"Inappropriate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mountains, otherwise named "Magaliesberg". These are not to be counfounded with the Cape colonists, who sometimes pass by the name. The word Boer simply means "farmer", and is not synonymous with our word boor. Indeed, to the Boers generally the latter term would be quite inappropriate, for they are a sober, industrious, and most hospitable body of peasantry. Those, however, who have fled from English law on various pretexts, and have been joined by English deserters and every other variety of bad character ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... may be innocent,—that is to say, when they are extremely young. Of course they outgrow it when they arrive at years of flirtation; but up to—say—their tenth or eleventh year, they rarely go in for muddy boots and inappropriate peanuts,—at least not to the same extent as boys. The average little girl is, moreover, seldom found at the CIRCUS. She prefers WALLACK'S, or BOOTH'S theatre,—whereas your usual boy despises the legitimate drama, and prefers to have his dissipations served up with a great deal of horse and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... States are not unfrequently spoken of as a "new country," in terms which would be appropriate if applied to Australia or New Zealand, and which are not inappropriate as applied to the vast region west of the Mississippi River, where the white man had hardly set foot before the beginning of the present century. New England, however, has a history which carries us back to the times of James I.; and while its cities are full of such bustling ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... "the true Church" were regarded as identical conceptions. In this way the concept "Catholic" became a pregnant one, and finally received a dogmatic and political content. As this result actually took place, it is not inappropriate to speak ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... not be inappropriate to mention here, in reference to the minuteness attainable by paper negatives, that a railway notice of six lines is perfectly legible, and even the erasure for a new secretary's name is discernible in the accompanying ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... of a man who has done a questionable act: "His intentions were good," or, "His motives were good." Still, popular usage does not always regard the two expressions as equivalent. To revert to the case of the unhappy Flex. It does not seem inappropriate to say that the use of a man as a stepping- stone was a part of his master's intention. It does appear inappropriate to call it the motive or a part of the ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... as she placed the glass before him, received the silver dime in payment, and for the third time looked into his eyes. Her vocabulary was limited, and she knew little of the worth of words; but the strong masculinity of his boy's face told her that the term was inappropriate. ...
— The Game • Jack London
... the excellent taste he had shown in falling in love with her. Round this bright young creature (Owen, at the foot of the table, and Morgan and I on either side) sat her three wrinkled, gray-headed, dingily-attired hosts, and just behind her, in still more inappropriate companionship, towered the spectral figure of the man in armor, which had so unaccountably attracted her on her arrival. This strange scene was lighted up by candles in high and heavy brass sconces. Before Jessie stood a mighty china punch-bowl of the olden time, ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... you are fighting. That eternal principle censors out all the objections, isolates the issue from its background and its context, and sets going in you some strong emotion, appropriate enough to the principle, highly inappropriate to the docks, warehouses, and real estate. And having started in that mood you cannot stop. A real danger exists. To meet it you have to invoke more absolute principles in order to defend what is open to attack. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... six volumes, covering the years 1865-66. The review was then made a monthly without, however, changing its now inappropriate name, and the editorship was accepted by Mr. John Morley, who conducted the Fortnightly with great success for sixteen years. Most of the earlier contributors were retained; others like Mr. Swinburne, J.A. Symonds, Professor Edward Dowden and (Sir) Leslie Stephen ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... names, on this 24th day of June, 1698." Then follow the signatures of Sister Assumption, superior, Sister St. Ange, assistant, Sister Lemoine, mistress of novices, Margaret Bourgeois, and others then assembled, to the number of twenty-five persons. It may not be inappropriate to say a few words in explanation of the austerities that were mitigated by the wise prelate, the observance of which he and others considered too severe, and the non-observance of which the mortified and penitential Foundress regarded as a relaxation. The ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... a jolly party all in deep evening dress which I thought was rather inappropriate. Mrs. Vernon Bale dropped her side comb into the chop suey which occasioned much laughter—Jeffery was very tiresome and refused to be impressed, saying repeatedly that he'd seen ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... from the society in which he happened to be. He was nothing but a chattel, subject to the will of his owner, and unprotected in his rights by the law of the State where he happened to live. His rights, did I say? No, sir, I use inappropriate language. He had no rights; he was an animal; he was property, a chattel. The Almighty, according to the ideas of the times, had made him to be property, a Chattel, and ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... found in the present form of many of our ballads may be the survival of a survival from those primitive iterations. The "Blaw, blaw, blaw winds, blaw" of The Elfin Knight is not, in this instance, inappropriate to the theme, yet we can almost hear shrilling through it a far cry from days when men called directly upon the powers of nature. Such refrains as "Binnorie, O Binnorie," "Jennifer gentle an' rosemaree," "Down, a down, a down, a down," have ancient secrets in them, had we ears ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... Waking Up" is not inappropriate therefore as the title of the book now offered to the public. The reader will kindly observe here that I have written of where half the world is waking up and not merely of the waking-up itself. My purpose has been to set forth the old and the new in due proportion; to present the ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... inappropriate in a brief sketch, to refer to and narrate incidents of boyhood days, and they are therefore passed over. Mr. Backus, while in early youth, became possessed of an unconquerable desire for knowledge, and while laboring ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... between them had become uncomfortable—inappropriate; and Harboro put a gentle arm about her and drew her closer to him. "Sit down by ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... this chapter some remarks regarding the authority and method of Christian Ethics may be not inappropriate. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the rest of the community. At the court in question a Gipsy woman named Emma Barney was brought to task for 'imposing by subtle craft to extort money' from a Bournemouth shopkeeper named Richard Oliver. It seems that Oliver is troubled with pimples on his face, and that Emma Barney—not an inappropriate name, by the way—said she could cure these by means of a certain herb, the name of which she would divulge 'for a consideration.' Before doing so, however, she required Richard's coat and waistcoat, and ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... called the curraleiro or "stable horse," bred in the north of the State, especially in the valley of Paranan, bordering upon Minas and Bahia. The curraleiro was also known as cavallo sertanejo or "horse of the jungle"—two most inappropriate names, for it was, accurately speaking, neither one nor ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... greatness, he himself was disposed, at any rate during his earlier philosophical development, to exaggerate his indebtedness to the philosopher Descartes, whose system he laboriously abridged in the inappropriate form of a series of propositions supposed to be demonstrated after ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... silhouetted against the background of the 19th century's dress is its hard, shiny, black head-gear. It is without a parallel. It is impossible for us to conceive of a similar article surviving for so long a period; and I venture to say, versed as I am in the science, nothing more absurd and irredeemably inappropriate, or more openly violating in texture and contour every rational idea on the subject, was ever launched. In 1962 the neck was left bare, in the neglige fashion, in imitation of Butts, the aesthete ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... as I could, I left. The next day there was a funeral, and little Nelly was what they called "the chief mourner;" yet it seemed a very inappropriate name for one whose sorrow was so cheerful. There were but few of us who followed; and, when we reached the grave, and the face of the earthly form was exposed to the sunlight for the last time, little Nelly sung the following lines, which I had ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... are not presented in logical order, but seem to fall out promiscuously, and fairly represent the condition of a disordered brain. Attempts at joking are generally failures, as the jest is sure to be inappropriate or vulgar, and no one but himself sees any occasion for laughter except at his stupidity. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... less known or newer variety. If the name has reference to the colour of the foliage, it is not inappropriate. The bold leaves are a dark green, shading to a bronze, then a purple, the whole having a soft downy effect. It is a ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... the banished Kent, so disguised that Lear does not recognize him, presents himself to Lear, who is already staying with Goneril. Lear asks who he is, to which Kent answers, one doesn't know why, in a tone quite inappropriate to his position: "A very honest-hearted fellow and as poor as the King."—"If thou be as poor for a subject as he is for a King, thou art poor enough—How old art thou?" asks the King. "Not so young, Sir, to love a woman, etc., nor so old to dote on her." ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... quieter—better taste.' He did not care for dogs, or he would have named them; and it was in desperation at last—for his knowledge of charities was limited—that he decided on the blind. That could not be inappropriate, and it would make the Jury assess the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... herself had bestowed the name of Scrooge on the successful draper, to whom, as far as his personal appearance went, it was absurdly inappropriate. ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... think it necessary to make this latter observation because the succession of short-lived gales and squalls which have been prominently and unavoidably brought forward in our tale might lead the reader to deem the name of this ocean inappropriate. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... as he scrawled the signature which pledged him so irretrievably to battle. He felt that his autograph to such a missive was distinctly inappropriate, and invited sure calamity. Ham, however, only nodded approval as he commanded, "When you take the bucket up, lay that on his desk and be sure ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... agencies that they would perhaps render a very substantial and timely service to the country if they would give it widespread repetition. And I hope that clergymen will not think the theme of it an unworthy or inappropriate subject of comment and homily ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... Herein Aunt Jane gave utterance to a fact that was beginning to be generally acknowledged. Whatever Archibald had lost, it was beyond dispute that he had somehow come into possession of a fund of native intelligence (the term "mother wit" seems inappropriate under the circumstances) to which he had heretofore been a stranger. He might have forgotten his own name, and the mother that bore him; but he had learned how to learn, and was for the first time in his life wide awake. This was very much ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... letter—that any reasonable reader could possibly attach a scriptural reference to a passage in a book of mine, reproducing a much abused social figure of speech, impressed into all sorts of service on all sorts of inappropriate occasions, without the faintest connexion of it with its original source. I am truly shocked to find that any reader can make ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... Gregory, they found the country of a more arid nature. They ascended the main range, and on the 21st of December, Landsborough found an inland river flowing south, which he named the Herbert. The Queensland authorities subsequently re-christened the stream with the singularly inappropriate name of Georgina. In this river two fine sheets of water were found, and called Lake Frances and Lake Mary. An ineffectual attempt was then made to go westward, but lack of water compelled them ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... session of Congress, on the subject of Indian affairs, have introduced important changes into those relations. Many of the provisions of former laws had become inappropriate or inadequate, and not suited to the changes which time and circumstances had made. In the act regulating the intercourse with the various tribes, the principles of intercommunication with them are laid down, and the necessary details provided. ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... the various Italian varnishes may not be inappropriate. The Brescian is mostly of a rich brown colour and soft texture, but not so clear as the Cremonese. The Cremonese is of various shades, the early instruments of the school being chiefly amber-coloured, afterwards deepening into a light red of charming appearance, ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... of his article, the writer should eliminate (1) superfluous words, (2) trite phrases, (3) general, colorless words, (4) terms unfamiliar to the average reader, unless they are explained, (5) words with a connotation inappropriate to the context, (6) hackneyed and mixed metaphors. The effectiveness of the expression may often be strengthened by the addition of specific, picture-making, imitative, and connotative words, as well ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... view, they are in great part in false taste, and injure the beauty of the girls," said I. "They are inappropriate to their characters, and make them look like a kind and class of women whom they do not, and I trust never will, resemble internally, and whose mark therefore they ought not to bear externally. But there you ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... thus evident that Falieri was not a man used to the position of a lay figure, although at seventy-six the dignified retirement of a throne, even when so encircled with restrictions, would seem not inappropriate. That he was of a haughty and hasty temper seems apparent. It is told of him that, after waiting long for a bishop to head a procession at Treviso where he was podesta ("chief magistrate"), he astonished the tardy prelate by a box on the ear when he ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... sight of Hans, a finger-post pointing to ways long since traversed, could not reconcile the soldier to his surroundings; the humor of the burnt-cork artist seemed inappropriate to the place; his grotesque dancing inadmissible in that atmosphere once consecrated to the comedy of manners and the stately march of the classic drama. Where Hamlet had moralized, a loutish clown now beguiled the time ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... something of deformity; but yet with an elfin look of shrewd, hard, worldly wisdom in his face that marred the impression which his delicate regular little features would otherwise have conveyed. Indeed, I do not think he was quite of equal rank with the rest of the company, for his dress was inappropriate to the occasion (and he apparently was an invited, while I was an involuntary guest); and one or two of his gestures and actions were more like the tricks of an uneducated rustic than anything else. To explain what I mean: his boots had ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... these so-called grey areas involving non-traditional Operations Other Than War (OOTW) and law enforcement tasks are growing and pose difficult problems and challenges to American military forces, especially when and where the use of force may be inappropriate or simply may not work. The expansion of the role of UN forces to nation-building in Somalia and its subsequent failure comes to mind as an example of this danger. It is also arguable that the formidable nature and huge technological lead of ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... "Hello," "Heep, heep, hourrah," "Good morning," "How are you, keed?" and "Cock-tails for two." Some of the expressions were not so inappropriate as they sounded. ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... to the Grey Sisters, such scenes being inappropriate to her mourning, and besides her apartments being needed for the influx of guests. There, in early morning, before the revels began, Grisell ventured to ask for an audience, and was permitted to follow the Duchess when she returned from ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... William Gardiner, now venerable but surviving by true merit, is not unlike "Azmon" in movement and character. Though less closely associated with the hymn, as a companion melody it is not inappropriate. But whatever the range of vocalization or the dignity of swells and cadences, a slow pace of single semibreves or quarters is not suited to Wesley's hymns. They ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... Alley, had revenged himself on Bill and all the rest of this by stealing apples from the front of the store and calling, "Dirty Dutchman"—a singularly inappropriate epithet—at Mr. Schmitt. But he realized now that Mr. Schmitt had been a kind and hospitable man, a much better husband and father than poor Bill Slade, senior, had ever been, and an extremely good friend to lucky ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... lives almost entirely among the branches of the trees. In shape it is somewhat like a weasel, and is the largest of the tree martens. It is known as the wood-shock or pekan, and is also called the black cat, and fisher. This last term is inappropriate, as it is not in any way piscivorous. It is of a dark brown hue, with a line of black shining hair reaching from the neck to the extremity of the tail. The under parts are lighter; some entirely white. It possesses also a very large, full, and ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... seeing rather than hearing, for she was in much awe of him, blushed more than she spoke, and seemed taken up by the fear of doing something inappropriate, constantly turning wistful inquiring looks towards her husband, to seek encouragement or direction, but it was a becoming confusion, and by no means lessened the ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be inappropriate or unpleasing to you should I state in a very simple manner the history of my relation to the return of this book, for it all has occurred ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... confusion of Scotch theology. Peter, I knew, had been active as a missionary among the Red Men in Canada; but I had neither heard of his death nor could conceive how his shade had found its way into a paradise so inappropriate as that in which I encountered him. Though never very fond of Peter, my heart warmed to him, as the heart sometimes does to an acquaintance unexpectedly met in a strange land. Coming cautiously ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... may not be inappropriate to remark, that circumstances have combined to secure to the author some qualifications for the preparation of a work of this kind, which are not common to writers in the English language. A residence of several years in early life in Russia, first in the southern provinces, and afterwards ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... so much in accord with modern demands for greater accuracy in diagnosis that it seems not inappropriate to talk of it as the first definite attempt at laboratory methods in the department of medicine. The maker of the suggestion, curiously enough, was not a practising physician, but a mathematician and scholar, Cardinal Nicholas ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... a great difference in opinion regarding the advisability of telling fairy stories to very young children, and there can be no question that some of them are entirely undesirable and inappropriate. Those containing a fierce or horrible element must, of course, be promptly ruled out of court, including the "bluggy" tales of cruel stepmothers, ferocious giants and ogres, which fill the so-called fairy literature. Yet those which are pure in tone and gay with fanciful ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... interior, the finest part of the church, reminds one irresistibly of a good puzzle badly put together. The weak tower is a sufficient excuse for the absence of the other; from the tower the roof slopes sharply and unreasonably, and the rose-window is perched, with inappropriate jauntiness, to the left of the main portal. The whole structure is not so much the vagary of an architect as the sport of Fate, the self-evident survival of two unfitting facades. Walking through narrow streets, one comes ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... source of stimulation, and the acuteness and pleasantness of this determine to a great extent the character and sweep of the associations that will be aroused. Very often the pleasantness of the medium will counterbalance the disagreeableness of the import, and expressions, in themselves hideous or inappropriate, may be excused for the sake of the object that conveys them. A beautiful voice will redeem a vulgar song, a beautiful colour and texture an unmeaning composition. Beauty in the first term — beauty of sound, rhythm, and image — will make any thought whatever poetic, while no thought ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... when he lay in prison, his old body weak with many infirmities, and his old spirit still scheming and hoping for the reprieve that did not come. On April 9th he was executed on Tower Hill. His latest words were grotesquely inappropriate to his evil life. With his lying lips he repeated the famous line from Horace, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," and with that lie on his lips he knelt before the block and had his head cut off at one stroke. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... her soul he had never really known when her body left off being lanky and freckled. He saw it now, however; he would have been blind if he had not; and it set him vibrating with the throb of a new responsibility. Mrs. Pearce saw it too, and stared astonished at this oddly inappropriate niece. She stared still more when Fritzing, jumping up from his chair, bent over the hand Priscilla held out and kissed it with a devotion and respect wholly absent from the manner of Mrs. Pearce's own uncles. She, ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... she meets, who happens to be none other than Geronte himself, the deceit practised upon him by Scapin. The farce of the sack into which Scapin makes Geronte to crawl, then bears him off, and cudgels him as if by the hand of strangers, is altogether a most inappropriate excrescence. Boileau was therefore well warranted in reproaching Molire with having shamelessly allied Terence to Taburin, (the merry-andrew of a mountebank). In reality, Molire has here for once borrowed, not, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... It is far better that they should be hanged, because nobody knows where violence ends and insanity begins, and it is just as well to be on the safe side. Whenever a given form of intellect happens to be joined to a totally inappropriate temperament, we say it is a case of idiocy or insanity. Of course there are many other cases which arise from the mind or the body being injured by extraneous causes; but they are not genuine cases of insanity, because the evil has not been transmitted ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... made in the housekeeper's room, is to reduce the most social and friendly of ceremonies to a formal giving out of rations. Better the pretty influence of the tea cups and saucers gracefully wielded in a woman's hand than all the inappropriate power snatched at the point of the pen from the unwilling sterner sex. Imagine all the women of England elevated to the high level of masculine intellectuality, superior to crinoline; above pearl powder and Mrs. Rachael Levison; above taking the pains to be pretty; above tea-tables and that cruelly ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... whether, apart from the 1972 Act, the applicants could have obtained relief by any of the proceedings mentioned. The Commission having ceased to exist, it would be too late to apply for prohibition or an injunction against the first respondent and mandamus would also be inappropriate. The decision of this Court in Reynolds v. Attorney-General (1909) 29 N.Z.L.R. 24, 37-38, suggests that once the report has been forwarded to the Governor-General it may be permanently beyond the reach of certiorari; this is perhaps a corollary of the view, ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... thermometer in her hand-bag. She had it by her and rose to put it under his tongue. He struck it from her, and she stared at him. He stood quivering like an overdriven horse. He called her a name highly proper in a kennel club, but inappropriate to the boudoir. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... the handsome but exaggerated and inappropriate Government buildings not yet finished, there are few "imposing edifices" here. The tasteful but temporary English Cathedral, the Kaiwaiaho Church, diminished once to suit a dwindled population, but already ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... of Inappropriate Trailers on Unsuitable Occasions: By their very nature, trailers are difficult to censor adequately and, because of their origin and intent, are designed to have an exaggerated impact upon audiences. Trailers of the worst type, however, are sometimes shown at special ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... sally of our fleet is not war. Because of our civilian population we cannot make war on Mekin! The defiance of our fleet will be a gesture only—a splendid gesture, but no more. It should be a dignified gesture. It would be most inappropriate for our fleet to take to space, ostensibly to say that it prefers death to surrender, and for it then to unveil a new and eccentric device which would say that the fleet was foolish enough to hope that a gadget would save it from dying and Kandar from conquest. The fleet action should be ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the ballad of Young Beichan (E), and partly into Jamie Douglas. Thus Scott did not MAKE the stanza, and we cannot suppose that, if he knew the stanza in any form, he either "accidentally pitchforked" or wilfully inserted into Jamie Telfer anything so absurdly inappropriate. The inference is that Scott worked on another copy, not ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... 'I have heard you without interruption. But the character you rehearse is inappropriate. You forget that we are now concerned with a piece representing the tribulations of a faithful wife, and not a comedy of the school of Charles the Second. I see that you are sincere; but sincerity renders a bad passion the more hateful. Now leave me. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a wildly inappropriate desire to seize her, crush her in my arms, taste the red honey of that teasing mouth. The effort of mastering the ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... innocent-looking dear slily came up beside me, and, taking my hand, pressed it amorously, stealing at me a look with eyes swimming with a strange expression. This by-play decided the business. The agreement was made, the terms being left entirely to Mr Tapes. Covering my inappropriate dress with my blue surtout, I was about leaving with my messmate, when the young lady said to her father, "Perhaps Mr Rattlin would like to see his room ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... its pristine symmetry and beauty, yet we can at least discern and trace the ground plan and outlines of the fane it raised to God. Before leaving the field to the richer returns of more fortunate workmen, it will not be inappropriate to add a sketch of the ministers of these religions, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... the progress of Science is given before a conference concerned largely with historical subjects, it is not inappropriate to point out that Science has a history of its own and that its progress makes a connected story. The discovery of new facts is not made in an isolated fashion, nor is it a matter of pure chance, unaffected by what has gone before. On the contrary, scientific progress ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... would contradict its purpose; but the Greek architects of Ephesus not only placed their columns on pedestals (making them so far less stable in appearance), but they adorned the lower part of their Ionic columns with figures, of admirable execution, but perfectly inappropriate in the position they occupy. One cannot imagine Pheidias making a mistake such as this. Splendid in execution as Hellenistic sculpture often was, it won its place at the expense of architecture; one looks in vain ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... half-natural, half-affected, wholly nestling and agreeable manner, on the great rugged figure of the Carrier. It was pleasant to see him, with his tender awkwardness, endeavouring to adapt his rude support to her slight need, and make his burly middle age a leaning-staff not inappropriate to her blooming youth. It was pleasant to observe how Tilly Slowboy, waiting in the background for the baby, took special cognizance (though in her earliest teens) of this grouping; and stood with her mouth and eyes wide open, and her head thrust forward, taking it in ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... under the pretence of worship. Nor would the saying fit into the facts of the case if we gave it that low meaning, for no person had his residence in the temple. And what follows in the next verse would, on that hypothesis, be entirely inappropriate. 'In the secret of His tabernacle shall He hide me.' No one went into the secret place of the Most High, in the visible, material structure, except the high priest once a year. But this singer expects that his ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... left over. The presence of a person of his own sort, a fellow citizen of his own period, wearing its clothes, speaking its speech, would have broken the charm, would have seemed as undesirable and as inappropriate as the introduction of an English meadow into ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... summer-house. The bench was narrow, hard, and broken; and there were some snails which discomposed her;—but, nevertheless, she would make the best of it. Her darling "Queen Mab" must be read without the coarse, inappropriate, every-day surroundings of a drawing-room; and it was now manifest to her that, unless she could get up much earlier in the morning, or come out to her reading after sunset, the knob of rock would ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... "that Frederick will think so too. It would be too painful to dash the cup of half-holiday joy from a boy's lips by wearing an inappropriate hat." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... certainly one of the party, and probably more than one, thought that Bleeding Heart Yard was no inappropriate destination for a man who had been in official correspondence with my lords and the Barnacles—and perhaps had a misgiving also that Britannia herself might come to look for lodgings in Bleeding Heart Yard some ugly day or other, if ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... speeches and with high astounding terms. It was played upon a platform, and had to appeal more to the ears of the audience than to their eyes. Spectacular elements it had to some extent,—gaudy, though inappropriate, costumes, and stately processions across the stage; but no careful imitation of the actual facts of life, no illusion of reality in the ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... miscalled the temple of Jupiter Stator), is a typical example of Roman architectural decoration, in which richness was preferred to the subtler refinements of design (see Fig. 44). The splendid figure-sculpture which adorned the Greek monuments would have been inappropriate on the theatres and therm of Rome or the provinces, even had there been the taste or the skill to produce it. Conventional carved ornament was substituted in its place, and developed into a splendid system of highly decorative forms. Two principal elements ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... Marjorie Butler spied them, and, coming up, insisted upon reading aloud to them a letter she had received that morning from a sailor cousin. Would she never go away? It was too tiresome of her to confide in them at such an inappropriate time. ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... and sweeping curve across the sky and came nearer and nearer to MacIan, like a steam-engine coming round a bend. It was of pure white steel, and in the moon it gleamed like the armour of Sir Galahad. The simile of such virginity is not inappropriate; for, as it grew larger and larger and lower and lower, Evan saw that the only figure in it was robed in white from head to foot and crowned with snow-white hair, on which the moonshine lay like a benediction. The figure ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... to use an inappropriate word, and say, the superb ease with which He grappled with, and overcame, all types of disease is a revelation on a lower level of the inexhaustible and all-sufficient fullness of His healing power. He can cope with all sin-the world's sin, and the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... mind.—Most persons, whilst blushing intensely, have their mental powers confused. This is recognized in such common expressions as "she was covered with confusion." Persons in this condition lose their presence of mind, and utter singularly inappropriate remarks. They are often much distressed, stammer, and make awkward movements or strange grimaces. In certain cases involuntary twitchings of some of the facial muscles may be observed. I have been informed by a young lady, who blushes excessively, ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... discovered that the grand object for which they were sent into existence was to perform the functions of wine skins. It is beautifully sculptured with grape leaves, and the skin and claws of the panther—these latter certainly not an inappropriate emblem of the god of wine, beautiful, ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... by their enjoyment? When we have once learnt what was the picture before which was hung Mrs Radcliffe's solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil. They are to us, merely a receptacle for old bones, and inappropriate coffin, which we would wish to have decently buried ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... commonplace, smoking, meanwhile, innumerable cigarettes out of mouthpieces which display a complex escutcheon contrived in gold and rubies upon the amber surface. Yes, his choice was good: Poles are gentlemen. But why caricature them? And why, above all things, select an inappropriate Muscovite name? That argues a lack of general intelligence and might easily spoil everything; so true it is, as a legal friend once observed to me, that "it takes a wise man to handle a lie. A fool had better ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... address, "That this house views, with the deepest sorrow and anxiety the severe distress which now afflicts the country, and will immediately proceed to examine into its cause, and into the means of effectually providing the necessary relief." His lordship said that a more inappropriate and unsatisfactory speech had never been addressed to any public assembly. The speech said that distress existed "in some parts" of the country: he asked, in what part it did not exist? The kingdom, he asserted, was in a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... be relied on than the preceding, is not without its value. The woman who possesses a cultivated taste, and a corresponding expression of countenance, will generally be tastefully dressed; and the vulgar woman, with features correspondingly rude, will easily be seen through the inappropriate mask in which her milliner or dressmaker ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... you introduce a strangely inappropriate subject, I must say your intelligence grieves me, for I like Guy Elersley exceedingly well, and should be heartily sorry were I given to credit your statements with the slightest suspicion ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... not inappropriate to an invalid about to begin the fifth act in a roystering night's ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the Elucidation, and on the evidence at our disposal I have ventured to suggest the hypothesis of a group of poems, dealing with the adventures of Gawain, his son, and brother, the ensemble being originally known as The Geste of Syr Gawayne, a title which, in the inappropriate form The Jest of Sir Gawain, is preserved in the English version of that hero's adventure with the sister of Brandelis.[5] So keen a critic as Dr Brugger has not hesitated to accept the theory of the existence of this Geste, and is of opinion that the German poem Diu ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... The window was narrow, and deep in an embrasure of stone. To be twenty and to be leaning in this palace window wearing a pale blue dinner-gown manifestly suggested a completion of the picture; and all that evening it had been impressing her as inappropriate that the maiden and the castle tower and the very sea itself should all be present, with no possibility of any knight within an altitude of ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... so-called god of love. This bastard creation of a barbarous fancy was no doubt inflicted upon mythology for the sins of its deities. Of all unbeautiful and inappropriate conceptions this is the most reasonless and offensive. The notion of symbolizing sexual love by a semisexless babe, and comparing the pains of passion to the wounds of an arrow—of introducing this pudgy homunculus into art grossly to materialize the subtle ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... many a reflection ludicrously inappropriate to the occasion passes from guest to guest under the same safe wrapper. Here you have the pleased beatitude of Leonard Astier, who has this very morning received the order of Stanislas (second class), as a return ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... bent and breathless, wrapped in her rusty black shawl, with her shadow flitting far out over the level bog amid the slanted beams, she looked a not inappropriate messenger of woe, symbolically impotent and insignificant; a little dark speck in the wide westering light; a feeble stir of life creeping on the verge of a vast silent solitude; and full, withal, of baseless fears and futile plots, concerning the withered shred of existence that ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... part any general expression of political opinions or any announcement of the principles which would govern me in the discharge of the duties to the performance of which I had been so unexpectedly called. I trust, therefore, that it may not be deemed inappropriate if I avail myself of this opportunity of the reassembling of Congress to make known my sentiments in a general manner in regard to the policy which ought to be pursued by the Government both in its intercourse with foreign nations and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... was, in his wonted way, preaching the kingdom to a great multitude, one of the audience, taking advantage probably of some momentary pause in the discourse, broke in upon the solemn exercises with the inappropriate and incongruous demand, "Master, speak to my brother that he divide ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... the skies, bestowed a warm commendation on the "noble Englishman who, with a native love of liberty, had taken on himself the burden of Aureataland in her hour of travail." The metaphor struck me as inappropriate, but the sentiment was most healthy; and when I finally beheld two officers of police sitting on the head of a drunken man for toasting the fallen regime, I could say to myself, as I turned into the bank, ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... fact that the actors are prone to consider their own "reading" of a part without reference to the audience, and even, in some cases, to the author. In other words, they are misled by the delusive term "create," so often applied to acting as well as to millinery. The word is inappropriate to the rapidly evanescent. "Original interpreters" is the highest phrase ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... dislikes "Mister," perhaps the ugliest and most inappropriate word in the English language—if the shootings and hangings which figure so prominently in the stories of the romancers were not exaggerations. He said he certainly was of that opinion. I said: "As a matter of fact, did you ever see a man ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... my friend, one does not finish. Considering all that you have in your well-furnished brain beside your accumulated papers, half the contents of which you do not yourself know, your expression "aufraumen,"—to put in final order, is singularly inappropriate. There will always remain some burdensome residue,—last things not yet accounted for. I beg you, then, not to abuse your strength. Be content to finish only what seems to you nearest completion,—the most advanced of ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... buy your paper. The other was to throw you down the front stairs. I am leaving now without doing either. I abandoned the first because I had to; I abandon the second, voluntarily, because—I don't quite know why—but I think it is because it seems inappropriate to hit a man when he is down and something is just driving him ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... nasty temper about the character given to his batman, who was, he assured me, the only pious man in the squadron and in private life a dissenting minister. "Dissolute" certainly was on the face of things inappropriate, but then it was no fault of mine that the merriest of English monarchs should have appeared at the moment when I was filling up the papers ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... there was a tale of an eel in a garden-well, in Scotland, which would come to be fed out of a spoon when the children called him by his singularly inappropriate name of Rob Roy. This seems a more likely story than Lucian's; at all events it comes from a more orthodox atmosphere. But before giving it full credence, I should like to know whether the children, when they called "Rob Roy!" stood where the eel could ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... determine on some general principle what songs are suitable to women, and what to men, and must assign to them their proper melodies and rhythms. It is shocking for a whole harmony to be inharmonical, or for a rhythm to be unrhythmical, and this will happen when the melody is inappropriate to them. And therefore the legislator must assign to these also their forms. Now both sexes have melodies and rhythms which of necessity belong to them; and those of women are clearly enough indicated by their natural difference. The grand, and ...
— Laws • Plato
... compositions, especially in a six-part mass, dedicated to Pope Marcellus II., shown that science need not exclude clearness, and the possibility of hearing the words sung, and that the truly inventive artist has no need to seek his themes in inappropriate spheres. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Victor never, or certainly very seldom, prefixes to a passage from a Father the name of its Author;—above all, seeing that sometimes, at all events, he is original, or at least speaks in his own person;—I think the title of "Catena" inappropriate ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... merely a poor governess, and that to the little Waylands—mere interlopers in the eyes of the Belamour tenantry. So the good woman had no idea that the rough gallantry of the young farmer guests was inappropriate, viewing it as the natural tribute to her guest's beauty, and mistaking genuine offence for mere coyness, until, finding it was real earnest, considerable affront was taken at "young madam's fine airs, and she only a poor kinswoman of my Lady's!" Quite as ill was it received that ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... grace, Agnes returned the Captain's and Mr. Clifford's respectful greeting, and resumed again her embroidery, disclaiming, however, as she did so, the epithet of dreary, as being quite inappropriate, in her estimation, to the place which had afforded her so ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... by the magnificence of a ducal residence unparalleled, perhaps, in the world for its wealth and culture, we had set off, in the latter part of the afternoon, to view its antipodes. The circumstances and the hour were not inappropriate. Sated with the most perfect display of luxury and taste which the present age can boast, and somewhat weary with the toil of sight-seeing, a six-mile drive, the gradual decline of the summer day, the shadows gathering over the landscape, all acted as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... very, very funny indeed, since there appears to be nothing at all remarkable or remorseful about Ralph Rackstraw. But Ralph immediately begins to sing about a nightingale and a moon's bright ray and several other things most inappropriate to the occasion, and winds up with "He sang, Ah, well-a-day," in the most pathetic manner. The other sailors repeat after him, "Ah, well-a-day," also in a very pathetic manner, and Ralph thanks them in the politest, most heartbroken manner, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... of California was intense. Our trunks were brought up from the vessel's hold, and we took out summer clothing. But how inadequate and inappropriate it was for that climate! Our faces burned and blistered; even the parting on the head burned, under the awnings which were kept spread. The ice-supply decreased alarmingly, the meats turned green, and when the steward went down into ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... contests of great warriors in founding states, or of gods with evil spirits. On his houses and temples alike, the Christian put carvings of angels conquering devils; or of hero-martyrs exchanging this world for another: subject inappropriate, I think, to our manner of exchange here. And the Master of Christians not only left His followers without any orders as to the sculpture of affairs of exchange on the outside of buildings, but gave some strong evidence ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... inappropriate at this moment, when the newspapers are ringing with the Paris-Rome aviation contest and the achievements of Beaumont, Garros and their colleagues. I have purposely brought his biography with me, to re-peruse on the spot. But let me first explain how I ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... expression, feeling, I am sure, that I had put her up to it. Mother thought it quite amusing, and enjoyed my discomfiture hugely. Then for no particular reason she began to garnish her conversation with inappropriate seagoing expressions, such as "Pipe down," "Hit the deck," "Avast," and "Hello, Buddy!" Where she ever picked up all this nonsense I am at a loss to discover, but she continued to pull it to ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... bitten his blond moustache into a wisp; he was breathing heavily, with his mouth ajar; his very large and conspicuous blue eyes glittered with a sort of passion. (He wore those eyes in his odd little ugly face like some inappropriate decoration.) ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... places and conveyances. In public conveyances, such as railway trains and street cars, and in public places, such as theaters, honors and personal salutes may be omitted when palpably inappropriate or apt to disturb or annoy ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... distances are now, at least in scientific researches, universally expressed in kilometres. A kilometre is, however, an inappropriate unit for celestial distances. When dealing with distances in our planetary system, the astronomers, since the time of NEWTON, have always used the mean distance of the earth from the sun as universal unit of distance. Regarding the distances in the stellar ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... subject, in summer, to restlessness. Thick-coming fancies mar my rest, and my ear is peculiarly sensitive to the least inappropriate sound. One sultry evening in July, I returned home later than usual, from an arbitration, wherein I lost a cause on which I had counted certainly to win. I suspect I bored the arbitrators with too long a plea, and too voluminous ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... signet-ring, and if you will look at the crest and motto you will see that they are not inappropriate. And I do wish to give it even 'to a chance acquaintance,' Miss Rodd, if you will allow me no ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... It is not inappropriate to record that when these articles were published in the St. James' Gazette, the editor received several communications warning him that his contributor was abusing his good faith—to put it in the mild French phrase. Happily, my friend was able to reply ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... find it to be the language that Charlotte Bronte shook off; but before she shook it off she used it. Dickens, too, had something to throw off; in his earlier books there is an inflation—rounded words fill the inappropriate mouth of Bill Sikes himself—but he discarded them with a splendid laugh. They are charged upon Mr. Micawber in his own character as author. See him as he sits by to hear Captain Hopkins read the petition in the debtors' prison "from His Most Gracious ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... much reflection had fortified himself by many little recipes against sudden apoplexies of taste and heart, and he advised the Count to indulge at least once a month in a wild orgy to avert those storms of the soul which, but for such precautions, are apt to break out at inappropriate moments. ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... Company’s building? They do not support anything (the “business” of columns in architecture) except some rather feeble statuary, and do seriously block the entrance. Were they added with the idea of fitness? That can hardly be, for a portico is as inappropriate to such a building as it would be to a parlor car, ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... It would be inappropriate, even if it were possible, to discuss the difficulties and unresolved problems which have hitherto met the evolutionist, and which will probably continue to puzzle him for generations to come, in the ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... order and over-severity to the rebels. He explains very carefully that he is not concerned with the moral question, and contends only that the legal name for their conduct is murder. In fact, he paid compliments to the accused which would be very inappropriate to the class of murderers in the ordinary sense of the term. The counsel on the opposite side naturally took advantage of this, and described his remarks as a 'ghastly show of compliment.' It must be awkward to say that a man is legally a murderer ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... struggle you persist in making to be reasonable (why don't you give it up? I've known you hopelessly at it now forty years or thereabouts), you really make use of very singular and, permit me to say, inappropriate language. After detailing, in a manner that nearly made me cry and laugh with distress for you and disapprobation of you, all your unnecessary agonies of anxiety about me, you suddenly rein yourself up with an extra-reasonable jerk, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... but for a creature like man, who has the same tastes, who eats the enormous buds of the cabbage, the cauliflower, and the brussels sprouts, or the more tender buds which he calls heads of lettuce, it seems particularly inappropriate that he should throw stones at this little creature whose tastes are ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... necessary to explain at length, Ayesha had thought it best that, with the exception of herself, we should proceed on foot, and this we were nothing loth to do, after our long confinement in these caves, which, however suitable they might be for sarcophagi—a singularly inappropriate word, by the way, for these particular tombs, which certainly did not consume the bodies given to their keeping—were depressing habitations for breathing mortals like ourselves. Either by accident or by the orders of She, the space in front ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... which are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment? When we have once learnt what was that picture before which was hung Mrs. Ratcliffe's solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil. They are to us merely a receptacle for old bones, an inappropriate coffin, which we would wish to have decently buried ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... in regard to the Log-Book may not be inappropriate. It seems to be a mere waif that has floated on the current, and among a thousand things that have perished, to have been, as it were by accident, preserved. A portion of the volume seems to be a kind of a private journal kept by my grandfather, for a few weeks ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman
... reason to the contrary, avoid the use of expressions that have been used so much that they are worn out and often almost meaningless. Such expressions as the following ones are not wrong, but are often used when they are both inappropriate ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... never be unimportant. A Churchman could promote and honour such public servants in the little commonwealth of his cathedral town with greater freedom than might be done elsewhere; and James, a studious and feeble boy, not wise enough to see that the example of his great teacher was here inappropriate and out of place, learned this lesson but too well. The King grew up "a man that loved solitariness and desired never to hear of warre, but delighted more in musick and politie and building nor he did in the government of his ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant |
