"Unromantic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... experience briefly treated, this defect might be lessened and our mystery seem to inhere in life. The tone of the age, its movement, the mingling of races and classes in the dollar hunt, the fiery and not quite unromantic struggle for existence, with its changing trades and scenery, and two types in particular, that of the American handy-man of business and that of the Yankee merchant sailor—we agreed to dwell upon at some length, and make the woof to our not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... country, is a most engaging phenomenon; it is full of afflatus, sweep, and deep searchings of heart; but it is essentially romantic and egotistical, and all in it that is not soliloquy is mere system-making and sophistry. Therefore when it is taught by unromantic people ex cathedra, in stentorian tones, and represented as the rational foundation of science and religion, with neither of which it has any honest sympathy, it becomes positively odious—one of the worst imposture ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the afternoon wore itself away, and I was glad when that evening I boarded the west-bound train. It was thronged with emigrants of many nationalities, and among them were Scandinavian maidens, tow-haired and red-cheeked, each going out to the West to be married. Their courtship would be brief and unromantic, but, as I was afterward to learn, three-fourths of the marriages so made turned out an unqualified success. Still, I found a corner in the smoking end of a long Colonist car, and, with the big bell clanging and a storm of voices exchanging ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... to look upon, and with seven-and-sixpence in odd money in her bag, stepped out bravely on to the road, scorched by the midday sun, with a curl at the corner of her mouth, a medley of disconnected thoughts in her madcap head, and a feeling of unromantic emptiness somewhere in the vicinity of her ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... any event the boy's introduction to war was going to be as unromantic as anyone could want, short of being thrown cold and untrained into a major battle. They must be prepared for a bad time until they made it out of the Union lines and ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... stern, and did not give her enough to eat. This, we felt, would have made the melancholy picture of Katrina's condition most satisfyingly complete. But when we sought eagerly for such details, Katrina, with shameless indifference to dramatic possibilities, painted for us an unromantic, matter-of-fact old German, kind to her when he remembered her existence, but submerged in his library and in scientific research. We further learned that they ate five meals a day at Katrina's home, with ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... imagination make them his own! He could turn abruptly from the law—to hotels! A disconcerting man! And the mere tone in which he mentioned his enterprise seemed, in a most surprising way, to dignify hotels, and even boarding-houses; to give romance to the perfectly unromantic business of lodging and catering!... And the seed from which he was to grow the magic plant sat in the room there with Hilda: that bowed head! The ambition and the dream resembled St. Pancras: the present ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... that in matters of the affections the feelings of these semi-savages should be more in unison with the sentiments and customs of the highly organized western nations than with the methodical and unromantic heart-schooling of their ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... expense and risk in sending vessels in, was so much reduced that the ventures hardly paid. And when at last Fort Fisher was taken, and thus all blockade-running entirely put an end to, the enterprise had lost much of its charm; for, unromantic as it may seem, much of that ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... conjecturing that she had had a disappointment in her youth, and had been incapable of loving twice. It never struck them—which was actually the case—that she had been incapable of loving once; and that her single-blessedness was due to no unforgotten love-story, but to the unromantic fact that among her score of lovers she had never found a man for whom she seriously cared. In a delicate and ladylike fashion she had flirted outrageously in her time; but she had always broken hearts so gently, and put away the pieces so daintily, that the owners of these hearts ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... and much more they surely can and will do for him, and if the pastor who thinks that he has no field or who is getting a bit weary or professional in the routine ministry to unromantic middle life could but behold within his parish, however small, this very essence of vital reality, this allurement of unbounded possibility, this challenge of a lively paganism, and this greatest single opportunity to bring in the Kingdom of God, ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... suited to Smollett's genius. The result is, that while uninteresting as a novel of contemporary manners, Fathom has an interest of its own in that it reveals a new side of its author. We think of Smollett, generally, as a rambling storyteller, a rational, unromantic man of the world, who fills his pages with his own oddly-metamorphosed acquaintances and experiences. The Smollett of Count Fathom, on the contrary, is rather a forerunner of the romantic school, who has created a tolerably organic tale of adventure out of his ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... descendants.[57] The tone of the memorials in which many Southern townsmen petitioned for legal exemptions to permit specified free negroes to remain in their communities[58] found no echo from the corresponding type of commonplace unromantic citizens of the North. A few Southern petitions were of a contrasting tenor, it is true, one for example presented to the city council of Atlanta in 1859: "We feel aggrieved as Southern citizens that your honorable body tolerates a negro dentist (Roderick Badger) ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... opinion, that there is nothing more dangerous than for a man almost to forget a lady who has shown him favor. If he can quite forget her—and will be so unromantic—why, let him, and perhaps small harm done. But almost—That leaves him at the mercy of every generous self-reproach. He is ready to do anything to prove that she was ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... Oh, you're so horribly unromantic! But, LAVENDER, couldn't we get one of those gondolas and go about. It would be so lovely to be in one again, and fancy ourselves back in dear ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... immediately behind, to seize and carry him to perdition. His impetuosity, however, was all in vain; not even an echo reverberated through the cold and empty walls, but, on the contrary, every peal was followed by a most unromantic and ominous silence. ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... scene in the tragic part of my unromantic experience. One of the artful dodgers, having transformed himself into an angel of light (in my hearing, not in my sight), informed me, at about eight o'clock in the evening, that, though my destruction appeared imminent, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... am, a lonely knight, eating a marvelously good dinner in enforced solitude, with a beautiful lady imprisoned in the upper rooms of the castle. In the rare old days I could go up and knock the jailers' heads together, break in the door, and bear the captive damsel away on my charger. But in this unromantic age I can't ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... orchestra in a boulevard theatre, and a music master in several young ladies' boarding-schools, a post for which his face particularly recommended him. He was entirely dependent upon his earnings. Running about to give private lessons at his age!—Think of it. How many a mystery lies in that unromantic situation! ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... course not." But the interior Tiffles was disappointed at this sudden and unromantic termination of his case. A few more nights in the station house, or in the Tombs, would have given him capital material for a book, of which he had already projected the first chapter. He sat down, and ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... curious, not unromantic feeling, that of wandering about a strange town at midnight, and the effect increases as, leaving the place, I turn down a little by-street—the Rue de Guise—closed at the end by a beautiful building or fragment, unmistakably ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... at him in wonder. If ever there was a man who seemed unromantic, it was he, heavy and prosaic and so shy that he was visibly agitated even in bowing to ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... she was never heard of again; at least, I never found out who she was. It was very funny and very unromantic; but it laid me up for a few weeks, and my arm doesn't grow strong as fast as it should, so I have to be careful of it. No swimming or golf for me, this year. Meanwhile, I am waiting to hear of a buxom damsel who lacks one skull and one white straw Knox hat, size six ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... novels that people are knocked down successfully and artistically," admitted the other. "In everyday life they resent it. Yes—if you do anything hysterical there will be some sort of a disgraceful noise, I suppose. It's shoot or suit in these unromantic days, Dysart, otherwise the newspapers laugh ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... without further ceremony, stretching out my arms and legs, lashed them to the topmast-rigging, making what is called a spread eagle of me. It was very humiliating, though my position was thus exalted, and very unromantic; and the rogue Jerry aggravated my feelings by pretending to pity me, though I guessed even then that he had arranged the plan beforehand with Yool and Cockle thus to entrap me. The seamen had descended towards the deck, leaving me bound in this ignominious ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... turned, by the next day's train, full of a sense of frustration; what an involved, unromantic, practical world we ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... of the nation's capital, and away from the sight of the marble dome, the great army and its faithful historians moved from sight, to the bloodiest contests of war. No more splendid pageants in the fields, but close, hard, unromantic destruction in the woods and among trenches and craters! One mind now directed all the movements of the many armies of the Union, making all the forces at the control of the nation into one mighty trip-hammer, for the crushing of Slavery's ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... He had changed his clothes, and appeared in his accustomed business suit; its neat creases and quiet colour made him again the responsible, unromantic lawyer I had known, and took away the last vestige of dramatic oddity from the situation. It all seemed natural ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... Rotterdam. We had all of us seen windmills before, but we never felt quite so intimately acquainted with any as with these. Don Quixote's was but a thing of the imagination, and Daudet's, in Provence, was but a dismantled, unlovely, and unromantic ruin. These windmills of Schiedam were very sturdy and practical things, broad of base and long of arm, and would work even in a fog, an ancient mariner-looking Dutchman with sabots and peg-top ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... than a cunt as I then understood it; as if her buttock parting was continued round towards her belly, and as unlike the young cunts I had seen as possible. Those seemed to be but little indents. That the delicate ladies of the novels should have such divisions seemed curious, ugly, and unromantic. My sensuous temperament was developing, I saw females in all their poetry and beauty, but suppose that my physical forces had not kept pace with my brain, for I have no recollection of a cock-stand, when thinking about ladies; and fucking never entered into my mind, either when I read novels, or ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... narrative could not be photographed, attempts being usually made in a light which required prolonged exposure. Efforts to touch it were failures, nor did it speak. On the other hand, it did lend itself, perhaps unconsciously, to one scientific experiment. The story is unromantic; the names are ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... to marry one particular woman and her alone; the sensual lover's dream embraces several women, or many. The unromantic ideal of the ancient Hindoo is romantically illustrated in a story told in the Hitopadesa of a Brahman named Wedasarman. One evening someone made him a present of a dish of barley-meal. He carried it to the market hall and lay down in a corner near where a potter had stored ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the scene of her unromantic martyrdom, and I made a feeble effort to shake the dew-drops from my mane, and, so to speak, look myself in the face. I must give this life over, I thought; and I will give it over; an I do not, I am a villain. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... is the grand point. Your character is now in my hands, and I shall take care of it; I shall see you a general officer yet, if you have not the greater luck to retire and live an honest farmer, sitting under your own fig-tree and your own vine, with an unromantic spouse, and some half-dozen of red-cheeked children. Farewell, we shall ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... morning—that sunrise of which poets write so sweetly, but which to the unromantic traveller is wont to seem a dreary thing—mother and nurse and child went their way in a great black steamer, redolent of oil and boiled mutton; and at nine o'clock at night—a starless March night—Clarissa and her belongings were deposited on ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... and the words "with you" formed themselves in my heart. I know not what folly I might have spoken had not the conversation been interrupted by Gazen, who called out in his unromantic style, ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... not a just criticism of mine. One part of the subject you have certainly omitted. You do not tell us how much there often is of physical disorder in despair. I dare say you will think it a coarse and unromantic mode of looking at things; but I must confess I agree with what Leigh Hunt has said somewhere, that one can walk down distress of mind—even ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... disposition towards those who had acquired any hold on his heart. A casket, which was for sale, being one day offered to him, he was not a little surprised on discovering them to be the same jewels which he had, not long before, presented to his fair favourite, and which had, by some unromantic means, found their way back into the market. Without enquiring, however, any further into the circumstances, he generously repurchased the casket and presented it to the lady once more, good-humouredly taxing her with the very little estimation in ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... age of the world, in affairs of the heart, an American does not look for rivalry that bears the suggestion of medieval romance. The situation savored too much of the story-books that are born of the days when knights held sway, to appeal natural in the eyes of an up-to-date, unromantic gentleman from New York, that city where love affairs adjust themselves without the ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... life. Pinches, buffets, the glow of hope, the shock of disappointment, furious contention with obstacles: these are the true elixir for all vital spirits, these are what they seek alike in their romantic enterprises and their unromantic dissipations. When they are taken in some pinch closer than the common, they cry, 'Catch me here again!' and sure enough you catch them there again—perhaps before the week is out. It is as old as Robinson Crusoe; as old as man. Our race has not been strained for all these ages ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... summon the vision of Honora, in rustling garments, poised as the figurehead of this craft, beckoning him on to battle and victory. Alas! the launching happened at that grimmest and most unromantic of hours-ten minutes of eight in the morning. There was a period, indeterminate, when she poured out his coffee with wifely zeal; a second period when she appeared at the foot of the stairs to kiss him as he was going out of the door; a third when, clad in an attractive dressing-gown, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... "Disagreeably unromantic, Louisa, is it not?" said Lord Delmont, laughing heartily; "but what was the poor man to do? Ellen was inexorable, and refused to bestow on him anything but ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... But she seemed unattuned, and coyly refrained from showing her face. He undertook to loiter gracefully, knowing himself to be the target of many eyes, but found it extremely hard to refrain from sitting on the curb, a manifestly unromantic attitude for a love-lorn swain. He swore grimly that, if usage required a suitor to make an exhibition of himself before the entire neighborhood, he would do the job thoroughly. It did not cheer him to reflect that the girl had a keen sense of humor and must be ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... of Spain was measureless; she desired not only the mastery of America and its riches, but the empire of the world, the leadership in commerce, and the ownership of the very gates of Heaven. England sought land and trade; she was practical and unromantic, but strong and daring; and in her people, unlike the Spanish, were implanted the seeds of human freedom. She had not as yet the prestige of Spain; but men like Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh went far to win it; moreover, the star of Spain had already begun to wane, while that ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... with the muscular exercise required, my strictest of vegetarian friends should permit us to bow in the House of Rimmon. One day while crossing a bay I noticed some seals popping up their heads out of the water beyond the ice edge. I had a fine leading dog bearing the unromantic name of Podge, and pure white in colour. But he was an excellent water dog, trained not only to go for birds, but to dive under water for sunken seals. Owing to their increasing fat in winter, seals as a rule float, ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... could not help owning that such a house in so remote a place might be a great convenience to visitors like herself. She took the matter quietly, however, returning Emily's gay look with one somewhat rueful, and saying, "Ah, dear girl, all very mundane and unromantic, but depend upon it the house has proved a blessing often to poor wanderers in bleak weather over these wild hills; and we ourselves may find it not so unpleasant by and by when Paul has spread our luncheon in the parlor, and we look ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... of these manuscript memorials of his practical studies and exercises, we have come upon some documents singularly in contrast with all that we have just cited, and, with his apparently unromantic character. In a word, there are evidences in his own handwriting, that, before he was fifteen years of age, he had conceived a passion for some unknown beauty, so serious as to disturb his otherwise well-regulated mind, and to make him really ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... song is the voice of emotion, it will of necessity vary with the emotion; and every one who has ears must have heard once in a while bird music of quite unusual fervor. For example, I have often seen the least flycatcher (a very unromantic-looking body, surely) when he was almost beside himself; flying in a circle, and repeating breathlessly his emphatic chebec. And once I found a wood pewee in a somewhat similar mood. He was more quiet than the least flycatcher; but he ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... rock, or fill our pages with the rest of the pedigree. Senefelder invented Lithography. His invention has not made so much noise and larum in the world as some others, which have an origin quite as humble and unromantic; but it is one to which we owe no small profit, and a great deal of pleasure; and, as such, we are bound to speak of it with all gratitude and respect. The schoolmaster, who is now abroad, has taught us, in our youth, how the cultivation ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of Christian fortitude exhibited by a very wealthy lady in the neighbourhood, who had also been recently widowed. 'That's all very well, ma'am,' said my old woman drily, 'but fat sorrow's a deal easier to bear than lean sorrow.' And though it may sound unromantic, it's the raw truth—only very few people are sincere enough ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... the commonplace and (to his mind) unromantic irritated him; but an instinct of good manners, that was not the least of his charm, compelled him to humour her. Once she sat for a whole hour in a dark cellar that smelt of tallow where a couple of men were engaged in making those enormous candles ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... breathed more freely. She began to wonder who her rescuer was and how he had come so opportunely to her relief. Their dramatic meeting invested him in her eyes with more interest than she would have found in any man whose acquaintance she had made in a more unromantic and conventional manner. And so she bestowed more attention on him and studied his appearance more closely than she would otherwise have done. He struck her at once as being exceedingly good looking in a strong and manly way. His profile showed clear-cut and regular features, with ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... I've a fancy for inditing; It shows the funny quarters in which chivalry may lodge, A story about Africa, and Englishmen, and fighting, And an unromantic hero by the name of ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto. It is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting, perhaps towards the middle and close of the meal, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... was contrary to Peg's nature. If she liked anyone, she never asked questions about them. It suggested a doubt, and doubt to Peg meant disloyalty in friendship and affection. Everyone had referred to this young gentleman as "Jerry." He even introduced himself by that unromantic and undignified name. No one seemed to treat him with any particular deference, nor did anything in his manner seem to demand it. She had imagined that anyone with a title should not only be proud of it, but would naturally hasten to let everyone they met become immediately ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... landscapes in general are, however, very strange; rather eccentric than natural in colour, yet preserving the intended atmospheric effect by an idealism of colouring not quite in keeping with the unromantic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... countenances of our companions, who fled from their Spanish venta to take refuge at the club the morning after our arrival, they may surely be thankful for being directed to the best house of accommodation in one of the most unromantic, ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the name of a very ordinary bird, but I, at least, will not be a party to it. I refuse to surrender the portcullis and the moat, the bastion and the well-manned towers, which were the features of every castle with which hitherto I have played, in order to take the field with allies so unromantic as a brace of rooks. You may tell me that "rook" is a corruption of this or that word, meaning something which has never laid an egg in its life. It may be so, but in that case you cannot blame me for continuing to call it the castle which ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... I have done nothing. I am only an unromantic gentleman, hiding from a romantic lady who is in love ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... Seven thousand a year—a place in the country—and a decent sort of girl, dropped down on me, as it were, from heaven! I hadn't the slightest idea of such luck—and hadn't any pretensions to it. But the girl has taken a liking to me, and her mother wants to get her married. It's ugly—unromantic—but there are the facts. If you cared for me really, I shouldn't think you would want to ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... without speaking. "But how did she go through it? How I should like to know all her love story!" thought Kitty, recalling the unromantic appearance of Alexey ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... came round, he used to stride up and down his room with much gnashing of teeth and other stage indications of distress, finally settling down into a chair before the table, on which he would place and replace a packet of letters and a wisp of unromantic-looking hair. Then he would take the little silver pistol from his breast, and, after the usual soliloquy of "To be or not to be," or something equally to the purpose, would point it at his temples just as the landlady came bursting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... been the beginning and middle of them—a perfectly quiet and everyday kind of vanity, but vain from centre to circumference and entire surface. He (one cannot exactly say "tries," but) is brought into the possibility of trying love of various kinds—illegitimate-romantic, legitimate-not-unromantic, illegitimate-professional but not disagreeable, illegitimate-conventional. Nothing ever "comes off" in a really satisfactory fashion. He is "exposed" (in the photographic-plate sense) to all, or nearly all, the influences of a young man's life in Paris—law, literature, art, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... direction from where flags are waving. If you could only deliberately arrange to do something that would lower your reputation in the eyes of gouty old gentlemen or mothers with marriageable daughters! If you could manage to get your nose broken, or elope with a chorus girl, or commit an unromantic murder, I should begin ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... first volume of the Athenaeum (1798) a place of honor was given to his group of apothegms, Pollen (rather an unromantic translation for "Bluethenstaub"); these were largely supplemented by materials found after his death, and republished as Fragments. In the last volume of the same journal (1800) appeared his Hymns to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... always made much of the nuns. It has ever been the custom of the priesthood to endeavor to throw a veil of romance over the very unromantic way of life followed by females who have shut themselves up for life in a place hardly equal to a second-class state-prison. Woman has an important place which God has assigned her in the world; but when she separates herself from the family circle, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... though?' asked Jacker McKnight dubiously. He had found his parents very unromantic people, who took a severely commonplace view of things, and retained unquestioning faith in the strap as a means ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... rest of the house, and that the convenience of its site enabled one on quitting it, to escape at once, and privately, either to the solitary beach, or to the glades and groves of the wide park which stretched behind,—I could not help indulging the belief that the unceremonious and not unromantic noble had himself selected his place of retirement, and that, in so doing, the gallant of a stately court was not perhaps undesirous of securing at well-chosen moments a brief relaxation from the heavy honours of country homage; or that the patron and poetic admirer of the dreaming Spenser ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the two speakers were hushed, or were replaced by the gentle but unromantic music of the nose; and save when the church bells tolled the hour and the watchman called it, all was silent at the house of John Sedley, Esquire, of Russell Square, and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... so unromantic, so unemotional, so utterly different from the scene she had pictured when she imagined what "breaking her engagement" would be like. Then she had always thought of herself as dissolving in tears on the horsehair sofa, which had become sacred to the tragedy of poor Jane; but, to her ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... I must draw my instances) the great change of the past century has been effected by the admission of detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on the novelist. For some time it signified and expressed a more ample contemplation of the conditions of man's life; but it has recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely technical ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unromantic name of the commonplace man over whose fifteen-year-old letters Rose had glowed and dreamed an hour before. It was a name that had become mythical in that household—to all but one. Rose heard it spoken now with a sense of unreality. She smiled a little uncertainly, ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... dignify with gilding our utterly respectable, our limp history? There is no margin to it for erudite annotations. Unromantic, unsensational, yet was the actual beginning emphasis by the thud of a bullet. To that noisy start of our quiet life I meander ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... productions, of no earthly interest to anyone but the unromantic writers, one formal note soliciting a generous subscription to an hospital fund, two postal cards, one begging his patronage towards the tailoring department of an up-town dry goods store, and the other notifying him of a meeting of prominent citizens to be ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... one more when we see him afterwards in the town, marching along with a flat-footed shambling tread, holding an umbrella in front of him in his clenched fist (as all french priests hold it),—a figure as unromantic-looking as ungraceful. ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... over nothing," said Mary Vance disdainfully as Jem dashed off. She was sitting out with Miller Douglas on a lobster trap which was not only an unromantic but an uncomfortable seat. But Mary and Miller were both supremely happy on it. Miller Douglas was a big, strapping, uncouth lad, who thought Mary Vance's tongue uncommonly gifted and Mary Vance's white eyes stars of the first magnitude; and neither of them had ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... through a certain unromantic yearning for oats under his loosening girth, the stallion Sooltan raced Damaris back to ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... the great satisfaction of her father and to the great indignation of her mother, the rector of Hunsford lost no time in betaking himself to Elizabeth's dearest friend, Charlotte Lucas, who, being a girl with unromantic, not to say prosaic, views of marriage, readily accepted and married him, thereby moving to further disgust and anger poor Mrs. Bennet, who was already wondering and repining at Mr. Bingley's returning no more into Hertfordshire. Jane suffered in silence, and despite Elizabeth's efforts to point ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... indeed, it has not already passed away; and with it we are losing one of the most ennobling qualities in our nature. We pride ourselves nowadays in living in a 'matter-of-fact' age, by which we mean a practical, unromantic age. But is it a matter for so much pride after all? Granted that the benefits which have accrued to mankind during the past century and a half are worth all the Romance in the world; but is the relegation of Romance to the domain ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... eccentricities of Stephane's conduct, certain salient points in his character, the passionate ABANDON of his language; his face, his hair, his glances, the charm of his smile; how was it that so many of his indications had escaped him? And this want of penetration which resulted from the rather unromantic character of his mind, he attributed to bluntness of sensibility and charged himself with it as a crime. He was profoundly absorbed in his reverie when the cry of a raven aroused him. He opened his eyes, and when he ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... come on Snow White and her seven dwarfs, that is only because you must have taken the wrong turning after you came through the kissing-gate at the bottom of Lovers' Lane. I am a native of Cotterham, and in my more reflective moments I wonder why such an idyllic place should have produced anything so unromantic as myself, His Majesty's Deputy Assistant Acting Inspector for All Sorts of Unexpected Explosives. Cotterham still has a large place in my affections, and it gave me a considerable shock the other day to get a letter from the Squire, who is an old friend, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... them. Even William, the bell-ringer and purveyor of hot batter-cakes at Mrs. Haley's hotel, walked to the railroad station to see them safely off. General Garwood accompanied them to Atlanta; and though the passenger depot in that pushing city is perhaps the most unromantic spot to be found in the wide world—it is known as the "Car-shed" in Atlantese—it was there that he found courage to inform Miss Eustis that he purposed to visit Boston during the summer in search not only of health, but of happiness; and Miss ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... Peregrine's proposals having been announced, the daughter suddenly withdrew from the father's roof, and fled to the lodgings of Sir Peregrine, who instantly retired to other quarters. The upshot of the whole thing, at once romantic and unromantic, included a marriage and a reconciliation, and eventually a Lieutenant- Governorship for the son-in-law, under the Governorship-in-Chief of the father, both despatched together to undertake the discharge of vice-regal functions ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... Grace, pausing in the act of applying still more powder to the tip of her nose and regarding the Little Captain with a horrified expression, "why drag the mention of such unromantic things ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... the road. Nor was the merchant any less heavy in mind than in body, for he was both very rich and very serious, and nothing is more ponderous than a rich, fat man who takes his riches and his fatness seriously. In disposition Don Mario was practical and unromantic; he boasted that he had never had an illusion, never an interest outside of his business. And yet, on the day this story opens, this prosaic personage, in spite of his bulging waistband and his taut neckband, in spite ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... for a recent trial, who of the outside public would even have guessed that the unromantic and quite Bozzian name of "Mr. and Mrs. TILKINS" meant the clever musician, Mr. IVAN CARTEL and the charming and accomplished actress and soprano, Miss GERALDINE ULMAR? The TILKINSES are to be congratulated on their winning the recent action of Tilkins v. Greaves with the award of one thousand ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... been fine upon the whole, and a very fair quantity of fish brought in, Miss Twemlow had picked up a sweetheart, as the unromantic mothers of the place expressed it. And the circumstances were of such a nature that very large interest was aroused at once, and not only so, but was fed well and ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... untiring faculty for taking infinite pains over his work, Derrick did not break down, but pleasantly cheated my expectations. I was not called on to nurse him through a fever, and consumption did not mark him for her own. In fact, in the matter of illness, he was always a most prosaic, unromantic fellow, and never indulged in any of the euphonious and interesting ailments. In all his life, I believe, he never went in for anything but the mumps—of all complaints the least interesting—and, may be, an ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... table the feast drew to its close, and very different was the mood of the feasters from that of the young woman whose glance had for a moment rested on their unromantic heads. Generations of undergraduates had said that Oxford would be all very well but for the dons. Do you suppose that the dons had had no answering sentiment? Youth is a very good thing to possess, no doubt; but it is a tiresome setting for maturity. Youth all around prancing, vociferating, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... you talk of that so soon? Why, Kit, you unromantic girl, you ought to be thinking of your lover and not your clothes," said Rose, amused yet rather scandalized ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... from introducing such an episode by a strong conviction that it does not usually occur at such times. And I trust that my fairest reader, who remembers that, in a real crisis, it is always some uninteresting stranger or unromantic policeman, and not Adolphus, who ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... heedlessly on my desk was—what should it be but the little morocco case, empty now, in which our Francesca keeps her dead mother's engagement ring,—the mother who died when she was a wee child. Truly a very pretty modern ballad to be sung in these unromantic, ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Arctic pans and hummocks; and the broken field and wash of the sea beyond the lesser island of the Spotted Horses. And he knew, too, the issue of the disappearance of the moon, the desperate plight into which the sluggish bank of black cloud might plunge a man. As a matter of unromantic fact he desired greatly to decline a passage ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... believe it, too? It would be monstrous—disloyal and unromantic not to. I won't listen to a word more on that score, please. And the rest follows, doesn't it? We are marrying because we love each other and believe we can help each other, and I am sure one of the reasons why we love each other is that we both have enthusiasm and find life intensely absorbing ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... gleaming white Mission, as when we beached our boats for the first time, riding over the breakers with shouting Kanakas, the three small hide-traders lying at anchor in the offing. But now we are the only vessel, and that an unromantic, sail-less, spar-less, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... before, marked her very evident confusion and leaped to instant comprehension. So this was the cause of Noel's reticence! She shook hands with Max with a very decided sense of disappointment, resenting his intrusion on Noel's behalf, and with womanly criticism marvelling that this thick-set unromantic Englishman could ever have held the girl's fancy when Noel, the handsomest officer in the district, had been so obviously at ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... of the little one's diet were useless. Indigestion was unromantic (in the mother's judgment), and "nerves" ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... sound, sterling; unsophisticated, unadulterated, unvarnished, unalloyed, uncolored; in its true colors; pukka^. well-grounded, well founded; solid, substantial, tangible, valid; undistorted, undisguised; unaffected, unexaggerated, unromantic, unflattering. Adv. truly &c adj.; verily, indeed, really, in reality; with truth &c (veracity) 543; certainly &c (certain) 474; actually &c (existence) 1; in effect &c (intrinsically) 5. exactly ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Unromantic enough, but beyond all conception wonderful. I stood at the east end of Bourke Street, not a year ago, looking at the black swarming masses, which thronged the broad thoroughfare below. All the ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... the teeth of an explicit presbyterial anathema, and again in the same year—in the month of August—the boys of the Burgh School of Kirkcaldy, which Smith was at the time attending, enacted the piece their master had written. It bore the rather unromantic and uninviting title of "A Royal Council for Advice, or the Regular Education of Boys the Foundation of all other Improvements." The dramatis personae were first the master and twelve ordinary members of the council, who sat gravely round a table like senators, and next a ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... bills, to depend for protection upon a policeman, was intolerable. He lived in a world of his own imagining. And one day, in order to make his imaginings real, and to escape from his father-in-law's unromantic world of Standard Oil and Florida hotels, in a proclamation to the powers he announced himself as King James the First of the ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... me go on, Guy, for you must allow that it was much worse in such a grave, grand, unromantic person, who makes a point of thinking before he speaks, than if it had been a hasty, hand-over-head man like Maurice de Courcy, who might have got into ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the mouth of the tunnel. The popular commonplace that science, steam, and travel must always be unromantic and hideous, was not proven at this spot. On either slope of the deep cutting, green with long grass, grew drooping young trees of ash, beech, and other flexible varieties, their foliage almost concealing the actual railway which ran along the bottom, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... excitement. He held the hands tighter, and the movement drew the girl closer to him, until for no more than a breath he felt her against his breast. In that moment he forgot all sense of time and place; forgot his old self—Jack Howland—practical, unromantic, master-builder of railroads; forgot everything but this presence of the girl, the warm pressure against his breast, the lure of the great brown eyes that had come so unexpectedly into his life. In another moment he ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... was seeing those two in the new light of this letter. So they were really lovers, the drab, unromantic, plain, dull, middle-aged souls! What had they seen in one another? What had they felt, to drive them to deeds so desperate, yes, and so absurd? Was there then a world right outside his ken, a world from which he had been since his ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... know him and I don't, but that's how it strikes a stranger." He turned on his heel and paced the veranda thoughtfully. "And, after all, the burden of the actual, daily unromantic toil falls on the shoulders of the men out here, and not on his own. He enjoys all the privileges of recommendation without responsibility, and we—well, perhaps, when you've seen a little more of India you'll understand. To begin with, our death rate's five times higher ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... for long and heavy mushing. Beside it slouched West, head down, hands tied behind his back, the eyes from the matted face sending sidling messages of hate at the capering crowd. At his heels moved Morse, grim and tireless, an unromantic figure of ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... and it is to be feared that even good women love to triumph over others. She, of course, could have no love for this portly old gentleman of seventy. But it is pitiful to think he was madly infatuated. The poor old man, in spite of his unromantic appearance, had warm blood in his veins and plenty of romance in his heart. At last, in spite of gossip and opposition, they were married, and then, instead of settling down, as the happy groom had hoped, to a life of wedded ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... to America and his home in 1900 was, in the unromantic procedure of our self-conscious days, of the nature of a triumph. He was formally welcomed by the Lotus Club, and, of course, as delicately as might be, he was praised for his honesty. His reply to compliment was a generous ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... them down to the dining-hall. The meal had been delayed half an hour on account of the tournament, so preparation followed immediately afterwards, and Lindsay and Cicely were obliged, with their thoughts still running on possible tragedies, to endeavour to apply their minds to the unromantic details of parsing. ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil |
