresting-looking man with a troublesome cough. But one sentence he had let fall had gripped her attention. For a moment she could not remember it, and then it came to her: "All Roads lead to Calvary." It struck her as rather good. ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... the necessary explanation. As a priest writing to priests, I pass over details utterly uninteresting to us. The substance of what he said amounted to this: Miss Eyrecourt had produced an impression on him which was new to him in his experience of women. If he saw more of her, it might end—I ask your pardon for repeating ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... measure the ancient religion, which it had been the grand object of the former reign finally and totally to overthrow. It is the business of the historian to record the series of public measures by which this calamitous revolution was accomplished: the humbler but not uninteresting task, of tracing its effects on the fortunes of eminent individuals, belongs to the compiler of memoirs, and forms an appropriate accompaniment to the relation of the perils, sufferings and obloquy, through which the heiress of the English crown passed on safely ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... began a slavery of five years, of five years taken from the best part of life, and wasted in menial drudgery or in recreations duller than even menial drudgery, under galling restraints and amidst unfriendly or uninteresting companions. The history of an ordinary day was this. Miss Burney had to rise and dress herself early, that she might be ready to answer the royal bell, which rang at half after seven. Till about eight she attended in the Queen's dressing-room, and had the honour of lacing ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... not her fault that she did not understand games, and was quite unable to act the part of any other character than her own. If she did make the attempt, she failed so miserably that Ruth had to tell her what to say, which made it so flat and uninteresting that she found it better to play alone. But she often became weary of this; and there were times when she was tired of her toys, and tired of Nurse Smith, and did not know what in the world to ...
— The Kitchen Cat, and other Tales • Amy Walton
... when the visitation of the sick, as a part of the Christian life, will hold a higher consideration than is now generally accorded, especially in the cases of uninteresting sufferers who have nothing to attract kind attentions, except that they are suffering children of our Father in heaven, and "one of the least" of the ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... her hour and then obediently went away, in spite of Jed's urgent invitation to stay longer. She had asked a good many questions and talked almost continuously, but Mr. Winslow, instead of being bored by her prattle, was surprised to find how empty and uninteresting the shop seemed after she ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... commands no respect, and the reception of a few roubles as salary afford no adequate compensation for the trouble, annoyance, and responsibility which a Village Elder has to bear. The elections are therefore generally very tame and uninteresting. The following description may serve ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... commencement; the fate of OEdipus and of Thebes, the ravages of the pestilence, and the avenging of the death of Laius, are all secondary and subordinate considerations to the loves of Theseus and Dirce, as flat and uninteresting a pair as ever spoke platitudes in French hexameters. So much is this the engrossing subject of the drama, that OEdipus, at the very moment when Tiresias is supposed to be engaged in raising the ghost of Laius, occupies himself in a long scene of scolding about love and duty with ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... we must like everybody. That is a physical, mental and moral impossibility. But we may do others the justice of seeing their good traits as well as the bad. And sometimes when we find a chance acquaintance drearily uninteresting, it is because we do not take the trouble to find out what is ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... new field of labor, perhaps a short account of it will not be uninteresting. It is situated on the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal, and extends from 15 deg. 54' to 20 deg. 51' north latitude. Its width is very variable. At the northern part of the province it is about ninety miles wide, while the width at ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... succession of uninteresting loamy and fertile flats, a very easy country for the construction of railways, and propitious for the laying-down of these direct level lines so ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Jackson which corresponded with a boy's idea of a hero. His aggressive punctuality, his strict observance of military etiquette, his precise interpretation of orders, seemed to have as little in common with the fierce excitement of battle as the uninteresting occupations of the Presbyterian deacon, who kept a Sunday school for negroes, had with the reckless gaiety of ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... my troop, quite uninteresting. But what do you think? Something exploded not 100 yards away from Rinaldo. I was much farther off, dismounted. He didn't turn a hair, but only looked round and watched the smoke. Whereas, as you know, a little bit of paper blown across the road sends ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... Bay the city is barely visible, and travellers have to take train through Port Adelaide up to the city, a journey of about eight miles across the plains. These plains have been cleared of trees, and the country is bare and uninteresting. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... that relate to the sea, without regard to order. We have carried out our intention; and now, at the close of our task, find that the more we listen to the Ocean's Voice, the more we find its tale to be interminable, though the reverse of uninteresting. ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the country, then he came to Paris to live; for, the family fortunes having dwindled, he had to look for a position. For several years he was a clerk in the Ministry of Marine, where he turned over musty papers, in the uninteresting company of the clerks ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... "Some of the uninteresting ones too. I used, to meet some of that sort over there. I believe I would rather chance it for my pleasure with ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... gentleman's pursuits, and it must be owned that his life was not unpleasant. In term-time, Mr. Pen showed a most praiseworthy regularity in performing one part of the law-student's course of duty, and eating his dinners in Hall. Indeed, that Hall of the Upper Temple is a sight not uninteresting, and with the exception of some trifling improvements and anachronisms which have been introduced into the practice there, a man may sit down and fancy that he joins in a meal of the seventeenth century. The bar have their messes, the students their tables ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... like that were a part of carny; you got used to them, as the show rolled along year after year, and paid no more attention to them than a housewife pays to rather uninteresting back-fence gossip. ...
— Charley de Milo • Laurence Mark Janifer AKA Larry M. Harris
... felt inclined to check his tendency to condemn all he beheld, yet I could not in truth otherwise than acknowledge that it was as uninteresting as it was possible to be, of which every one must be aware who has ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... guide, "that is the path I always go, for it is the shortest." So we turned to the right and followed the old road. Perhaps, however, it would have been well had we gone by the new, for the hen ffordd was a very dull and uninteresting road, whereas the ffordd newydd, as I long subsequently found, is one of the grandest passes in Wales. After we had walked a short distance my guide said, "Now, sir, if you will turn a little way to the left hand I will show you ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... hastened over this ambiguous and uninteresting period with a rapidity I trust all but antiquaries will forgive. Hitherto we have been in the land of shadow—we approach the light. The empty names of apocryphal beings which we have enumerated are for the most ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... reaction was that of Goethe and his university circle at Strasburg to whom the Systme de la Nature appeared a harmless and uninteresting book, "grau," "cimmerisch," "totenhaft," "die echte Quintessenz der Greisenheit." To these fervent young men in the youthful flush of romanticism, its sad, atheistic twilight seemed to cast a veil over the beauty of the earth and rob the heaven ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... become dreadfully uninteresting," he continued, "if you prefer the faces in that album, of which I've heard you make fun time and again. Won't you tell me what it is? Don't be afraid to talk plainly: I can stand ...
— All He Knew - A Story • John Habberton
... distinguishing marks of men in leading Chancery practice. Perhaps legal readers of this chapter will favor the writer with further information on this not highly important, but still not altogether uninteresting subject. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... four o'clock when he left the tavern, and then began for the indefatigable Mr. Howard one of the most wearisome and uninteresting chases, through the mazes of the London streets, he ever remembers to have made. Up Notting Hill, down the slums of Notting Dale, along the High Street, beyond Hammersmith, and through Shepherd's ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... on the choice of the subject. It is not enough to value oneself upon a close imitation of nature, if the subject chosen for imitation is not worth imitating, or improper to represent; that is to say, either trivial, indifferent, consequently uninteresting; or disgustful and unpleasing. The one tires, the other shocks. Even in the lowest classes of life, the composer must seize only what is the fittest to give satisfaction; and omit whatever can excite ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... difficulties in the way of working the material with ease imposed certain limitations in design and execution which could not well be disregarded. The lack of machinery (which is responsible for much of the uninteresting character of our modern work) necessarily compelled the use of comparatively simple and straightforward methods. It was difficult to avoid the tell-tale marks of the smith's work, and there were limits ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 7, - July, 1895 • Various
... Rhoneland's too frequent. But whatever may have passed between him and Kate, and even if they did occasionally meet in the street and stop to speak, and sometimes to hold conversations which were neither short nor uninteresting to themselves, that is a matter between themselves with which we have nothing to do. Certain it is, however, that as Ned cooled off in his intimacy with Rhoneland, he appeared to rise in the old man's ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... lands must be recreational and social. The contacts must be real, vital, and individual—expressed in the concrete interests of the now. This is the principle. The method must be the work of the lesson writer and the missionary expert, and, until this is achieved, missions must still be but two uninteresting facts for the teen ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... 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 got ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... usual in the White Nile districts, flat and uninteresting. Forest and bush clothed the banks of the river, but this formed a mere fringe for a depth of about half a mile, beyond which ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... we played our second game in Brooklyn before a crowd of 3,500, and gave a rather uninteresting exhibition, the Chicagos taking the lead at the start and holding it to the finish, the All-Americas supporting Crane in a very slipshod manner. That same evening we left for Baltimore, where 6,000 people gave us a hearty welcome when we appeared the next afternoon on the Association grounds. ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... want you to know this: for if I have been anything to you, you have been a great deal to me. I have never met with much sympathy from those of my own age: I have found them narrow and unyielding, and they found me dull and uninteresting. They had passed through few experiences and knew nothing about failure or success, and some of them did not even understand the earnestness of endeavour, and laughed at me when I spoke of a high ideal. So I withdrew into myself, and should probably have grown still more isolated ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... declares that "the secret of ugliness consists not in irregular outline, but in being uninteresting. We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine. If command, eloquence, art, or invention exists in the most deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease, please, and raise esteem and wonder ...
— Why go to College? an Address • Alice Freeman Palmer
... the road, though good, is uninteresting, but if time presses the cyclist can ride direct back to Sligo, round Glencar Lake. By adopting this route, however, some beautiful scenery will be missed, and we should strongly advise following what is known as the old road from Manorhamilton to Sligo (14). Unless ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... consuming vestige of a once important structure. That was the view in that century of grandly inaccurate assertions, the nineteenth. Not that they relegated it with that statement to the limbo of the dull and the uninteresting. Quite the contrary. They conferred upon it a distinguished romance and mystery by identifying it as the last heir and vestigial remnant of a third eye, situated in the back of the head, which may still be observed in certain reptiles. Imagine it! Somewhere, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... to you a Note, which, many years ago, I inserted in my interleaved Brand's Observations on Popular Antiquities, vol. ii. p. 519. 4to., in the hope that, as the subject interested me then, it may not prove uninteresting to ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.02.23 • Various
... long as he cares to stay, while over in Norway that privilege is rare and uncertain, owing to the fogs and clouds that obscure the horizon sometimes for days at a time. But there is nothing else to call the tourist to this part of Sweden, for the scenery is monotonous and uninteresting and the facilities for travel are primitive ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... themselves.- -Coming after these authorities, and availing myself of their inquiries, but with other authorities to aid me, and as much of fresh investigation, and of criticism of my authorities, as I can add, I shall attempt what, even for our own forgetful and self-engrossed time, ought to be a not uninteresting portion of the ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... empty wilderness—a waste as monotonous and bare as the beach he had grown so weary of gazing at. So he gave careful and minute attention to every item. He was in the midst of a long and wholly uninteresting account of a charity bazaar, which the Princess of Wales had opened, and where the Duchess of Blank-Blank had made a tremendous hit and much money for a worthy cause, by selling her kisses for a ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... of the ways, and paused for breath. Before turning to the right, his proper and picturesque course, he looked up the uninteresting left road to the fortifications. It was new, long, white, regular, tapering to a vanishing point, like a lesson in perspective. About a quarter of the way up a girl was resting beside a basket of white linen: and ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... till an officer voiced it—then we believed. Our clean blues were furbished up, lanyards scrubbed, and money counted. We understood that there was little to see at Key West; that it was a dull and uninteresting place. Still it was land, and we had not set foot ashore for ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... with all their beauty of form, color, and movement, and peculiarly interesting from their singular modes of growth, remains comparatively unknown except to the professional naturalist. It may, therefore, be not uninteresting or useless to my readers, if I give some account of the appearance and habits of these animals, keeping in view, at the same time, my ultimate object, namely, to show that they are all founded on the same structural elements and have the same ideal significance. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... cannot drive; the tortures, both mental and physical, of a long walk down dusty roads and over clayey fields to see that old Elizabethan house "only a mile off;" or the loathing induced by a pic-nic among mouldering and utterly uninteresting ruins. All this I swallowed with the equanimity and patience born of many seasons of country-house visiting; I even interviewed the old family and old-fashioned cook, on the subject of a few new dishes, and I helped to entertain some of those strange ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... that old, but never uninteresting subject of the miracles of geology. Physical science does something for us here. St. Peter speaks of scoffers who said that "all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation;" but the apostle affirms himself that "all these things shall be ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... a disgrace to our sex," said Hoffland. "To tell a young lady that the manner in which she proposes appearing at a ball is uninteresting, sounds like Ernest." ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... {9} I propose to confine myself here to the ten or a dozen chapels containing life-sized terra-cotta figures, painted up to nature, that form one of the main features of the place. At a first glance, perhaps, all these chapels will seem uninteresting; I venture to think, however, that some, if not most of them, though falling a good deal short of the best work at Varallo and Crea, are still in their own way of considerable importance. The first chapel with which we need concern ourselves is numbered 4, and shows the ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... would assign my best look-out to the hours of dressing and undressing; the first thing in the morning, the last at night, and the half-hour before dinner. You can give greater attention to the views before you when you are following operations, important certainly, but mechanical from repetition, and uninteresting in themselves, than when you are engaged in some absorbing study, which probably shuts out all perception of the ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... Martin appeared. It was by no means an uninteresting face, that which the earl now scanned, but quite unlike the features of Hubert—a round face, contrasting with the oval outlines of the other—with twinkling eyes and curling hair; a face which ought to be lit up with smiles, but which was sad for the ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... ceremonies, which had the air of being coarse imitations of the Catholic worship. For our part, we met here some Indians of whom we bought two horses. The banks of the river at this place are tolerably high, but the country back of them is flat and uninteresting. ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... Frances turned her letter round, examined the postmarks, looked with interest at the seal, and studied the handwriting. Her careful perusal of the outside of the letter revealed at a glance how few she got, and how such a comparatively uninteresting event in most lives was regarded ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... questioned on the matter, were very short in their replies. Not because the subject was uninteresting, or one they in any way sought to avoid, but because the invitations to a great party had just come in, and no other topic was worthy their discussion. But I learned this much. That the house belonged to one of New York's oldest families. That its present ...
— The Hermit Of ——— Street - 1898 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... first decision. After a time, though, that seemed rather an uninteresting purchase. All her money would be gone at once, and almost before she had realised that she had got it. She next decided to get a large piece of bacon, two sacks of coal, and a sack of corn for the fowls; but this plan was changed again for others. ...
— Dick and Brownie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... tongues, went in due course to Cambridge University, and during those years when the youthful mind is in its stage of richest recipiency, lived among the kind of men who haunt seats of learning,—on the whole, the most uninteresting men in existence, whose very knowledge is a learned ignorance; not bees of industry, who have hoarded information by experience, but book-worms.... It is important, also, that Milton was never to any distracting extent in love. If Shakspere had been a distinguished university man, ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... may be a late hour to dissipate the faith placed in signs and tokens, we are persuaded that a more intimate knowledge of this insect will not prove uninteresting to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... "You mustn't rob me of my chance, Mr. 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
... central place in the book of Kings which they occupied in the minds of the Jewish community after the Exile. Large sections of the old history are devoted to the religion and politics of the ten tribes, which are altogether unintelligible and uninteresting when measured by a strictly Levitical standard; and in general the whole problems and struggles of the prophetic period turn on points which had ceased to be cardinal in the life of the New Jerusalem, which was no longer called to decide between the claims of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... are, except for its size, really more suggestive of Genoa or Naples. In the general ensemble of the city, the Loire is an attraction of itself, when viewed from across that wonderful stone bridge, the first public work endowed by Louis XV. But even then, the awkward and uninteresting cathedral does not enter into the view with that liveliness and impressiveness which we are wont to associate with such an environment. In short, it must be set down that in the lack of pleasing qualities in its cathedral, is found Blois' ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... Randall, having bought his experience, went back to sound tactics. This and the next two rounds were uninteresting and quite indecisive, though at the end of them Wesley had a promising black eye and Randall was bleeding at mouth and nose. The old gentleman rubbed his chin and took snuff. This Fabian fighting was all against the lighter weight, who ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... deep ravines between them are exquisite in color when the sun flashes along their sides. A few miles below the point where the Hungarian and Roumanian territories meet the mountainous region declines into foot-hills, and then to an uninteresting plain. The Orsovan dell is the culminating point of all the beauty and grandeur of the Danubian hills. From one eminence richly laden with vineyards I looked out on a fresh April morning across a delicious valley filled with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... makes a rather tame and uninteresting tragic heroine. Notwithstanding all her fervid phrases, she is essentially cold. Did Schiller intend this effect, or is it due to the fact that he could not have portrayed her differently? Did it really spring from his limited ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... are obliged to speak of them. To do so can neither hasten nor retard the event. All the more obliged to speak of them, because I have never greatly cared about money, except for what I could do with it.—As a means, of vast importance. As an end, uninteresting.—So it has been lightly come and lightly go, I am afraid. All the same I've not been culpably improvident. A portion of my income dies with me; but enough remains to secure you against any anxiety ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... young man who was in love with a beautiful 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 became uninteresting, ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... come out. However, I shall have a chance of finding out soon; for she and Angus are coming to stay with us, on his way to York, where his father is sending him on some kind of business. I do not know what it is, and I don't care. Business is always dry, uninteresting stuff. Flora will stay with us while Angus goes on to York, and then he will pick her up again as he comes back. I wish the Bracewells might be here at the same time. I should like Flora and Amelia to know one another, and I do not think they ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... County Academy in the fall. The Boy didn't like it. After the easy life with the kindly old monks at St. Thomas, this academy was not only cheap and coarse and uninteresting, but the teacher had no sense. He gave lessons so long and hard it was impossible ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... Egyptian Princess in mine when I took up my pen. Only the first volume originally contained much more Egyptian material, and the third I lengthened beyond my primary intention. Many notes of that time I was unwilling to leave unused and, though the details are not uninteresting, their abundance certainly impairs the effect of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... oxygen with varying proportions of aqueous vapor. I therefore thought a description of the more convenient methods lately devised as lecture experiments for showing the influence of water on the combustion of carbonic oxide would not be uninteresting to the Section. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... a village called Morsha, and shortly afterwards, feeling drowsy, and being warned by my companion that we should have a long, uninteresting drive, I had lain down in the tarantass and gone to sleep. On awaking I found that the tarantass had stopped, and that the stars were shining brightly overhead. A big dog was barking furiously close at hand, and I heard the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... has been an extremely dull and most uninteresting street, entirely lacking in all the essential elements that go towards making a place look bright and cheerful. I really forget what it was like before the Museum was erected, but this did not apparently have the effect of adding to its attractions. The Wesleyan Chapel, ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... the train at Bonn for Cologne, in order to pass rapidly over a part of the Rhine scenery said to be comparatively uninteresting. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... of British goods on hand, which he never sold cheaper than any body else, though he got richer. Hornblower's account of how he and the Squire carried on business together in the good old times may not be uninteresting, 'Squire Burgle,' said Hornblower, 'was a great man in them days, said a sight of good things in his prayers every night and morning, denounced smuggling, and hoped all those fearless men that followed it would see the error ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... process by which I came to a conclusion which, if established, must overthrow so many ingenious theories, will not, I trust, be uninteresting to your readers. In the relationship between these two plays there always seemed to be something which needed explanation. It was the only instance among the works of Shakspeare in which a direct copy, even to matters of detail, appeared ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... histories of the church. The great facts are stated by all the historians, and few new ones have been brought to light. Historians differ merely in the mode of presenting their subject. The ecclesiastical histories are generally deficient in art, and hence are uninteresting. The ablest and the most learned of modern historians is doubtless Neander. He is also the fullest and most satisfactory; but even he is unattractive. Mosheim is dry and dull, but learned in facts. Dr. Schaff has most ably presented primitive Christianity, and his recent ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Plummer," she said promptly. "I shouldn't have known you," she added maliciously, surveying the work of time. She felt that her plebeian hands were revenged: he was quite ordinary. His wife was with him and four uninteresting children, and he seemed bored.... That had been her Alpine height at eighteen. The heights ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... practical could hardly be expected to attach the same importance to the emotions as has been attributed to them by Europeans. Feeling, like Intellect, is not regarded, in the West, as an end in itself. And it is not uninteresting to note that the Americans are the only great nation that have not produced a single lyric of love worth recording. Physically, as well as spiritually, they are a people of cold temperament. Their women, so much and, ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... have had enough of most things,—perhaps too much. If your countrymen are uninteresting, you may possibly wish to meet some of your countrywomen. I've been abroad enough to know that you have never ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... out of his dream, who will sound the ideal note in our hurly-burly and bustle of affairs. He may never discover a town site, but he will create new worlds for us to live in, and in the course of a century the coming Matthew Arnold will not be minded to call us an unimaginative and uninteresting people. ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... To be sure, it would have been better if Nell had not eloped, but is there any knowledge of sexual questions which would have helped her to a wiser decision? On the contrary, she said she did elope because her life in the small town was so uninteresting, and she felt so lonely and was longing for the life of love. She knew all which was to be known then, and if there had been any power to hold her back from the foolish elopement it could have been only a kind of instinctive respect for the traditional demands ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... for a sufficiency of money to be able to pursue my studies, that is all. I am a theologian, and shall be a pastor in a few months' time, and the occupation with the uninteresting peasant souls of a country parish is little to ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... be more dreary and uninteresting than the scenery of this part of the delta. The water is clay-coloured and turbid, always cooler than the air, which again was 4 degrees or 5 degrees below that of Calcutta, with a damper atmosphere. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... except for the Company. I have since learned that this is not infrequently the case with theatres. My company consisted of pasteboard men and women who, as artists, struck me as eminently unsatisfactory. They couldn't move their arms or legs, and they had such stolid, uninteresting faces. I don't know how it first occurred to me to turn them all off, and fill their places with my mice. Mercedes, of course, was leading lady; Monsieur and Madame Denis were the heavy parents; and a gentlemanlike ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... understanding, written by a man 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 ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... highly realistic representation of pinning an enemy to the earth with a spear, and with the barong decapitating him. The first part of the dance, before the passions of the savages became aroused, was, however, monotonous and uninteresting. ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... lot of hard work—they are so very thin. Her clothes are neat but shabby—that is not the last look like French women have—but as if they had been turned to "make do"—I suppose she is very poor. Her manner is icily quiet. She only speaks when she is spoken to. She is quite uninteresting. ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... painfully monotonous. It was the most uninteresting job he had ever undertaken. Most of the habitues of the club had evidently come at an early hour, for he saw nobody come in and nobody go out until nearly eleven o'clock. It began to rain a fine, thin drizzle, which penetrated every crevice, which insinuated itself down ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... fragrant steam to curl about his nose, and wreathe his head and face in a thick cloud. However, for all this, he neither ate nor drank, except at the very beginning, a mere morsel for form's sake, which he appeared to eat with infinite relish, but declared was perfectly uninteresting to him. ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... them of the peculiarities of the persons whom they mock. When we read one of them now, we are almost inclined to wonder how such a reputation for humour could be gained. Wit is of the present; preserved for posterity it is as uninteresting as a faded flower, nor can it recall to us memories sunny or sad. But Selwyn was a man who while filling a conspicuous place in the fashionable life of the age was also so intimate with statesmen and politicians, and so thoroughly lives ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... who, notwithstanding the peculiar merits of Defoe, must be called the Father of Modern Prose Fiction, was born in Derbyshire, in 1689. The personal events of his life are few and uninteresting. A carpenter's son, he had but little schooling, and owed everything to his own exertions. Apprenticed to a printer in London, at the age of fifteen, he labored assiduously at his trade, and it rewarded him with fortune: he became, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... nerve-shaking force. It was more likely to be a trap than a meeting meant for my advantage. There was, indeed, no assurance that the note was written by Mother Borton herself. It might well be the product of the gentlemen who had been lending such variety to an otherwise uninteresting existence. ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... the stories of attempt and failure of the earliest dabblers in aeronautics would be unprofitable and uninteresting. Not until the eighteenth century did the experimenters with lighter-than-air devices show any practical results. Not until the twentieth century did the advocates of the heavier-than-air machines show the value of their ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... Ferdinand signing away his rights for a castle and a pension. To crown the farce, Napoleon ordered Talleyrand to receive them at his estate of Valencay, and amuse them with actors and the charms of female society. Thus the choicest humorist of the age was told off to entertain three uninteresting exiles; and the ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, who disapproved of the treachery of Bayonne, was made to appear the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... tone to the proceedings. I sat beside her by virtue of my office as page. Among other things, she proposed that any one who had to pay a forfeit should tell his dream; but this was not successful. The dreams were either uninteresting (Byelovzorov had dreamed that he fed his mare on carp, and that she had a wooden head), or unnatural and invented. Meidanov regaled us with a regular romance; there were sepulchres in it, and angels with lyres, and talking flowers ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... creeping, measles, cheeks growing round and rosy, all were conveyed in the same smooth, pat, and proper phrases, so absolutely empty of any glimpse of the child's personality that after the first few months it was like reading about a somewhat uninteresting infant in a book. I was sure Cecily was not uninteresting, but her chroniclers were. We used to wade through the long, thin sheets and saw how much more satisfactory it would be when Cecily could write to us herself. Meanwhile we noted her weekly progress with much the feeling one ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... to be thankful. You're very lucky, if you knew it. (Lowering her voice.) Shall I tell you a secret? I've seen your chart and you've no cause to worry. Doctor Stanton joked about it. He said you were too uninteresting—there was so little the matter ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... appear, and only presented herself at last at the earnest request of her father. She was one of those model princesses whom one may see in a picture—very formal and very sedate—and it was very difficult to draw her into conversation. She was very uninteresting to Genji. He thought that it would only lead to a very unpleasant state of affairs, as years grew on, if they were to be as cool and reserved to each other as they had been hitherto. Turning to ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various |
