"Unreadable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... steel-framed and stone-cased tradition, to challenge which is taught to be heresy and impiety. The poetical similes used in the Rig Vedas have been transformed into mythological tales. In the change of language the Vedas themselves are unreadable, except by the priests, who fatten on popular beliefs in the transmigration of souls and in the power of priestcraft to make that transmigration blissful—provided liberal gifts are duly forthcoming. Idolatry and witchcraft are rampant. ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... entirely different principle than any previous review; by restricting its attention to the most important works of each quarter, it gave extensive critiques of only a few books in each number and thus avoided the multitude of perfunctory notices that had made previous reviews so dreary and unreadable. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... girl had been a victim? It seemed hardly probable. It was not even easy to imagine. What struck me most was her—I suppose I must call it— composure. One could not tell whether she understood what she had done. One wondered. She was not so much unreadable as blank; and I did not know whether to admire her for it or dismiss her from my thoughts as a passive ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... word in the same sense would go very far to establish the usage. On the other hand, the fact that any number of newspaper reporters agree in usage does not make the usage reputable. The style of newspaper reporters is not without merit; it is very rarely unreadable; but for all its virtue it is rarely ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... they would not be found before the aasvogels had picked them clean, and these would be at work upon them now. And if they were found, the paper would have rotted or been blown away, or, at the worst, rendered so discoloured as to be unreadable. For the rest, there was nothing to connect him with the murder, now that his confederates were dead. Hendrik would prove an alibi for him. He was a useful man, Hendrik. Besides, who would believe that it was a murder? Two men were escorting an Englishman to the river; they became involved in ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... as 'to whiten' and 'to blanch'; 'to soften' and 'to mollify'; 'to unload' and 'to exonerate'; 'to hide' and 'to conceal'; with many more. Duplicate adjectives also are numerous, as 'shady' and 'umbrageous'; 'unreadable' and 'illegible'; 'unfriendly' and 'inimical'; 'almighty' and 'omnipotent'; 'wholesome' and 'salubrious'; 'unshunnable' and 'inevitable.' Occasionally our modern English, not adopting the Latin substantive, has admitted duplicate ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... the most unreadable specimens of the sex on which he pronounced this highly original dictum, entered the room just then; and he found himself at once out of his chair and ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... to the modern world. For years past I have felt a longing to undertake this work, but the task was by no means an easy one. Leaving out all episodical matter, the leading narrative of the Epic forms about one-fourth of the work; and a complete translation even of this leading story would be unreadable, both from its length and its prolixness. On the other hand, to condense the story into shorter limits would be, not to make a translation, but virtually to write a new poem; and that was not what I desired to undertake, nor what I ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... information concerning their royal prototypes of an antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable. Were there only a compensatory arrangement for this also in another class who should be driven by a like irresistible instinct to unreadable books, the heart of the political economist would be gladdened at seeing the substantial rewards of authorship so much more equally distributed by means of a demand adapted to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... content of a book matters not at all. He loves books because they are books, and discriminates them only by the irrelevant standard of their rarity. A rare book is not less dear to him because it is unreadable, even as to the snob a dull duke is as good as a bright one. Indeed, why should he bother about readableness? He doesn't want to read. 'Uncut edges' for him, when he can get them; and, even when he can't, the notion of reading a rare edition would seem to him ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... {elegant}) has long fascinated hackers (who tend to be intrigued by artificial languages in general). It is traditional for graphics printers, plotters, window systems, and the like to support a Feanorian typeface as one of their demo items. See also {elder days}. 2. By extension, any odd or unreadable typeface produced by a graphics device. 3. The typeface mundanely called 'B"ocklin', an ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... her blanket around her. She was typically Indian at the moment, unreadable and cold. But she nodded in acquiescence and ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... crowd was dispersed, the two strangers who had been seated on the bench appeared at the window and called for their mail. The postmaster handed to one of them a letter addressed, Evangelist Blank. The address was written in almost an unreadable hand. The evangelist opened the letter. ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... would have liked to vindicate the efficiency of his department by establishing the identity of that man. He was a loyal servant. That, however, appeared impossible. The first term of the problem was unreadable—lacked all suggestion but ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... founded on the form and substance of ancient documents; but I have hardly ever introduced into it literal quotations; I believe that unless it possesses a certain unity of language a book is unreadable, and ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... cordiale of the conspirators. Why else should he mistrust Liane's sincerity in asserting that she had seen Popinot? Aside from the question of what he imagined she could possibly gain by making a scene out of nothing—a riddle unreadable—one wondered consumedly what had happened to render Monk ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... demeanor of Jesus before Pilate was meant as an example of normal human conduct. Let us admit that without the proper clues the gospels are, to a modern educated person, nonsensical and incredible, whilst the apostles are unreadable. But with the clues, they are fairly plain sailing. Jesus becomes an intelligible and consistent person. His reasons for going "like a lamb to the slaughter" instead of saving himself as Mahomet did, become quite clear. The narrative becomes ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... his method and sensibility: 'In contemplating the origin, rise, and fall of nations, the mind is alternately filled with a mixture of sacred pain and pleasure.' Would you read further? Then you will find Fauna and Flora, twin goddesses of ineptitude, flitting across the page, unreadable as a geographical treatise. His first masterpiece was translated into French, anno VI., and the translator apologises that war with England alone prevents the compilation of a suitable biography. Was ever thief treated ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... most difficult of authors. Few can wade through the mingled solecisms in language and mistakes in science, the empty verbiage that dilates on a platitude in one place, and the jejune abstract that hurries over a knotty argument in another, without regretting that so unreadable a poet should have ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... reader marvellously in mind of that well-known old book of the same era, 'Reynolds's God's Revenge,' in which, with all due pious horror and bombastic sermonising, the national appetite for abominations is duly fed with some fifty unreadable Spanish histories, French histories, Italian histories, and so forth, one or two of which, of course, are known to have furnished subjects for ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... gaze of infancy, They speak,—yet utter not. Fair heavenly flowers Strewn on the floor-way of the angels' bowers! 'Twas HIS own hand that twined your chaplets bright, And thoughts of love are in your wreaths of light, Unread, unreadable by us;—there lie High meanings in your mystic tracery; Silent rebukings of day's garish dreams, And warnings solemn as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... needing to change these conflicts into a mere appendix of ecclesiastical history. Here it is evident how far we in our day are away from Feuerbach. His most beautiful passages in praise of the new religion of love are today unreadable. ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... fifteen letters, disguising our handwritings as much as we could. It was not easy. Oswald tried to write one of them with his left hand, but the consequences were almost totally unreadable. Besides, if any one could have read it, they would only have thought it was written in an asylum for the insane, the writing was so ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... book. It is useless to argue with biographers; they, at all events, are neither utilitarians nor opportunists, but idealists pure and simple. What is the good of reminding them, being so majestical, of Guizot's pertinent remark, 'that if a book is unreadable it will not be read,' or of the older saying, 'A great book is a great evil'? for all such observations they simply put on one side as being, perhaps, true for others, but not for them. Had Mr. Bradlaugh's ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... new confidence had transformed the girl. Her body had been modified and her soul at once chastened and fired. Fresh in her memory was endless matter for meditation. And on the sofa, in a negligent attitude of repose, with shameless eyes gazing far into the caverns of the fire, and an unreadable faint smile on her face, she meditated. And she was the most seductive, tantalizing, self-contradictory object for study in the whole of Bursley. She had never been so interesting as in this brief period, and she might never be ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... others were pounding away at the typewriter; others were talking in undertones to "typists" taking dictation to the machine; others were reading "copy" and altering it with huge blue pencils which made apparently unreadable smears wherever they touched the paper. In and out skurried a dozen office-boys, responding to calls from various desks, bringing bundles of proofs, thrusting copy into boxes which instantly and noisily shot up ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... really tried, that he was not as availably clever as others of his family. Whether nature or dawdling was to blame, he had neither originality nor fire. He could not get his plots or his characters to work, even when his mother or Babie jogged them on by remarks: his essays were heavy and unreadable, his jokes hung fire, and he had so exhausted every one's patience, that the translations and small reviewing work which he could have done were now unattainable. He was now ready to do anything, and he actually meant it, but there seemed nothing for him to do. Mrs. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be used without embellishment. Mere facts are frequently most unliterary, though they may be susceptible of a high literary polish. The sub-title "A True Story," which young writers think so valuable a part of the tale, is too often the trademark of an unreadable mess of conventional people, ordinary incidents and commonplace conversation. We find few genuinely true stories, and when we do find them we seldom care to read them through. I have read many stories which ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... illegible, unreadable image, effigy imaginary, imaginative impending, approaching imperious, imperial imply, infer in, into inability, disability ingenious, ingenuous intelligent, intellectual insinuation, innuendo instinct, intuition involve, implicate irony, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... who came in daily to perform such chores cleared away the things. Jessie, with an unreadable countenance, brought back the bottle of Scotch and the glasses and a bowl of cracked ice and ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... the Etruria Vendicata praises the murder of the abominable Alessandro de' Medici by his kinsman, Lorenzaccio. None of the satires, whether on kings, aristocrats, or people, have lent themselves easily to my perusal; the epigrams are signally unreadable, but some of the sonnets are very good. He seems to find in their limitations the same sort of strength that he finds in his restricted tragedies; and they are all ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... occasionally writing elegantly and impressively into Carlyle's proof-sheets is rather striking. Some of Jeffrey's other criticisms sound very curiously in our ear in these days. It is startling to find Mill's Logic described (1843) as a "great unreadable book, and its elaborate demonstration of axioms and truisms." A couple of years later Jeffrey admits, in speaking of Mr. Mill's paper on Guizot—"Though I have long thought very highly of his powers as a reasoner, I scarcely gave him credit for such ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... to whether it is his last work. I believe it to be so; but Blaise, in his excellent edition, prints the dull and unreadable ode to Lagade later, and ascribes it ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... "unpacking" results in an unreadable word, a simplified form has been added in brackets ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... As they are today, so shall ye become. A little space, a few cycles of time, and all that lives and stalks abroad in the full plentitude of energy and ambition shall become resolved into the unfathomable the unreadable mysteries ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... a scrap-book is: 1. One never has paste or gum tragacanth handy; 2. Mucilage won't stick, or stay, 4 weeks; 3. Mucilage sucks out the ink and makes the scraps unreadable; 4. To daub and paste 3 or 4 pages of scraps is tedious, slow, nasty and tiresome. My idea is this: Make a scrap-book with leaves veneered or coated with gum-stickum of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush, rag or tongue, and dab on ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... unreadable text] about sunset that evening, and the command went into camp and I went to Jim's new log house. He had built one and had started in to build the second, having two carpenters at ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... him about, and show him the way people did things. It would open his eyes and his brains. Electrically, something self-protective within her added the further message: it would keep him out of the way for a time. Sally breathed deeply. An unreadable smile was upon her lips, and no smile at all was in her eyes. Afar off she scented change; but what manner of change she did not as yet recognise. It was her instinct at work, her instinct for turning life to ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... Quincey's work is now unreadable because it deals with political economy and allied subjects, in which he fancied he was an expert. He is a master only when he deals with pure literature, but he has a large vein of satiric humor ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... are books written by people who have spent the night in China, as it were, superficial and amusing, full of the tinkling of temple bells; and there are other books written by people who have spent years in China and who know it well,—ponderous books, full of absolute information, heavy and unreadable. Books of the first class get one nowhere. They are delightful and entertaining, but one feels their irresponsible authorship. Books of the second class get one nowhere, for one cannot read them; they are too didactic and dull. The only people who might read them do not read them, for they also ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... country an interest on the subject to which to appeal. A work treating of early Irish kings, in the same way in which the historians of neighbouring countries treat of their own early kings, would be, to the Irish public generally, unreadable. It might enjoy the reputation of being well written, and as such receive an honourable place in half-a-dozen public libraries, but it would be otherwise left severely alone. It would never make its way through that frozen ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... east-north-east of Nordenskjold Ice Tongue. At 9 p.m. Hooke called Cape Evans and sent weather reports to Wellington and Melbourne via Macquarie Island. Hooke and Ninnis on several evenings at about 11 o'clock have heard what happened to be faint messages, but unreadable. He sent word to Macquarie Island of this in hopes that they would hear and ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... images were taken from Early Canadian Online and there are several pages where the text is missing on the images. These have been marked "unreadable."] ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... eighteenth century. But he wrote one work which requires further notice. The 'Complete Duty of Man' would, if nothing else did, prevent his name from sinking into oblivion. It deserves to live for its intrinsic merits. It is one of the few instances of a devotional book which is not unreadable. It is not, like some of the class, full of mawkish sentimentality; nor, like others, so high-flown that it cannot be used for practical purposes by ordinary mortals without a painful sense of unreality; nor, like others, so ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the poem has been objected to it. But this, we think, shows the poet's good sense. The subject is too uniform and too gloomy for a long poem. "The Grave, in twelve books" would have been totally unreadable. It was far better to give, as Blair has given, a strong, stern, rapid, and concentrated sketch of the grisly gulf. The grave, in one respect, has no unity, and no story. It stands by itself, hollow, solitary, with its momentary ghastly yawnings, its general repose, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... unsteadily; the two men grasped hands and for an instant neither spoke. Darrell saw before him a tall, powerfully built man, approaching fifty, whose somewhat bronzed face, shrewd, stern, and unreadable, was lighted by a pair of blue eyes which once had resembled Whitcomb's. With a swift, penetrating glance the elder man looked searchingly into the face of ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... She put one hand on his shoulder, the other on his knee, and bent forward, peering into his face. Hollister matched that questioning gaze for a second. It was unreadable. It conveyed no message, hinted nothing, held no covert suggestion. It was earnest and troubled. He had never before seen that sort of look on Myra's face. He could make nothing of it, and so there ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... established by the exquisite descriptions of nature and the life-like sketches of character which will often reward the patient reader. That prolixity, which more than any other cause has made the work obsolete, and, as a whole, unreadable, was a recommendation rather than an objection at the time of publication. The "Arcadia," standing almost alone in the department of fiction, and far superior to its few competitors, took the place of a small circulating library. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... too Oriental and not Oriental enough. He had small store of Arabic at the time—Lane of the Nights is not Lane of the Dictionary—and his pages are disfigured by many childish mistakes. Worst of all, the three handsome volumes are rendered unreadable as Sale's Koran by their anglicised Latin, their sesquipedalian un English words, and the stiff and stilted style of half a century ago when our prose was, perhaps, the worst in Europe. Their cargo of Moslem learning was most valuable to the student, but utterly out of place for readers of "The Nights;" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... whispered, edging an inch nearer him, her white face uplifted, her dark eyes unreadable in their eloquence and mystery. "I've no friend but y'u. I'll be—yours.... I'm lost.... What does it matter? If y'u want me—take ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... timid expression, and every sentence broken by apology. I should have to write a dozen of letters before I could print a line, and the line, at last, would be only like a bit of any other botanical book—trustworthy, it might be, perhaps; but certainly unreadable. Whereas now, it will rather put things more forcibly in the reader's mind to have them retouched and corrected as we go on; and our natural and honest mistakes will often be suggestive of things we could not ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... their all (they dared not win), he would make their lives the stake and bid their friends redeem them. In addition to this open robbery of the rich, taxes of all sorts were laid and unlimited oppressions enforced. The new edicts of the emperor were written so small and posted so high as to be unreadable, yet no excuse of ignorance of the law was admitted in extenuation of ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... read it, and a great deal more, for himself. No wonder he stormed, for the impossible had been made not only consistent, but unreadable. The plot was lost for chapters. The characters no longer did anything, and then went and did something else: you were told instead how they did it. You were not allowed to make up your own mind about them: you ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... apprehensive of Ben Letts before the drowning of the squatter. The one person he stood in awe of was his mother. Again his eyes sought the silent girl at his side. She had ever been a hallowing influence in his life, and to lose her would be worse than death. After tonight the glory in those unreadable brown eyes would ever shine for him. He threw one arm across her shoulder, and drew her closer. "My little moonlight girl!" he breathed in ecstasy, his cheek against hers. "Are ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... it must be somewhere, for I'd trust his word against a thousand. I shall ask Mr. —— to forward this present not knowing your address, he is a kind gentleman and a true friend. I send you the little scrap of paper with the last words he ever wrote. Some may say it's no good and unreadable, but I took care that them that didn't value it didn't get it, though they did search everywhere, and looked so black when it couldn't be found being in my pocket at the time. I present my services, honoured Madam, and my dutiful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... and the living of it after British standards are what Mr. Smith sought and here reveals. He could not write an unreadable book, this American artist. It is all interesting that he has to tell of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... a shadow should spread to her work was unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with Dante, with Pascal. A novelist—for as a poet, after trying hard to think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable—as a novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a time when ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... command? What though the other pair were deep and thoughtful and sweet, and the brow one that promised passion and power? A thousand other eyes might have looked on either one of them, and forgotten; these two looked—and remembered. You cannot tell why; it is the old story; the hidden, unreadable affinity making itself known to its counterpart; the sign and countersign of nature. But it was only nature that gave and took; not Diana and ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... no doubt. Since we met, I've written the first draft of a novel, which is unreadable, and a play. . . . I sent the play to ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... that, in spite of the reasons I have advanced, the general reader can scarcely be expected to read modern poetry, and that therefore his habit of skipping must continue. He would say that most modern poetry is unreadable, at least by the average man. He would say that if the infinitely complex study of emotional mind-states that lies behind the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, or the eerie otherworldliness of Yeats, or ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the gift of universality. She was gifted with a singular confidence in her own abilities, infinite curiosity, untiring industry, and never-ending and inexhaustible energy. She wrote nearly as much as Voltaire, and barely excelled him in the amount of unreadable work, which, if printed, would fill ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... be better treated this time," smiled Cervera, dropping into a chair opposite the detective, and fixing her sensuous, dark eyes on Nick's calm, unreadable face. ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... are now satisfied that The Rhine Gold is an allegory, do not forget that an allegory is never quite consistent except when it is written by someone without dramatic faculty, in which case it is unreadable. There is only one way of dramatizing an idea; and that is by putting on the stage a human being possessed by that idea, yet none the less a human being with all the human impulses which make him akin and therefore ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... Liberty, which probably gave him infinite labour, but his ascent upon this occasion of what he calls 'the barren, but delightful mountain of Parnassus,' was labour lost. It is enough to say of Liberty, that it contains more than three thousand lines of unreadable blank verse. Sinecures were the rewards of genius in Thomson's day, and he was made Secretary of Briefs in the Court of Chancery. He took a cottage at Richmond, within an easy walk of Pope, and the two poets met often and ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Bill said, reaching out his hand. She did not take it, but looked around the room with unreadable eyes. ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... Howitzer 1856 J.A.D. U.S.N.Y. Washington 757 LBS. 58 PRE No. 45. The cannon on the right has inscriptions which are very worn and indistinct. There is an engraved anchor, but except for a letter here-and-there, the inscription is unreadable. ...
— The Fairfax County Courthouse • Ross D. Netherton
... sun shining on the snow. We have seen little shipping, one large oil boat passed west. All are taking the lack of news philosophically, nothing, as far as I can make out, being heard to-day. Code messages from battleships speaking to each other are received but are unreadable. ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... strongest bank safe which the expert Mr. Hobbs might vainly have tried to open; but even when that seal has already been rightfully broken and the contents of the letter exposed, those contents are to the eye of delicacy as unreadable as if written in that Bass language which Adam and Eve are said to have spoken while in the garden of Eden, and which, since the fall, none but angels have ever been able to comprehend. Now, if Cicero thought it base for a third party to read a private letter, what eloquent thunder would he ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the door jamb and with a parting "I should bibble," started back to his goats, which he had refused to graze outside the Basin as Holman Sommers advised. Helen May began valiantly to struggle with the fine, symmetrical, but almost unreadable chirography of the man of many words. She succeeded in transcribing the human polyp properly lithified and correctly constituting the strata of the psychozoic age, when Vic stuck his head in at ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... editions have since been published; and it may fairly be affirmed, that few books have been so much in favour with the reading public of every generation as this book, which the lapse of every generation has been rendering more unreadable. ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... crystallized into habit. Do not imagine that a superior mathematical knowledge is necessary to erect a horoscope. Many construct a horoscope in such an involved manner, so "fearfully and wonderfully made" that it is unreadable to themselves or others, while a simple figure easy of reading may be constructed by anyone who knows how to add and subtract. This method has been thoroughly elucidated in Simplified Scientific Astrology which is a complete text book, though small and inexpensive, and parents who have the welfare ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... rows of the above numbers in the source book had been defaced to the point of being almost unreadable. A best guess was made on some ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... watched till daybreak, an', havin' snatched a hasty breakfast, commenced t' pack my animal. Then it was that I discovered, slipped beneath a strap o' my saddle, a sheet o' paper. Unfoldin' it, I saw that it was scrawled over in a rude an' almost unreadable hand. This was what it said, 'This demand of ours shall remain uncancelled, an' shall be to you as was the Ark o' God among the Philistines. Unless you return to your father's house an' to the people ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... roulette, faro, keno, and stud-poker were going in full blast. The proprietor, his elegant diamonds flashing in the light, was seated on a raised platform from whence he could survey the entire company—his face, impassive as marble and unreadable as the sphinx, was turned toward the faro lay-out, which this evening appeared to be the center ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... with a keen eye. He had studied the face of the big man from up north all during the scene, and he found the stern features unreadable. For one instant now he guessed that Sinclair was about ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... recognitio trium voluminum operum clariss. P. Nicolai Cusae ... proxime sequens pagina monstrat."[44] Cardinal Cusa, who died in 1464, is one of the earliest modern attempters. His quadrature is found in the second volume, and is now quite unreadable. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... extreme evils from which we now suffer was destroyed as it appeared. Efforts at a thorough purge were dull, were libellous, were not of the "form" which the Universities and the public schools taught to be sacred. They were rejected as unreadable, or if printed, were unread. The results are ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... published a translation of Bottiger's 'Sabina,' a learned account of the Roman toilette. I here send you a companion to that work—not a direct translation, but a very minute abstract from a similar dissertation by Hartmann, (weeded of the wordiness which has made the original unreadable, and in consequence unread,) on the toilette and the wardrobe of the ladies of ancient Palestine. Hartmann was a respectable Oriental scholar, and he published his researches, which occupy three thick octavos, making in all one thousand four hundred and eighty-eight pages, under ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... some things, a greatness of soul. I will refrain—but in order that these effusions may not be lost to the world, I offer them to the annuals for 1839; not so much for the sake of pecuniary compensation, but in order to improve the reading of some of that very unreadable class of books. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the author of which, Valmiki, has come down to us, is a poem yet more vast and unequal. There are portions which to us are quite unreadable, and there are others comparable to the most imposing and most touching in all epic poetry. Reduced to its theme, the subject of Mahabharata is extremely simple; it is the history of Prince Rama, dispossessed of his throne, who saw his beloved wife, Sita, ravished ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... which is the spectral throne of exiled rulers. He has the power of all strong natures of creating around him an atmosphere of uncertainty, apprehension, and fear. Of all the many problems of this Session of probably fierce personal conflict, this was the most unreadable sphinx. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Christian belief, the course of country-dances in England, or the growth of mediaeval legends, he adds the grace of telling a tale and drawing a character. He has published nearly a hundred volumes, not one of them unreadable. But no one man may write with equal pen of German history, of comparative mythology and philology, of theological dissertations, and of the pleasures of English rural life, while he adds to these a long ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... obvious to the vulgar part of mankind. Their art is the transmutation of styles. By happy alchemy of mind they convert dross into gold—and gold into tinsel. They see farther into a millstone than most others. If an author is utterly unreadable, they can read him for ever: his intricacies are their delight, his mysteries are their study. They prefer Sir Thomas Brown to the Rambler by Dr. Johnson, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy to all the writers of the Georgian Age. They judge ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... There is certainly nothing either in the quantity or the quality of the performance which makes this incredible, for it does not fill quite two hundred pages of the ordinary 18mo size and not very closely packed type of the usual cheap French novel, and though it is not unreadable, any tolerably clever boy might easily write it between the time when he gets his scholarship in spring and the time when he goes up in October. The author had evidently read his Pigault and adopted that writer's revised picaresque scheme. His most prominent character (the hero, Henri ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... he spoke; the genial, engaging smile of a fond old father. But the eyes, surrounded by laughter crinkles, were as unreadable as two disks of gray slate. They were the eyes of a poker player—or master ...
— —And Devious the Line of Duty • Tom Godwin
... blinds had been drawn up, only to reveal the dusty desolation of an unused room, in which a few chairs had been uncovered, and a table cleared. A man rose from a chair beside the table, and he and Falloden shook hands. He was a round-faced and broad-shouldered person, with one of the unreadable faces developed by the life of a prominent solicitor, in contact with all sorts of clients and many varieties of business; and Falloden's sensitive pride had soon detected in his manner certain shades of expression to which the heir of Flood Castle ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... November in the same year he issued Shelley's second novel from his press, and entered into negotiations with him for the publication of more poetry. The new romance was named "St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian." This tale, no less unreadable than "Zastrozzi," and even more chaotic in its plan, contained a good deal of poetry, which has been incorporated in the most recent editions of Shelley's works. A certain interest attaches to it as the first known link ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... believe—no, I don't believe. I don't know. At the time I was certain. They all went down; and I don't know whether I have done stern retribution—or murder; whether I have added to the corpses that litter the bed of the unreadable sea the bodies of men completely innocent or basely guilty. I don't know. ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... hopeless efforts of mediocrities and inferiorities, believing in themselves as superiorities, and stumbling on through limping disappointments to prostrate failure! Poverty comes pleading, not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares. The unreadable author particularly requests us to make a critical examination of his book, and report to him whatever may be our verdict,—as if he wanted anything but our praise, and that very often to be used ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... caballero of whom I shall sing." And Boca hummed a tune, gazing at Pete with unreadable eyes, half-smiling, half-sad. How young, smooth-cheeked, and boyish he was, as he glanced up and returned her smile. Yet how quickly his face changed as he turned his head toward the doorway, ever alert for a possible surprise. Boca pushed ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... apprehend the greatness of the "Divine Comedy." Voltaire called the "Inferno" revolting, the "Purgatorio" dull, and the "Paradiso" unreadable. The reason is because they are not rightly attuned for the acceptance of the great truths which the poem teaches, and because they look at it from a wholly mistaken standpoint. If anyone supposes that the "Inferno," for instance, is meant for ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the sack and picked it up, Waring reached out his arm. "Give it to me," he said quietly. Quigley laughed. Waring's eyes were unreadable. ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... Tractatus Theologicus de Deo, an ugly, square, brown book of five hundred pages—is as unreadable as it is unprepossessing. Bayle says that it was shown to the King whilst out hunting, and that he forthwith read it with such energy as to be able to despatch within an hour to his resident at the Hague a detailed list of its heresies. Nothing in his reign seems to have ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... ordinary adult man—problems of pure aesthetics which don't so much as present themselves to people like myself—that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the ordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artists regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is really not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of literature, just as Professor Radium of 'Comic Cuts' is its stock ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... chessboard with my letters on it. I tried reading them downward, across, upward and diagonally, in the direction of the moves of different chess pieces—king, queen, rook and bishop. Nothing came of that, whatever I did; the thing was as unreadable as ever. But there remained one chess-move to try—the eccentric move of the knight; the move of one square forward, backward or sideways, and then one square diagonally, or, as it has sometimes been more concisely ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... any hesitation or compromise. It has some breathings of the Miltonic grandeur; but that is all. For the rest it is a mere party polemic written for the moment; and, as is the case with all pamphlets, the very qualities which gave it its contemporary interest make it unreadable to posterity. Part of it is a sweeping assertion of the inalienable right of the whole people to choose, judge and depose their rulers; a democratic doctrine which a few years later, when England had grown tired of the Army and the Puritans, ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... which—to make "a clean breast"—we must confess, is that of fickleness in our loves; an occasional flirting with other arts and sciences, in their turn—for we protest against the profligacy of making love to more than one at once! We string together fearful and unreadable lengths of iambics, and dactyles, and trochaics, and write sonnets to the bright queen of night, beginning "O thou!" and stick fast in the middle of sorely-laboured and at length baffling extempores to this, that, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... prejudices, as well as the interests, of the planters. The article in the Quarterly is valuable, as being an able and liberal digest of various narratives; some derived from Hayti itself. Rainsford's book is nearly unreadable, from the absurdity of its style; but it is truly respectable in my eyes, notwithstanding, from its high appreciation of L'Ouverture's character. It contains more information concerning Toussaint than can ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... to Mr. Peter Vibart; it would be a scholarly book, of elaborate finish and care of detail, with no irregularities of style or anything else to break the monotonous harmony of the whole—indeed, sir, it would be a most unreadable book!" ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... one of the men in the fore canoe was Yuara, who had been lying in the bottom of the craft and sleeping all the afternoon. From him Lourenco attempted to get information as to the reason for Suba's enmity—but in vain. The tall fellow spoke not a word in reply, and his face remained unreadable. ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... accurately of the status of Kohlhaas' lawsuit in Dresden, he believed that, in spite of the open enmity which existed between them, he could persuade the horse-dealer to enter into a new alliance with him. He therefore sent off one of his men to him with a letter, written in almost unreadable German, to the effect that if he would come to Altenburg and resume command of the band which had gathered there from the remnants of his former troops who had been dispersed, he, Nagelschmidt, was ready ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... III., that Titterby went, if I may put it so vulgarly, off the hooks. I think he must have got on to the conference between the mineowners and the representatives of the miners, and struggled until the gas became too thick for him. At any rate, after several unreadable pages, the following unhappy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... not go forth into the world without due acknowledgment being made to that worthy old Dominie, Richard Johnson, to whose erudite but somewhat unreadable work the author is so largely indebted. As he flourished at the end of the sixteenth century, and the commencement of the seventeenth, great allowances should be made for his style, which is certainly not suited to the taste of this generation. It is to be hoped that ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... diminish the efficacy of His Cross, nor our need of it, nor the full tide of blessings which flow from it to the believing soul. Therefore do men cling to Him today as if it was but yesterday that He had died for them. When all other names carved on the world's records have become unreadable, like forgotten inscriptions on decaying grave-stones, His shall endure for ever, deep graven on the fleshly tables of the heart. His revelation of God is the highest truth. Till the end of time men will turn ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... shook my head, for the riddle seemed quite unreadable, and as we had already sat up until long past midnight I begged for my candle, and proposed to defer our conversation until the morning. Jack, declaring that none of the beds in the damp old house was fit to sleep in without a week of previous ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... style which imparts such an air of heightened verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the new journalism. "The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are 'not for an age, but for all time,'" says Bernard Shaw, "has his reward in being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes trying to knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare peopling that same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire hunts, Ibsen photographing the local doctors and vestrymen ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... world; while the sultan (to whom they all profess an unlimited adoration) sits trembling in his apartment, and dare neither defend nor revenge his favourite. This is the blessed condition of the most absolute monarch upon earth, who o—— no l—— but his will. [Editor's note: Two words are unreadable due to damage to the book which may have occurred at the time of printing. It seems probable that the sentence should end ".. who owns no limit but ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... of political unity seems due to want of interest in politics. It is often said that the history of India in pre-Mohammedan times is an unintelligible or, at least, unreadable, record of the complicated quarrels and varying frontiers of small states. Yet this is as true of the history of the Italian as of the Indian peninsula. The real reason why Indian history seems tedious and intricate is that large ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... and encircled in mystery, according to some writers who have been studying the Gipsy character. They have been a theme upon which a "bookworm" could gloat, a chest of secret drawers into which the curious delight to pry, a difficult problem in Euclid for the mathematician to solve; and an unreadable book for the author. A conglomeration of languages for the scholar, a puzzle for the historian, and a subject for the novelist. These are points which it is not the object of this book to attempt to clear up and settle; all it aims at, as in the case of my "Cry of the Children ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... but that in addition to being the possessor of great learning he was a man of high character. His literary efforts were surprisingly varied. There are at least thirty-six volumes with his name on the title-page, most of them unreadable to-day; even such works, for example, as his Visit to the Philippine Isles and Siam and the Siamese, which involved travel into then little-known lands. Perhaps the only book by him that to-day commands attention is his translation of Chamisso's Peter ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... received a note from Hemerlingue, almost unreadable on account of the complicated scrawls, of abbreviations more or less commercial, under which the ex-sutler hid ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... startled into wakefulness. Johnny put one dark, bony hand on her white shoulder, gently, reassuring. After a moment, finding herself, she turned away and lit a cigarette. Johnny finished pulling on his boots and stood, his hawk-like face unreadable in the cold gray light streaming ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... fortified her to pursue her walk to the house and give battle for freedom. Willoughby appeared to her scarce human, unreadable, save by the key that she could supply. She determined to put faith in Colonel De Craye's marvellous divination of circumstances in the dark. Marvels are solid weapons when we are attacked by real prodigies of nature. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Figaro up to la Revue des Deux Mondes, including la Gazette de France and le Constitutionnel. And THEY have not finished yet! Barbey d'Aurevilly has insulted me personally, and the good Saint-Rene Taillandier, who declares me "unreadable," attributes ridiculous words to me. So much for printing. As for speech, it is in accord. Saint-Victor (is it servility towards Michel Levy) rends me at the Brabant dinner, as does that excellent Charles Edmond, etc. On the other hand I am admired by the ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... concentrated effort to read again in the man's gaze the undisguised worship and wonder which had always followed her from the eyes of the boy who had fought to be her knight. And she realized suddenly that he had sensed the effort behind her eager scrutiny, even though his own eyes remained whimsically unreadable. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... "Glen Morris Stories" is to sow the seed of pure, noble, manly character in the mind of our great nation's childhood. They exhibit the virtues and vices of childhood, not in prosy, unreadable precepts, but in a series of characters which move before the imagination, as living beings do ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... had found the word "Bushido" written with a particularly flourishing capital letter and twice repeated. "That was inevitable," said White with the comforting regret one feels for a friend's banalities. "And it dates... [unreadable] ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... saw something like effort in the dark unreadable eyes. Then suddenly Pierce smiled, his young face disarmingly innocent and merry. "Oh, come on, Bryce, it's not that serious. Be a good sport. You don't ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... fall was there, and yet neither Lamb's version nor Hunt's is satisfactory. His "Atys" pales before Cranstoun's, and his "Epithalamium," is almost unreadable; while the lines "On the death of Lesbia's Sparrow" naturally compel comparison with Byron's version. Nor will readers of the translations by Sir Theodore Martin or Robinson Ellis gain anything by ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... into their hands, perhaps they will speak of it!" In this passage there is an immense deal of Balzac—of the great artist who was so capable at times of self-deceptive charlatanism. "Louis Lambert," as a whole, is now quite unreadable; it contains some admirable descriptions, but the "scientific" portion is mere fantastic verbiage. There is something extremely characteristic in the way Balzac speaks of its having been optional with him to make it a "purely learned" work. His pretentiousness ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... best things—but how am I to begin?" She wondered what books he would tell her to take up to her own room, and recalled the famous writers that she had either not looked into or had found the most unreadable, with a half-smiling wish that she could mischievously ask Deronda if they were not the books called "medicine for the mind." Then she repented of her sauciness, and when she was safe from observation carried up a ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... little about bowing and scraping to people; often passes folk (unintentionally) without nodding; and has nothing of a polemically virulent character in his disposition. There is something genuine, honest, gentlemanly, and unreadable in him. He almost reminds one of Elia's inexplicable cousin. He has a special fondness for architecture; plans, specifications, &c., have a charm for him; he is a sort of clerical Inigo Jones; and ought to have been an architect. He is a rather polished reader; but he holds his ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... Grimm studied his friend's unreadable face for an instant with an almost painful intensity. Then a smile swept away the worry ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... Princeton College, was taken prisoner by the British during the war, and when the war was over engaged in journalism, as an ardent supporter of Jefferson and the Democrats. Freneau's patriotic verses and political lampoons are now unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet, by virtue of his Wild Honeysuckle, Indian Burying Ground, Indian Student, and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace and delicacy inherited, perhaps, with ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... this enquiry, would not the younger 'part of the world be ready to take off its coat and run at him might and main?' (Republic.) Yet, if like Peisthetaerus in Aristophanes, he could persuade the 'birds' to hear him, retiring a little behind a rampart, not of pots and dishes, but of unreadable books, he might have something to say for himself. Might he not argue, 'that a rational being should not follow the dictates of passion in the most important act of his or her life'? Who would willingly enter ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... were, made for appeal, and eloquent with a subdued heart language. But they were held in check by an infinite discretion. Never have I caught them quite off their guard, and to-night they were wholly unreadable. Yet she was trembling with something more than the fervour of the dance, and the little hand which had touched mine in lingering pressure a few hours before was not quiet for a moment. I could not see it fluttering in and out of the folds of ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... from Charles Lamb is an illustration of how humor may save the utterly absurd from being unreadable. Lamb had absolutely nothing to say when he sat down to write this letter; and yet he contrived to be amusing, ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... Petersburg, long ago secured its suspension. Besides, the Crimean War will always be remembered against Napoleon—it is so easy not to ally oneself with England, and, considering her proverbial ingratitude, so rarely profitable. I spoke of Bismarck! This man of a million, with deep, dark eyes, fixed and unreadable, with a cold, mocking mouth, iron will and mighty brain, is soon to be pitted against Napoleon, the shadow whom you have seen. I am no soothsayer, but I can tell which must go down in the charge, and never to hold up his head again. I am one of the flies ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas |
