"Unpretentious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Star Inn and stopped there. The tall, well-favoured youth leapt at once to the ground, and entered the inn with the air of a man who owned at least the half of the county, although his much-worn grey shooting costume and single unpretentious portmanteau did not indicate either unusual wealth ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... to "the Labrador," or, to be more of a purist still, "the Larbadore." Having put you right on these rudiments—oh! I forgot another: "Fish" is always codfish. Other finny sea-dwellers may have to be designated by their special names, but the unpretentious cod is "t' fish"; and the salutation of friends is not, "How is your wife?" or, "How is your health?" But, "How's t' fish, B'y?" I like it. It is friendly and different—a kind of password to ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... in ascertaining where he lived. It was in a brick house, on Waverley place, very unpretentious and certainly not fashionable. In order to find out how much he paid for his accommodations Frank visited the house on pretence of being ...
— The Telegraph Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... was an orphan of New England extraction. Her father, the eldest child of a simple unpretentious country family in Western Massachusetts, had been a brilliant but erratic throw-back to Mayflower traditions and Puritan intellectualism. He had married a girl with much the same ancestry as his own, but herself born and brought up in New York, and of a generation ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... warehouse, concert-hall, and, no doubt, a score of other things. When I found it with the aid of the police it was the paint-shop and scenic storeroom of the municipal theatre. It is a small building, utterly unpretentious of exterior and interior, innocent of architectural beauty, hidden away in the middle of a block of lowly buildings used as dwellings, carpenter shops, and the like. That Wagner never visited it is plain from the fact that though ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... bestowed a freezing look on his flippant protege and then commenced a very grave discussion of future ways and means, which ended in an immediate departure for Paris, where the two men entered upon an unpretentious career in the commercial line as agents and travellers for the patentees of an improved kind of gutta percha, which material was supposed to be applicable to every imaginable purpose, from the sole ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... and separated from the main village by a number of wretched lanes, lay the Jewish quarter. A decided improvement in the general condition of the houses which formed this suburb was plainly visible to the casual observer. The houses were, if possible, more unpretentious than those of the serfs, yet there was an air of home-like comfort about them, an impression of neatness and cleanliness prevailed, which one would seek for in vain among the semi-barbarous peasants ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... thirty, she had gentle eyes, a twitching forehead, and lips ever ready for a sympathetic smile. Her attire, a little shabby, a little disorderly, well became the occupant of furnished lodgings, at twelve and sixpence a week, in the unpretentious suburb of Acton. She was the daughter of a Hammersmith draper, at whose death, a few years ago, she had become possessed of a small house and an income of forty pounds a year; her two elder sisters were comfortably married to London tradesmen, but she did ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... been transformed! No one would have recognized it, covered as it was with a wealth of pure white blossoms and dark-green leaves, for it looked more like the throne of a fairy than like anything so ordinary and unpretentious. Mrs. Seabrook, who possessed exquisite taste, had so massed the blossoms around her and daintily perched an inverted one on her head that the effect was exceedingly beautiful and picturesque. Katherine, who had ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the men should not straggle far from the line of march; but the well-filled stores and gaudy shop-windows of the Indiana and Ohio towns seemed to stimulate, in men accustomed to impoverished and unpretentious Dixie, the propensity to appropriate beyond limit or restraint. I had never before seen anything like this disposition to plunder. Our perilous situation only seemed to render the men more reckless. At the same time, ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... girls were safer here than they would be at New York. It was a doughtful anomaly in a society which otherwise was exceedingly brutal, that a good woman possessed a civilising power which gained the respect of her rough surroundings, and, by an unpretentious charm, softened both ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... Boulaye was no less elegant in dress, for all that, from head to foot—saving the silver buckles on his shoes and the unpretentious lace at throat and wrists—he was dressed in the black that his office demanded. His countenance, too, though cast in a mould of thoughtfulness that bordered on the melancholy, bore a lofty stamp that might have passed ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... rarity of their displays, and the better reason why we should seize, when they come, our chances of assisting at these delightful exhibitions of an art whose revival has done so much to restore to the countryside the unpretentious joys that gave its name to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... were walking through the fragrant roads, in a dream they entered the unpretentious little church, and were questioned by the small Spanish sexton at the door. No, that was Miss Carroll,— this was Miss Brown. Yes, everyone was here. The groom and his best man had gone in the other door. Who would give away the bride? This gentleman, Mr. Eastman, who was just now ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... and found it in a back street—a shabby, unpretentious-looking place, with a front that had once been white, but that was now grimy in the extreme. The windows were hung with little curtains in the French fashion, whose freshness had also long departed. The restaurant itself was ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry have been familiar to me since I was a child. Yet until to-day I entered the room opposite the Cathedral where it has lately been simply but fittingly housed, I never imagined, and no one had ever told me, how splendid a work of art it is. Nothing could be more unpretentious, more domestic in a sense, with almost the air of our grandmothers' samplers, than this long strip of embroidered canvas, still so fresh in its colours that it might have been finished, if indeed it is finished, ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the hotel which she intended to patronise—wording her suggestion so cunningly that it would be an easy matter for her, when the time came, to demonstrate that she had invited the girl to be her guest. And with this she was thoughtful enough to select an unpretentious if thoroughly well-managed house on the West Side, in the late Seventies, in order that Eleanor might feel at ease and not worry about the size of the bill which she wasn't ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... forgot they were merely outer trappings, to be bought from any department store or private shop. They seemed part of a superior charm belonging exclusively to Rosamond Merton, and Patricia sighed as she saw in the mirror over the mantel-shelf the image of a fluffy-haired girl in an unpretentious blouse. ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... field where the flag floats is an unpretentious home, almost as much identified with Gen. Garfield's early history as the one he helped to clear of the forest timber while he was yet but a child. It is the home of Henry B. Boynton, cousin of the dead President, and ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... real geniuses at is the omelet. I remember, when we put in at Toulon for coal, I went ashore for a stroll, and had the most delicious omelet with chicken livers beautifully cooked, at quite a small, unpretentious place near the harbour. ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... beat a precipitate retreat to save themselves from serious threatened injury. They contributed, moreover, to the unpopularity of the medical student. 'Footing Suppers' were functions of the simplest and most unpretentious character. Each new matriculant was expected, although many failed to conform to the arrangement, to select an evening on which to entertain his fellow students, the entertainment consisting generally in furnishing biscuits and beer—the old, time-endorsed 'cakes ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... that there were so many books in the world! A cloud of dust rose under his feet as he went up to the cases and tried to read the tarnished titles of the volumes on the shelves. Again Chance led him aright, and his eye brightened as he discovered an unpretentious volume that proclaimed itself: The Official Visitors' Guide to the City of New York for the Year 1905. He pulled out the book and opened it. Of course it contained what he wanted, a large folding map, ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... above mentioned. The land was carefully tilled, and the houses, generally speaking, were of a better class than were to be found in most rural communities in Upper Canada at that period. Savareen's own dwelling was unpretentious enough, having been originally erected for one of the squire's "hired men," but it was sufficient for his needs, as he had not married until a little more than a year before the happening of the events to be presently related, and his domestic establishment was small. His entire household ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... as his permanent study a dark room in the courtyard. There it was that I saw him for the first time, surrounded by a great wilderness of books, and attired in an unpretentious indoor costume, the most striking feature of which was a tall, pointed felt cap, such as I had seen worn by the clown who belonged to the troupe of rope-dancers at Eisleben. A great love of independence had driven him to this strange retreat. He had been originally destined for ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... unpretentious ministry of "three months" shadowed forth the loving, gentle, yet vigorous and successful ministry of a quarter of a century; a ministry so like the Master's, not confined to sect or nationality, limited only by the wants of humanity and the great heart-love that went gushing out to friend and foe. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... that he printed his 'Miscellany,' an unpretentious quarto, with the title: Songes and Sonnettes, written by the Ryght Honorable Lorde Henry Hawarde, late Earl of Surrey and other. Before the 31st July a second edition became necessary, and several new poems ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... particularly in the neighbourhood of the Commander-in-Chief's tent, the exact position of which must have somehow been made known to the rebels, otherwise they could not have distinguished it from the rest of the camp, as it was an unpretentious hill tent, such as was ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... used by the class of thief about to be spoken of, a short description of it will not be amiss. To all outward appearance it is a very unpretentious traveling-bag. It looks honest, and does not differ, apparently, from any other bag of its kind. A careful scrutiny hardly discloses any variation from the ordinary valise; but, nevertheless, it has a false side, so ingeniously ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... in an unpretentious store, at last attracted attention, and after some little time it became the thing in the fashionable world to go there, and from that time ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... years there stood in a side street in Kiel an unpretentious old frame house which had a forbidding, almost sinister appearance, with its old-fashioned balcony and its overhanging upper stories. For the last twenty years the house had been occupied by a greatly respected widow, Madame Wolff, ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... of the most unpretentious nice breeding and unaffected taste, Emily might have been ingenuously funny in ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... province is extremely meager, being confined to brief sketches made by transient visitors or based for the most part upon the testimony of gold hunters and government explorers, who took but little note of the unpretentious relics of past ages. As there are few striking monuments, the attention of archaeologists was not called to the history of primeval man in this region, and until recently the isthmus was supposed to have remained practically unoccupied ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... have such magazines now-a-days? We have philosophical and scientific articles on the one hand, and insipid stories and travels on the other, but no such unpretentious miscellanies which the ordinary person can read in comfort—such as Chambers's or Cassell's or the Strand in England—which supply the general reader with a simple, but satisfying fare and are of the greatest use to the ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... events were happening at Vivey, the person whose name excited the curiosity and the conversational powers of the villagers—Marie-Julien de Buxieres—ensconced in his unpretentious apartment in the Rue Stanislaus, Nancy, still pondered over the astonishing news contained in the Auberive notary's first letter. The announcement of his inheritance, dropping from the skies, as it were, had found him quite unprepared, and, at first, ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... been called to Calgary on business. It sounds simple enough, in these Unpretentious Annals of an Unloved Worm, but I can't help feeling that it marks a trivially significant divide in the trend of things. It depresses me more than I can explain. My depression, I imagine, comes mostly from the manner in which Duncan ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... Francisco entered the unpretentious establishment of Christopher Buckley. He found it more like an office than a drinking place; people sat about, apparently waiting their turn for ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... success of this local brother's unpretentious discourse:—It cheered us, one and all. Faces brightened and drooping heads were lifted up as the old man pursued his way. The last hymn was the heartiest of all, not because, as is sometimes the case, the people were encouraged by the thought of approaching ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... turnings and twistings, are equally serious mistakes. The simple facts of syphilis can appeal to intelligent men and women as worthy of their most serious attention, without either stunning or disgusting them. It is in the unpretentious spirit of talking about a spade as a spade, and not as "an agricultural implement for the trituration of the soil," that we should take stock of the situation and of the resources we can ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... was unpretentious but comfortable. The hand of a careful and thoughtful housekeeper was in evidence everywhere. In the big living room, at the front, were several lounging chairs, and along one wall, between the front windows and the entrance door, stood ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... can be more inspiring to the lover of liberty and national progress than a view of Sofia from the hill where the great seminary of the national church overlooks the plain. There at your feet is spread out the unpretentious seat of a government which stands for the advance of European order in lands long blighted with barbarism. Here resides, and is centred, the virile force of a people which has advanced the bounds of liberty. From here, symbolised by the rivers and roads running down on each side, ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... the Koran through once every three days, and died in the holy month of Ramadan. His tomb at Hamadan, the ancient Ecbatana, still exists, a simple brickwork building, rectangular in shape, and surrounded by an unpretentious court. It was restored in 1877, but is again in need of repair. The illustration here shown is from a photograph sent by Dr. Neligan of Teheran. Though dead, the great Persian has still a large practice, as his tomb is much visited by pilgrims, among ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... Louis begins to peter out into brick- and limestone-kilns and great scars of unworked and overworked quarries, the first and more unpretentious of its suburbs take up—Benson, Maplehurst, and Ridgeway Heights intervening with one-story brick cottages and two-story packing-cases—between the smoke of the city and the carefully parked Queen Anne quietude of ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... The nuptials are about to be celebrated in the Chapel Royal, Savoy, when enter Wife No. 1 who explains that she was a married woman when she met Cuthbertson, and therefore, a fair, or rather unfair, bigamist. Upon this Cuthbertson (who is conveniently near in a pew, wearing the unpretentious uniform of the Royal Horse Artillery), rushes into the arms of the lady who has erroneously been numbered Wife No. 2, when she has been in reality Wife No. 1, and all is joy. Now I need scarcely point ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various
... of an unpretentious man came out in broken sections as the special sped along the smooth track, while the General Manager talked with the resident director and the General Superintendent talked with his assistant, who, not long ago, was the conductor ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... flower that required the sun. Only her sun was happiness. She was in soft white chiffons, her hair and frock alike girlish and unpretentious. Her mother, coming into her dressing room, ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... don't worry about such a thing as that!... A pearl is not less beautiful because it comes from some unpretentious jeweller's shop. I am too fond of jewels for their own sake, to trouble about ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... south aisle hangs a plain, unpretentious little slab of marble to the memory of Thomas Worlidge, artist and engraver, who died 1766. His London house was in Great Queen Street, and in it he had been preceded by Kneller and Reynolds, but in his last years he spent much time at his "country house" at Hammersmith. Not ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... detective and was fortunate enough to find him in. He expected to see a large man of impressive manners and imposing presence, and was rather disappointed when he found a small personage under the average height, exceedingly plain and unpretentious, who might easily have been taken for an humble clerk on a salary of ten or twelve ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... science. Surgery was bare of his exploits. Medical annals knew him not. All he had thought to do was undone by him; and yet here he was, contented, happy and healthy in a realm of little duties. In so unpretentious a life as this he had found satisfaction; and for the first time it came upon him that thus simply and calmly satisfaction comes to the great mass of men who have nothing to do with glory or ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... written by a master of the original sources. Indeed, the use of the text of Homer, Herodotus, the dramatists, and the other contemporary writers is very effective, and very suggestive as to the right method of teaching and study. The style is delightful. For simple, unpretentious narrative and elegant English the book is a model. In my judgment, the work is far superior to any other text-book for high school or academic use which has yet appeared. Its value is enriched by the illustrations, ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... where he stood in the center of his quiet and sheltered office, seeming, to her, a strangely old-time and courtly figure, a proud yet unpretentious student of life at peace with his own soul. The years would come and go, the years that would so age and wear and torture her, but he would reign on in that quiet office unchanged, contented, still at peace with himself and all his world. "Good-bye," she ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... a man of substance, but in domestic habits he followed the rule of the unpretentious middle-class. Breakfast at eight, dinner at one, tea at five, supper at nine—such was the order of the day that he had known in boyhood, and it suited him well enough now that he was at the head of a household. The fare was simple, but various and abundant; no dishes with foreign names, no ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... his father, who had failed to identify himself satisfactorily, but declared that everything was "on a higher plane" in his present state of being, and that all life was "continuous and progressive." Mrs. Horner spoke of herself as a "psychic"; but otherwise she seemed oddly unpretentious and matter-of-fact; and Eugene had no doubt at all of her sincerity. He was sure that she was not an intentional fraud, and though he departed in a state of annoyance with himself, he came to the conclusion that if any credulity were played upon by Mrs. Horner's ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... leads over the broken ground from North End to the Spaniards. The most noticeable object as the pedestrian approaches the latter is a grove of fine Scotch firs, which at one time formed an avenue to a substantial, unpretentious house on the north. A Mr. Turner, a tobacconist of Fleet Street, built the house and planted the trees in 1734. The road past the house turns to the left or north, and is bounded on the east side by the ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... Plymouth. Here he died on May 9, 1657, "lamented by all the colonists of New England as a common blessing and father to them all," and the only special memorial that tangibly recalls his fame is the unpretentious obelisk on Burial Hill. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... towards home, Doris with infinite pains put the finishing touches to her pretty hair, and took a last survey of her dainty person before the well-known step should sound on the stone staircase outside their unpretentious litte door. ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... The unpretentious little story "Dust" (Stoev, 1882) undertakes to demonstrate the unwholesomeness of the religious ideas regarding the life to come usually impressed upon children by parents and teachers. By dust Bjoernson means all obsolete, lifeless matter in the world of thought which settles upon, and ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... bespattered with mud, cold and cheerless but full of a grim excitement. Across the street from the small, poorly lighted railway station there was an eating-house. Leaving the car in the shelter of a freight shed, we sloshed through the shiny rivulet that raced between the curbs and entered the clean, unpretentious little restaurant. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... fear and respect for her great-grandmother, and everything that was fine and good in the child instinctively responded to the atmosphere of her little home. It was an unpretentious home, even for Los Lobos: only a whitewashed California cabin with a dooryard full of wall flowers and geraniums, and pungent marigolds, and marguerites that were budding, blossoming, and gone to rusty decay ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... the trees. Everywhere and always we hear the whirr and hum of insect life, sometimes soft and soothing, sometimes harsh and strident. And floating about wherever we look are butterflies innumerable, many dull and unpretentious, but some of a brilliancy of colour that ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... speak from the heart and to the heart as Lincoln did it is perhaps not given to be uniformly felicitous. Among these speeches was that delivered at Philadelphia, which has already been quoted, but most of them were not considered felicitous at the time. They were too unpretentious. Moreover, they contained sentences which seemed to understate the gravity of the crisis in a way which threw doubt on his own serious statesmanship. Whether they were felicitous or not, the intention of these much-criticised ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... realistic than Fielding. But any good criticism of Tom Jones must be as mystical as the Faery Queen. Hence it is unavoidable in speaking of a fine book like Great Expectations that we should give even to its unpretentious and realistic figures a certain massive mysticism. Pip is Pip, but he is also the well-meaning snob. And this is even more true of those two great figures in the tale which stand for the English democracy. For, indeed, ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... affairs of the State, which had been admitted to the Union only four months before. Whatever the speculation aroused by the personnel of the party, however, the business that called them to Ann Arbor caused little comment, if we are to judge from contemporary reports. Yet this unpretentious gathering of notables was charged with the inauguration of what was to become one of the most significant developments in the history of American education,—the establishment and successful maintenance of a University by the ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... contents which will probably be written. They came principally, as he informs us, from the New York Ledger, and partially from the Independent; were consequently written very much for the many, and very little for the student of elaborate literature. They are unstudied, unpretentious—true nugae venales, 'representing the impressions of happy homes, or the moods and musings of the movement * * fragmentary and careless as even a newspaper style will permit.' But, beyond this, we may assure the reader that these ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... church is of the very far past, having lost its Cathedral rank over six hundred years ago to Sainte-Marie in Grasse, a town scarcely younger than its own. It is the type of the church of this coast, with its unpretentious smallness, its strength, and its disfiguring restorations; and it is, especially in comparison with Vence and Grasse, of small architectural interest. The facade, and the double archway which connects the church and the tower, are of the unfortunate ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... brought to their support the most contumacious of the delegates. On the issue of the following day the hopes of each are centered. Nevins has asked his young champion to visit him at his rooms in an unpretentious hotel on Clark street; there are details for the work of the morrow that ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... the Wrights—Orville, his father, Bishop Wright, and Miss Katherine Wright, the sister, in a small, unpretentious frame house. Orville Wright and his father and sister were in the old homestead when the flood ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... in an unpretentious cottage with the commander, I followed the preparations which were being made for the assault. The ticking of the instruments gave news from the front, the line of which was visible from the windows by flares and rockets and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... Chicken Hill School stood the little vermin-infested house in which the Cavers family lived after they abandoned the weed-choked farm on the river-bank. This unpretentious log house had been the first home of Mr. and Mrs. Steadman, and was part of the "improvements" specified by the Government to show that a homestead is entered in good faith. The land had been rich and productive, and from it George Steadman ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... his brows until his eyes were merely cavities of blackness. Very tenderly he fondled the rifle-butt which lay across his knees, and never in the mountain-desert had there been a more humbly unpretentious ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... company it enters Bozen. Because the car, like ourselves, was thirsty, we stopped at the summit of the pass at the tiny hamlet of Madonna di Campiglio—Our Lady of the Fields—for water and for tea. Should you have occasion to go that way, I hope that you will take time to stop at the unpretentious little Hotel Neumann. It is the sort of Tyrolean inn which had, I supposed, gone out of existence with the war. The innkeeper, a jovial, white-whiskered fellow, such as one rarely finds off the musical comedy stage, served us with tea—with rum in it—and hot bread with honey, ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... wise resemble the present output except in form and stature. And our own forefathers—the people of the British Isles, the Anglo-Saxons who are to-day leading in the social world—were not one iota better throughout those pages than many of the smallest and most unpretentious of obscure tribes living here and there in ignorant, local isolation. One of the strongest points in our argument is the fact that history, as we have it, is composed of the clang of battles and the private lives of kings and despots. The ordinary, everyday life of the ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... unnecessary change in his simple manners and unpretentious method of living. Friends and neighbors came, and he was glad to see them. He answered the door-bell himself and accompanied visitors to the door. Some of his friends, desiring to save his strength in ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... about during the whole week in Sunday clothes. After all he was but an ordinary, commonplace person with whom he was well content, and he came to the conclusion that he had a better chance of living in peace with himself if he lived a simple, unpretentious, ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... to say that almost any man, however unpretentious his language, will command a hearing in Congress, Parliament, or elsewhere, if he gives accurate information upon a subject of importance and in a ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... lawn, Lawrence Hyde in attendance. The vicarage was an old-fashioned house too large for the living, its long front, dotted with rosebushes, rising up honey-coloured against the clear green of a beech grove. There are grand houses that one sees at once will never be comfortable, and there are unpretentious houses that promise to be cool in summer and warm in winter and restful all the year round: of such was Chilmark vicarage, sunning itself in the afternoon clearness, while faded green sunblinds filled the interior with verdant shadow, and the smell of sweetbrier and Japanese honeysuckle ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... his absorption with Miss Axewright's he did not notice them. He saw again the pretty, pathetic face, the gentle brown eyes, the ordinary brown hair, the sentient hands, the slight, graceful figure, the whole undistinguished, unpretentious presence, which had taken his fancy at Boston, and which he now perceived had kept it, under whatever ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... look which had been known to generate courtesy even in the offspring of a million dollars. They found that he knew more about motor-cars than any of them, and as motor-cars were among their greater gods, they considered him wise. He was incomparably simple and unpretentious; ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... lived in it until his death. Sir Isaac Newton lived in the little street off the south side of the square, at the back of the big new Dental Hospital. His house is still standing, and bears a tablet of the Society of Arts. It is quite unpretentious—a stucco-covered building with little dormer-windows in the roof. The great scientist came here in 1710, when he was nearly sixty, and his fame was then world-wide. Men from all parts of Europe sought the dull little street in order to converse ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... as well explain here that Olaf Jansen, a man who quite recently celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday, has for the last half-dozen years been living alone in an unpretentious bungalow out Glendale way, a short distance from the business ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... husband and herself took up their residence in the rural town of Wayland, Mass. Their house, plain and unpretentious, had a wide and pleasant outlook; a flower garden, carefully tended by her own hands, in front, and on the side a fruit orchard and vegetable garden, under the special care of her husband. The house was always neat, with some appearance ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... me past the Bastille and up the Rue des Tournelles to the door of an unpretentious house, upon which he knocked. We were admitted by an old woman to whom Montresor appeared to be known, for, after exchanging a word or two with her, he himself led the way upstairs and opened the door of a ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... always Thackeray's favourite period; he liked the rational, unpretentious tone of its best literature, its practical politics and tolerance, its common sense, and its habit of keeping very close, in art as in action, to the realities of the world as we find it. Swift is the most unromantic of any writer that possessed ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... unpretentious poem, describing in six short cantos the six seasons into which the Hindus divide the year. The title is perhaps a little misleading, as the description is not objective, but deals with the feelings awakened by each season in a ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... finally, in the great war of the Rebellion, there was constant need of regulars to act as mustering and disbursing officers at the rear. Such had been old Whaling's career, and, so long as he himself was utterly unpretentious,—never claimed to have done any war service, and was content to drift along and draw his pay,—nobody would have said much in detraction had it not been for his wife's persistent pushing. He was merely second in command of his ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... being, the only real colonist in the land. On his farm, moreover, a house had been built during these same years with the aid of two artisans, but chiefly by the labour of the owner himself. It was a stone house, about twenty feet by forty in size, a one-story affair, unpretentious and unadorned, but regarded as one of the most comfortable abodes in the colony. The attractions of this home, and especially the hospitality of Madame Hebert and her daughters, are more than once alluded to in the meagre annals of the ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... the unpretentious master and myself as we walked away from the crowded pavement, the onlooker surely suspected us of intoxication. I felt that the falling shades of evening were sympathetically drunk with God. When darkness recovered from its nightly swoon, ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... brother, on the contrary, is, on reaching his unpretentious home, received with a gentle, loving heartiness and the fondest caresses. He sits down to a frugal meal, but everything he eats is excellent; and how could it be otherwise? It is Pamela herself who has prepared it all. They eat with enjoyment, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... protracted drives when he made his round of visits, taking these new friends along. Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Edinburgh, everybody in Scotland, for that matter, and his story of Rab had won him a following throughout Christendom. He was an unpretentious sovereign. Clemens ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and flowers sprang up, and great trees with leafy branches rose on every side.... As they rode on beneath the leafy trees from every tree the birds sang out, for the spell of silence over the lonely moor was broken for ever." This unpretentious story, a child's story, is as engaging as a gem. And so, I think, are most of the others. One more example to illustrate the quality of Leamy's style—say, the description of the contest of the bards before the High King ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... pretty wide stream, a dimpling breadth of transparent water flowing between low banks, with a margin of pebbles. We then returned to our inn, and had tea, and passed a quiet evening by the fireside. This is a good, unpretentious inn; and its visitors' book indicates that it affords general satisfaction to those who ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... compelled my grandfather, as Paul was driven, in his epistle to the Corinthians, and as Demosthenes was forced in his oration for the crown, to enter somewhat upon his own past record. Though a very modest and unpretentious man, yet it is said that the author of the Log-Book, on this memorable occasion straightened himself up, and boldly referred his hearers to the glorious days of the war for Independence, which had tried men's souls, and when he had forever sealed the genuineness of his own patriotism, ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman
... higher tax. The country people, in their sad poverty, form a great contrast to the enormously wealthy Bojars. Although very backward in everything relating to culture, the Roumanian peasant is a busy, quiet, and easily satisfied type, unpretentious to a touching degree when compared with the ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... open. A single thick-set man, apparently unarmed and dressed like an ordinary traveler, followed by half a dozen other equally unpretentious-looking men, entered. The leader turned to ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... for a book. I shall do neither: I have tried to explain my meaning simply and clearly in the book itself, and I am optimistic enough to think that my favourite game is too popular to require an apology for increasing its literature, however unpretentious the attempt may be. Moreover, I am still too much affected by the "brilliant and feverish glow" of enthusiasm to ...
— Lawn Tennis for Ladies • Mrs. Lambert Chambers
... morning Camellia wore an unpretentious dress of white—one which made the thing the Gay Lady had worn at dinner the evening before seem to her memory poor indeed. Later in the morning the Skeptic took Camellia boating on the river, and she went up and dressed for it in a yachting suit ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... Chinese manufacture and a few private dwellings had roofs made of slate-coloured tiles, but most of them were shingled. In the earlier period, it is to be remembered, tiles were used almost exclusively for temple roofs. The architecture of the new city was in general very simple and unpretentious. The old canons of Shinto temple architecture had some influence even in this city built on a Chinese model. Whatever display or ornament there was, appeared not on the exterior but in inner rooms, especially those giving on inner court yards. That these resources were severely ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... in this tumult. I was only stopping in it in order to be near the Hernes, my brother, and Howells. The Georges, whom I had come to know very well, interested me greatly and often of an evening I went over to the East Side, to the unpretentious brick house in which The Prophet and his delightful family lived. Of course this home was doctrinaire, but then I liked that flavor, and so did the Hernes, although Katharine's keen sense of humor sometimes made us all seem rather like ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... proved a light affair. After diligent search through the city, Syama decided to take a two-story house situated in a street running along the foot of the hill to-day crowned by the mosque Sultan Selim, although it was then the site of an unpretentious Christian church. Besides a direct eastern frontage, it was in the divisional margin between the quarters of the Greeks, which were always clean, and those of the Jews, which were always filthy. It was also observed that neither the hill nor ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... sure it was right for you to come here where the life is so different from the quiet, unpretentious one you have led," the doctor thought, but he merely said: "It's my impression they wear their best dresses ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... in front of one of the unpretentious, respectable hotels in the Thirties, just off Fifth Avenue, and Maggie followed the two men in. This hotel did, indeed, in its people, its furnishings, its atmosphere, seem sober and commonplace after the Ritzmore; but at the Ritzmore she had been merely a cigarette-girl, a paid onlooker ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... that has been handled by so many distinguished people as this one. If only the friends of Mr. Gladstone were enumerated, they would make up a long list of illustrious names, and many Prime Ministers have resided at the unpretentious, old-fashioned mansion so conveniently situated for the Houses ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... steamers, and made naught of it. They were middle-aged, disillusioned, tepidly polite, conscientious, and rapid. They knew precisely what they wanted and how to get it. Having got it, they raised their hats and went. Their printed stories were brief, quite unpretentious, and inoffensive—though one of them did let out that the most salient part of me was my teeth, and the other did assert that I behaved like a school-boy. (Doubtless the result of timidity trying to be dignified—this ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... home before Wilhelm appeared in the Kochstrasse. His house lay between the Charlotten and Markgrafenstrasse, and was an old and unpretentious structure, looking, among the stately houses of a later period which surrounded it on all sides, like a poor relation at a rich and distinguished family gathering. During the "milliard years," building ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... horses and our two guides, and started about two o'clock. For some time we followed the road known as the Rue de la Raillere, which leads to the baths of the same name from the Place St. Martin; crossing the river by a very unpretentious bridge, not far from the town. Leaving La Raillere behind, and passing in turn the drinking establishment of Mauhourat—near which the Gaves of Lutour and Marcadau form the Gave of Cauterets—and ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough |
