"Unpicturesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and pitchy spot on earth, swarming with old salts, and full of warm, bustling, coarse, homely, and cheerful life. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a cold and torpid neighborhood, mean, shabby, and unpicturesque, both as to its buildings and inhabitants: the latter comprising (so far as was visible to me) not a single unmistakable sailor, though plenty of land-sharks, who get a half-dishonest livelihood by business connected ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in any of the principal figures, and the comparative meanness and commonplaceness of even the folds of the drapery. It seems as if Tintoret had determined to make the shepherds as uninteresting as possible; but one does not see why their very clothes should be ill painted, and their disposition unpicturesque. I believe, however, though it never struck me until I had examined this picture, that this is one of the painter's fixed principles: he does not, with German sentimentality, make shepherds and peasants graceful or sublime, but he purposely ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... uncomfortably angular, if I may be allowed the expression, and although its height, the vivid colour of its base, and the masses of snow that cover its slopes, give it a peculiar attraction, it nevertheless struck me as being intensely unpicturesque, at least from the point from which I saw it, and from which the whole of it was visible. When clouds were round it, toning down and modifying its shape, Tize appeared at its best from the painter's point ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... an old friend of the poet, lately deceased, "lies between six and seven miles NNW of Peterborough, on the Syston and Peterborough branch of the Midland Railway, the station being about half a mile from the town. A not unpicturesque country lies about it, though its beauty is somewhat of the Dutch character; far-stretching distances, level meadows, intersected with grey willows and sedgy dikes, frequent spires, substantial watermills, ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... rest of his apparel, were particularly rusty. His looks were starched, but his white neckerchief was not, and its long limp ends straggled over his closely-buttoned waistcoat in a very uncouth and unpicturesque fashion. A pair of old, worn, beaver gloves, a broad-brimmed hat, and a faded green umbrella, with plenty of whalebone sticking through the bottom, as if to counterbalance the want of a handle at the top, lay on a ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... was formed by the azure wall of Tayyib Ism,[EN32] the "Mountain of the Good Name," backed by the far grander peaks of Jebel Mazhafah: the latter rises abruptly from the bluer Gulf of El-Akabah, and both trend to their culminating points inland or eastward. On our right followed the unpicturesque metalliferous heap of Jebel Zahd or 'Aynunah Mountain, whose Breche de Roland seems to show from every angle; its chocolate-coloured heights contain, they say, furnaces and "Mashghal," or ateliers, where the Maru ("quartz") was worked for ore. In places it ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... over and around it, as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me; for—though it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some importance in their ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... were installed in a new house, built near the site of the double cabin, which was again transferred to the settlement, in order to give greater seclusion to the fair guests. It was a long, roomy, one-storied villa, with a not unpicturesque combination of deep veranda and trellis work, which relieved the flat monotony of the interior and the barrenness of the freshly-cleared ground. An upright piano, brought from Sacramento, occupied the corner of the parlor. A suite of gorgeous ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... in romance and history, is yet singularly isolated and unknown. It is an island whose people have stood still for a century, indolent, unobserving, thriftless. No smoke, that ensign of progress, hangs over her towns, which are squalid and unpicturesque, save they lie back among the mountains. But the country itself is wildly and magnificently beautiful: great mountains of granite as varied in colors as the palette of a painter, emerald streams that plunge over porphyry and marble, splendid forests ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... was. I suppose I ought to have known. I suppose that was, really, why I liked him so much—so infinitely much. Come to think of it, I can remember a thousand little acts of kindliness, of thoughtfulness for his inferiors, even on the Continent. Look here, I know of two families of dirty, unpicturesque, Hessian paupers that that fellow, with an infinite patience, rooted up, got their police reports, set on their feet, or exported to my patient land. And he would do it quite inarticulately, set in motion by seeing a child crying in the street. He ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... protracted by Lord Maulevrier's languor and ill-health, dragged its slow length along for nearly a fortnight; until it seemed to Lady Maulevrier as if they had been travelling upon those dismal, flat, unpicturesque roads for months. Each day was so horribly like yesterday. The same hedgerows and flat fields, and passing glimpse of river or canal. The same absence of all beauty in the landscape—the same formal hotel rooms, and smirking landladies—and so on till they came to Lancaster, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... unpicturesque, but always a little mysterious, was recognized quite sufficiently under the lofty glass and iron roof of the Sulaco railway station. He took a local train, and got out in Rincon, where he visited the widow ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... dawn struggled through the clouds, which still doggedly hugged the earth, and drove away the gloomy shadows which enveloped the high unpicturesque walls of the penitentiary. The rain had ceased falling; even the wind had grown weary, and its faint whispering could ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... unpicturesque object. Given a plumed hat, a doublet and hose, and he would look the part, and his manner would fit in with it. Given good English, his voice would never betray him for what he is. For another thing ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... the reforming political school that has trained the man now openly discussed as the next Premier of Canada. And for the benefit of any Canadian Norris who dreams of writing a problem novel about Crerar, it may be said that he is the most drab and unpicturesque personality that ever stood in line for any such office in this country. In the triangle of leaders at Ottawa he is the angle of lowest personal, though by no means lowest human, interest. Meighen is impressive; ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... the cloth cap and conventional and unpicturesque, though shapeless and weather-stained, garment of the late nineteenth century. Neither horns nor goat's feet were visible; nor was the pipe of reed on which he played. Yet he played, in Paul's ear, the comforting melody of Pan, and the glory of the ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... ahead, the spider following. The bullet-pierced, grey felt smasher hat, a manly and not unpicturesque headgear, sat on the man's close-cropped head with a soldierly air becoming to the square, opaque-skinned face that had power and strength and virility in every line of it. The blue eyes, under their black bar of meeting eyebrows, were clear now, and the short aquiline nose, rough-hewn ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... (England) for not wishing well to democracy—how should she?" The more obvious question is, How should not one democracy wish another well? There may have been at the time when Lowell wrote, and there may even be to-day, a handful of royalty-worshippers in England who regard a Republic as a vulgar, unpicturesque form of government; but this is not a political opinion, or even prejudice, but mere stolid snobbery. Whatever were England's misdemeanours towards America at the time of the Civil War, they were not prompted by any ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... like a witch's, Missy?" Virgie said, as Vesta took in its not unpicturesque outlines and crude plank carpentry, the weather-rotted roof, the decrepit chimney at the far end, the one garret window in the sharp gable, the scant little windows above stairs, and the doors low ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... passion for picturesque philanthropies, knew right well that she had neglected somewhat the plain, unpicturesque philanthropy which lay close to her hand. She had neither the heart nor the conscience to deny Eleanor this sacrifice. In that hour, there grew up between the childless aunt and the motherless niece an understanding which those three years of ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... it is added that the roof of some of these cabins was extended in front so as to cover a wide veranda, that the bark and moss were left clinging to the logs, which by another season would be covered with honeysuckles and the Virginia creeper, we shall see that they must have presented no unpicturesque appearance. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... recalling for my benefit certain passages and experiences of her past life. In doing this, there was no suggestion of confidence; and I am breaking no faith in alluding to them. She was a fine talker—rugged, unpicturesque, but with an instinctive capacity of selection in words. If I quote her, as I wish to do, I cannot reproduce her style; and that, no doubt, would appear bald on paper. But, at least, the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... of us is but the grouping of a few brilliant or sombre tableaux, which are like the famous lines in an epic that immortalize the whole. Maud's life was such a one, and her years had been rather unpicturesque until now, when the shadows began to deepen and the lights to grow more intense. In fact, she seemed to be approaching some sort of a climax, and she began to grow nervous about it, being just woman enough to dwell somewhat anxiously ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... this day, when I was out for a stroll pondering over the duties of this evening, which even then were looming in the distance, but not quite so far off as I could wish—I found it very curious to consider that though the newsman must be allowed to be a very unpicturesque rendering of Mercury, or Fame, or what-not conventional messenger from the clouds, and although we must allow that he is of this earth, and has a good deal of it on his boots, still that he has two very remarkable characteristics, to which none of his celestial predecessors can ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... entrance. The garden was tolerably large, and in decent order, and beyond the garden was a fine old orchard, divided from lawn and flower-beds only by a low hedge, full of bush-roses and sweet brier. It was a very pretty place in summer, not unpicturesque even at this bleak season; but Clarissa was thinking of lost Arden, and she looked at Mill Cottage with mournful unadmiring eyes. There had been a mill attached to the place once. The old building was there still, indeed, converted into a primitive kind ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... merely a shawl, but towards evening, if the day was chilly, became a sort of Spanish mantilla or Scotch plaid, and was brought over the head and hung loosely down, or was pinned under the chin in no unpicturesque fashion. ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... ornate in the telling—simple in his broad directness, and ornate in his dramatic and emotional touches. He began with the picture of the De Willoughbys of Delisleville—the autocratic and aristocratic Judge, the two picturesque sons, and the big, unpicturesque one who disappeared from his native town to reappear in the mountains of North Carolina and live his primitive life there as the object of general adulation. He unconsciously made Big Tom the most picturesque ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... enthusiasm, and then the natives came through the gate across the lawn, and up to the verandah where the king stood, in one continuous procession, till 2400 Hawaiians had enjoyed one moment of infinite and ever to be remembered satisfaction in the royal presence. Every now and then the white, pale-eyed, unpicturesque face of a foreigner passed by, but these were few, and the foreign school children were received by themselves after Mr. Lyman's boys. The Americans have introduced the villanous custom of shaking hands at these receptions, borrowing it, I suppose, from a presidential reception ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... harm), or travel by a newly finished road through the gorge, in the car, missing a few fine bits of scenery and an experience, but, it was to be supposed, enjoying extra comfort. There was the big blue car; there was the swift green river, and on the river a boat with two respectful and not unpicturesque boatmen. ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the vast heath, which spread around them, in a wild but not unpicturesque expanse, for many miles on either side, Leonard perceived a band of horsemen, amounting perhaps to a dozen, galloping towards them, and, not doubting they were the robbers in question, communicated his suspicions to his companions. ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... has brought it to represent fairly his loved Paris in the East. The approach to the city, through the dirty brown mud of the treacherous Mekong, which is swept down vigorously to the China sea between stretches of monotonous mangrove, with no habitation of man anywhere visible, is distinctly unpicturesque; but Saigon itself, apart from the exorbitance of the charges (especially so to the spendthrift Englishman), is worth the dreary journey of numberless twists and quick turns up-river, annoying ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... tops, composed of coarse gray stone, covered, or scarcely covered, with a scanty soil, but capable of cultivation in corn, olives, and figs. This region is most productive towards the north, barer and more arid as we proceed southwards towards the desert. The lowest portion, Judaea, is unpicturesque, ill-watered, and almost treeless; the central, Samaria, has numerous springs, some rich plains, many wooded heights, and in places quite a sylvan appearance; the highest, Galilee, is a land of water-brooks, abounding in timber, fertile and beautiful. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... it would not have been a cheerful place. The unpicturesque site, the rude and unlovely outlines, the unsavory details, which distinguish the nest-building of the California miner, were all here, with the dreariness of decay superadded. A few paces from the cabin there was a rough enclosure, ...
— Tennessee's Partner • Bret Harte
... her window. The window gave upon a background of serrated mountain and olive-shadowed canyon, with a faint additional outline of a higher snow level—the only dreamy suggestion of the whole landscape. The foreground was a glaringly fresh and unpicturesque mining town, whose irregular attempts at regularity were set forth with all the cruel, uncompromising clearness of the Californian atmosphere. There was the straight Main Street with its new brick block of "stores," ending abruptly against a tangled bluff; there was the ruthless ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... peaceful spot, and not unpicturesque. North and south the mountains fell away in an undulating rhythmical sameness, with no abrupt gorges to break in and destroy the poetry of their scroll against the sky. The valley supplemented the effect of the mountains; for, from the peak of Sunset Rock, high up on the mountain, ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... as the "headquarters," that the wind wreaked its grotesque rage. It howled under its scant eaves, it sang under its bleak porch, it tweaked the peak of its front gable, it whistled through every chink and cranny of its square, solid, unpicturesque structure. Situated on a hillside that descended rapidly to the Whippany River, every summer zephyr that whispered through the porches of the Morristown farm-houses charged as a stiff breeze upon ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... described, though varying in size and varying also in their lines athwart the house. Those of the ground floor are all uniform in size and position. But those above are irregular both in size and place, and this irregularity gives a bizarre and not unpicturesque appearance to the building. Along the top, on every side, runs a low parapet, which nearly hides the roof, and at the corners are more ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... occupancy. The ground before the cabin was covered with broken boxes, tin cans, the staves and broken hoops of casks, and the cast-off rags of blankets and clothing. The whole claim in its unsavory, unpicturesque details, and its vulgar story of sordid, reckless, and selfish occupancy and abandonment, was a foul blot on the landscape, which the first rosy dawn only made the more offending. Surely the last spot in the world that men should quarrel ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... short, the tower is a good example of the wonderful and ingenious way in which the eighteenth-century builders of Portugal often contrived the strangest results by a use—or misuse—of pieces of classic detail, forming a whole often more Chinese than Western in appearance, but at the same time not unpicturesque.[171] ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... in Galloway as that clear-cut, clean-shaven Greek face set on the square shoulders; for Galloway is a country of tall, stoop-shouldered men—a country also at that time of shaven upper lips and bristling beards, the most unpicturesque tonsure, barring the mutton-chop whisker, which has yet been discovered. The women, therefore, old and young, looked after him with a warmth about their hearts and a kindly moisture in their eyes. They felt that he was much too handsome to be ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... waistcoat. His corduroy trousers, of a light green colour, were hitched up at the knees with a couple of straps as though he wore his garters outside. His neckerchief was a bright red, tied round his neck in a careless but not unpicturesque manner. Take him for all in all he was as fine a specimen of a country lad as one could wish to meet,—tall, well built, ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... was cooling down toward evening at Sebastian, where an unpicturesque collection of wooden houses stand upon a branch line on the Canadian prairie. The place is not attractive during the earlier portion of the short northern summer, when for the greater part of every ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... of the Canche showed clear, lake-like sheets of water amid the brilliant greenery; later are passed sandy downs with few trees or breaks in the landscape. This part of France should be seen during the budding season; of itself unpicturesque, it is yet beautified by the early foliage. Hesdin is an ancient, quiet little town on the Canche, with tanneries making pictures—and smells—by the river, unpaved streets, and a very curious bit of civic architecture, the triple-storeyed portico of the Hotel de ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... little, stout, unpicturesque elderly man got up and began to walk to and fro in the room which he had turned into with Lanfear, and to say, more to himself than to Lanfear, as if balancing one thing against another: "The merciful thing is that she has been saved from the horror and the sorrow. She knows no more of ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... sharp knock the murmur of voices inside ceased. A profound stillness lasted for a few seconds, and then the door was brusquely opened by a short, black-eyed woman in a red blouse, with a great lot of nearly white hair, done up negligently in an untidy and unpicturesque manner. Her thin, jetty eyebrows were drawn together. I learned afterwards with interest that she was the famous—or the notorious—Sophia Antonovna, but I was struck then by the quaint Mephistophelian character of her inquiring glance, because it was so curiously evil-less, so—I may say—un-devilish. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... met them. Nielsen had a kindly, friendly way with Indians. There were half a dozen families, living in squalid tents. The braves worked in the fields for Denton and the squaws kept to the shade with their numerous children. They appeared to be poor. Certainly they were a ragged unpicturesque group. Nielsen and I visited them, taking an armload of canned fruit, and boxes of sweet crackers, which they received with evident joy. Through this overture I got a peep into one of the tents. The simplicity and frugality of the desert Piute or Navajo were here wanting. These ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... as far as possible, country divided by hedges. Perhaps nothing in the whole compass of landscape is so utterly unpicturesque and unmanageable as the ordinary English patchwork of field and hedge, with trees dotted over it in independent spots, gnawed straight at the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... further on we enter BRIXTON, a populous village in the heart of a rich tract of cultivation: is one mile from the shore, and screened from the north by a range of lofty downs. The Church is rather spacious, and not unpicturesque; many of the cottages are neat, some few furnished for lodgings: and there is a comfortable small inn. This place is commonly called Brison, and one clergyman names ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... buys, Long rods and wading stockings; Unpicturesque he walks in Esk With unbelief ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... staircase which leads to the raised Ambulatory. Observe that the transepts are simple. The ugly stained glass in the windows of their clerestory contains illustrations of the reign of Louis Philippe, with extremely unpicturesque costumes of the period. The architecture of the Nave and Choir, with its light and airy arches and pillars, is of the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... thoroughly to rags; and with these rags of Renaissance civilization, Italy may still be seen to drape herself. Not perhaps in the great centres, where the garments of modern civilization, economical, unpicturesque, intended to be worn but a short time, have been imported from other countries; but yet in many places. Yes, you may still see those rags of the Renaissance as plainly as you see the tattered linen fluttering from the twisted ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... everything straight, it was so formal and UNPICTURESQUE. Uniformity and conformity, she observed, had their day; but now, thank the stars of the present day, irregularity and difformity bear the bell, and ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... to suggest no contrast. If they were described as a handsome young man (for he was scarcely more than thirty) and a handsome young woman, the description would be correct. He was rather tall, she was rather tall; but he was formal, severe, respectable, and absolutely unpicturesque—she was picturesque in every motion. His well-made clothes sat stiffly on him, and the first idea he conveyed was that he was carefully dressed. Even a woman would not have thought, at the first glance at least, of how she was dressed. ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... distant three English miles from Doneraile, and is seated in as unpicturesque a spot as at present could have been selected. Many of the delightful and visionary anticipations I had indulged, from the pleasure of visiting the place where the Fairy Queen had been composed, were at an end on beholding the monotonous reality of the country. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various |
