"Unlovely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dazed with all the wealth of color and splendor, and wondering if "I be I." Was it a fairy tale, or was all this for Edith Darrell?—Edith Darrell, who such a brief while gone, used to sweep and dust, sew and darn, in dull, unlovely Sandypoint, and get a new merino dress twice a year? No, it could not be—such transformation scenes never look place out of a Christmas pantomime or a burlesque Arabian Night—it was all a dream—a fairy fortune that, like fairy gold, would change to dull ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... unpretentious domicile, out of what ugliness such beauty can be evoked and at how trivial a cost in money. Three years before this "garden to look out from" won its Carnegie prize it was for the most part a rubbish heap. Let me now tell of one other, that sprang from conditions still more unlovely because ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... child, and to separate a loving couple, every detail of whose life is such as to demand your sympathy. And this you must do at the bidding of four greedy, foul conspirators. Innocent, sweet, excellent in all feminine graces as is the one wife,—unlovely unfeminine, and abhorrent as is the other,—you must do your duty. God forbid that I should ask you to break an oath, even for the sake of that young mother. But in such a case, I do think, I may ask you to be very careful as to what evidence you accept. I do think ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... represented. If the Republic can afford to bare her shoulders, France may dispense with drapery entirely. She has a dove which she presses to her bosom. On one side is a portrait of Monsieur Rochefort. Again! Why this unlovely-looking journalist is a regular Lovelace. Finally, two cats (M. Jules Favre and M. Thiers) are to be seen outside the garret window with their claws ready for pouncing. "Poor dove!" is the tame ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... wished I might have died With my poor father; wherefore should I ask For longer life? Oh, I was fond of misery with him; E'en what was most unlovely grew beloved When he was with me. Oh, my dearest father, Beneath the earth now in deep darkness hid, Worn as thou wert with age, to me thou still Wast dear, and ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... old man with grey hairs, and another man old and grey was beside him. The countenances of both were dark and unlovely. And one old man was on his knees—but it was not to God he knelt; he had set up an idol to worship, and that idol was gold; and God, as a punishment, had turned his heart to stone, so that nothing but ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... big backwoodsman of twenty, whose life had been as obscure as that of a domestic animal. He was rough of manner and slow of speech, and just now, owing to a combination of physical confinement and mental torture altogether unlovely in disposition. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... is very cooling to the fervour Of over passionate ones, Beloved, like you. Nay, turn your lips to mine. Not quite unlovely They are as yet, as yet, ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... of his Aunt Margaret's presence. Fazio Cardano was a man of rigorous sobriety, and he seems moreover to have atoned for his early irregularities by the practice of that austere piety which Jerome notices more than once as a characteristic of his old age.[177] The discipline was hard, and the life unlovely, but the home was at least decent and orderly, and no opportunities or provocations to loose manners or ill doing existed therein. In Cardan's own case it is to be feared that, after Lucia's death, the affairs of his household fell into dire confusion, in spite of the presence of ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... bronze-haired, ox-eyed young woman in her disreputable attire—I have never seen a broken black feather waggle more shamelessly—was a sight indeed to strike wonderment into the cockney mind. And perhaps her association with myself added to the incongruity. I am long and lean and unlovely, I know; but it is my consolation that I look irreproachably respectable. Of the two I was infinitely the more disturbed by the public attention. "Calm and unembarrassed as a fate" she returned the popular gaze, and appeared somewhat bored by my efforts to find Harry. In the midst of an earnest ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... of the paddle, shallows where he must wade and lead his craft by hand. So he came at last to the Big Bend of the Toba River, a great S curve where the stream doubled upon itself in a mile-wide flat that had been stripped of its timber and lay now an unlovely vista of stumps, each with a white ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... literature 'Nothing to Wear' has the interest and value of satire in which our society life came to its full consciousness for the first time. To be sure there had been the studies of New York called 'The Potiphar Papers,' in which Curtis had painted the foolish and unlovely face of our fashionable life, but with always an eye on other methods and other models; and 'Nothing to Wear' came with the authority and the appeal of something quite indigenous in matter and manner. It came winged, and equipped to fly wide and to fly far, as only verse can, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... rarely went to church—the distance was too great—but Nathaniel, looming high and stern across the table in the bare kitchen, morning and night, set forth the rigid, unlovely creed of his belief. This fell upon Priscilla's unheeding ears, but the hours before the shrine were deeply, tenderly religious, although they were bright ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... precocious and romantic child like Margaret Fuller; and her childhood, though outwardly fortunate and well placed, was one of labor and repression, and far from happy, if we may judge by her own account of it. The theology of the people was gloomy. They made everything connected with religion unlovely, and this austerity was particularly distasteful to one of Margaret's imaginative temperament and heroic disposition. Her ungratified imagination brought her early into conflict with the circumstances and ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... Holt reckoned without Kate. She had been under the whip hand all her life. Her dash to freedom had not been accomplished without both mental and physical hurt. She was doing nothing but going over her past life minutely, and as she realized more fully with each review how barren and unlovely it had been, all the strength and fresh young pride in her arose in imperative demand for something better in the future. She listened with interest to what George Holt said to her. All her life she had been driven by a man of inflexible will, his very ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... She tastes unseen; unseen her nimble feet Leave traces in the grass and flowers sweet; From weary tendrils, and bow'd branches green, She plucks the fruit unseen, she bathes unseen: And by my power is her beauty veil'd To keep it unaffronted, unassail'd By the love-glances of unlovely eyes, Of Satyrs, Fauns, and blear'd Silenus' sighs. Pale grew her immortality, for woe Of all these lovers, and she grieved so I took compassion on her, bade her steep Her hair in weird syrops, that would keep Her loveliness invisible, ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... utterly necessary routine of the radar room which was the nerve-center of the ship, gathering all information needed for navigation in space. The fact that there had been a collision, that the Niccola's engines were melted to unlovely scrap, that the Plumie ship was now welded irremovably to a side-keel, and that a Plumie was signaling to humans while both ships went spinning through space toward an unknown destination—these things did not affect the ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... sounds odiously to us to hear him recommend for dysentery a powder made from "the sole of an old shoe worn by some man that walks much." Perhaps nobody here ever heard of tying a stocking, which had been worn during the day, round the neck at night for a sore throat. The same idea of virtue in unlovely secretions! [The idea is very ancient. "Sordes hominis" "Sudore et ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of the ancient chapel are less attractive. It stands, it may be, in some poverty-stricken corner or court of a town or city. Whatever picturesqueness it may have had once has long since vanished. Unlovely decay, an air of desolation, symptoms of neglect, present a mournful sight, and one wonders how much longer the poor relic will remain. Many places of the kind have already been swept away; others have been renovated, enlarged, and kept more worthy of their use. ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... innocuous Bridge whist until Cecile's yawns could no longer be disguised; and finally Gray rose in disgust when she ignored the heart-convention and led him an unlovely spade. ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... brief, which reminded them of the days of the roistering cavaliers and bedizened beauties of the court of "the man Charles," whose head had fallen beneath the sword of Puritan justice. Hard, harsh, unlovely, yet with many virtues and noble points of character, they were fitted, doubtless, for their work of pioneers in the wilderness. Sternly faithful to duty, in peril, and suffering, and self-denial, they wrought out the noblest of historical epics on the rough soil of New England. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... could have shaken beauty from that first unlovely "by- the-day"? Seamstress after seamstress had come and gone in that impossibly selfish household, the meek ones enduring it until they could endure no more, the proud ones hurrying angrily away; competent or incompetent, not one of them had ever been able to please her exacting employer, ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... and blushed, knowing that, do what she would to prevent it, it was reflected in her own. She remembered all that this stranger had done for her, how he had risked his life a hundred times, how she would now have been dead and unlovely were it not for his intrepid deeds, and remembering, something ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... had no leaves save one or two near the ground, and a great fungus fixed itself on its trunk. It had a dull life in its roots, but not enough to know that its moss and fungus were not foliage. It stood there, an unlovely mass of decay, when the young trees were all bursting. "That rotten thing," said the master, "ought to have been cut ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... and whenever he was tempted to give a cross answer, or get in a passion, he was sure to remember in time the celebrated day when everybody, by his mother's instructions, attempted his cure, by showing him, in their own persons, the unlovely ...
— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... great flame. From our youth up our associations with the dead and with the grave are oppressive. Our natural animal instincts get the better of us. Death seems the great catastrophe. The silver cord is loosened, and the golden bowl is broken. The physical aspects of death are unlovely and repellent. And the spiritual aspects—only the elect can see them. Our physical senses are so dominant, the visible world is so overpowering, that all else becomes as ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... letters change?" she asked, abruptly; and I saw her eyes look out dreamily, as if at something I did not see. "The letter clothes the spirit; and the spirit gives life to the form. A face grows lovely or unlovely with the spirit that lies behind it. I cannot say if there be a spirit in such things. Yet what we have worn we give a value to. It has an expression in our eyes. Do we give it all that expression, or has it some life ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... his appeared to him fair and desirable. He remembered the early morning risings in his boyhood, and it seemed to him that he had enjoyed every one of them to its fullest—that it was only the present that showed stale and unprofitable in his eyes. A rosy haze obscured all that was harsh and unlovely in the past, and he thought of himself as always eager and enthusiastic then, as always finding happiness in the incidents that befell him. The year when he had gone away, and worked in the factory in order to educate himself, ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... valleys, and lift, straightway, as mist again. So that, all the while Nature was trying to give lustier life to every living thing in the lowland Bluegrass, all the while a gaunt skeleton was stalking down the Cumberland—tapping with fleshless knuckles, now at some unlovely cottage of faded white and green, and now at a log cabin, stark and gray. Passing the mouth of Lonesome, he flashed his scythe into its unlifting shadows and went stalking on. High up, at the source of the dismal little stream, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... sunset, it had given Lady Bridget a little shock to see how crude and—architecturally speaking—unlovely was her new home. But her Celtic imagination was stirred by the weirdness of the grey-green gum forest, and of the mournful gidia scrub, ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... delicately attuned and all the rest of it, you can make unlovely noises. My eardrums are pierced. ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... said that the modern man has entirely lost the Greek love of beauty. This is, I think, untrue, and unjust to our present civilization, unlovely as it undoubtedly is in many ways. It is curious that modern critics of the Greeks have not called attention to the aesthetic obtuseness which showed itself in the defective reaction of the ancients against cruelty. It was not that they excluded beautiful actions ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... in dignity and triumph. In the last scene of all, implied rather than described, the restored prodigal sits at the feast, leaning on his father's bosom, but the respectable son stands without in a darkness of his own creation—the darkness which a harsh spirit and an unlovely temper never fail to create in men of ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... realising her young strength she held him firm in her grip and threatened to throw him into a pond if he persisted in his attempted chastisement. Since then he had respected her person, but to the day of his death he had cursed her for anserine stupidity. An unlovely, loveless and unloved old man. Why should Blanquette have wept over him? She had not the Parisian's highly strung temperament and capacity for facile emotion. She was peasant to the core, slow to rejoice, and slow to grieve, and she had the peasant's remorseless logic in envisaging the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... somewhat more startling than that of Xerxes, putting a prize upon a new pleasure. Happy will be the man who can devise truly available means of supplying this grand want in our Work-World! It is plainly for want of some such device that the public-house thrives, and that human nature is seen in such unlovely forms amongst the lower circles ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... darling loving every one around her? People do not always seem lovely at first, but remember that every one is lovable because he is a thought of God. Those who seem unlovely are always unhappy, too, in their hearts. We must help them, and the best way to help is to love. Mother is thinking about her little Jewel, and no seas ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... and dark and unlovely, and thus —even as I gazed—the mouth grew still more disdainful, and the heavy brow lowered blacker and more forbidding. And yet, in that same moment, I found myself sighing, while I strove to lend some order to ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... we were just looking at, not glorious, yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,—full of great and little boys' playthings from top to bottom,—in all these summer or winter nests he was always ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... cautiously, and—was entirely disappointed of my hope. The veil, which shrouded her whole face, was too thick for me to see more than the glitter of bright eyes and the hazy outline of what might be a lovely oval face, but might also, unfortunately, be an equally unlovely one. I closed my eyes again, saying to myself "—couldn't have a better chance for an experiment in Telepathy! I'll think out her face, and afterwards test the portrait ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... and worn with ceaseless toil and care, No perfumed grace, no dainty skill, had these! They earned for whiter hands a jewelled case, And kept the scars unlovely for their share. Patient and slow, they had the will to bear The whole world's burdens, but no power to seize The flying joys of life, the gifts that please, The gold and gems that others find so fair. Dear hands, ...
— Girls: Faults and Ideals - A Familiar Talk, With Quotations From Letters • J.R. Miller
... the slovenly, wasteful, and improvident processes of man. The unrecorded land-slip disintegrating a whole hillside will not only lay bare the delicate framework of strata and deposit to the vulgar eye, but hurl into the valley a debris so monstrous and unlovely as to shame even the hideous ruins left by dynamite, hydraulic, or pick and shovel; an overflown and forgotten woodland torrent will leave in some remote hollow a disturbed and ungraceful chaos of inextricable logs, branches, rock, and soil that will rival the unsavory details of ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... see where you will get it under these conditions unless you find some one with an abstract love of discipline for itself. And where will you find him except in Prussia? After all, it is a testimony to her that, unlovely as she is, she gives the law to Germany, and that the South German, though he dislikes her, accepts the law as good for him." And to show that he appreciates the full consequences of his words he adds: "If I had to live under ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... these mountains is the waste known as the Mojave desert. It stretches north and south from San Pasqual, fading away into nothing, into impalpable, unlovely, soul-crushing suggestions of space illimitable; dancing and shimmering in the heat waves, it seems struggling to escape. When the wind blows, the dust-devils play tag among the low sage and greasewood; ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... dead leaves scudding and whirling along the dusty, airless streets, under a light wind, gave the last dreary touch to the scene that Nelly Sarratt was looking at. She was standing at a window, listlessly staring at some houses opposite, and the unlovely strip of garden which lay between her and the houses. Bridget Cookson was sitting at a table a little way behind her, ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... than to any other man who has ever lived; and as God makes the wrath of man to praise him, and restrains the remainder, so he raised up Luther as an instrument adapted to his age and the circumstances of the times. But Luther's character in some of its features was harsh, rugged, and unlovely; and in these it was not founded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... to build before you've laid your foundations," said Mr. Paramor. "You let your feelings carry you away, Vigil. The state of the marriage laws is only a symptom. It's this disease, this grudging narrow spirit in men, that makes such laws necessary. Unlovely men, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the history of civilization. The rough, shapeless ore that lies hidden in the earth folds in its unlovely bosom such fate and fortune as the haughtier sheen of silver, gleam of gold, and sparkle of diamond may illustrate, but are wholly impotent to create. Rising from his undisturbed repose of ages, the giant, unwieldy, swart, and huge of limb, bends slowly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... not be disappointed. The gentlewoman in attendance had recently come from a canteen near the front where soup is made and often eight thousand bowls of it served in a day. The skin of her arms and hands is, I fear, permanently unlovely from the steam of the great kettles—or perhaps I should say permanently lovely now that one knows the cause of the branding. I offered to pour in ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... adopted five or six orphan-asylum kids, and I suppose the poor thing thinks she's having a good time." Even to the most prejudiced eye Annabel could not have looked beautiful at that moment. The venom that poisoned her spirit, disfigured her face like a scar. Hag-ridden by those unlovely twins, jealousy and hate, she looked for the ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... been sometimes asserted that Jackson was of the same type as the saints militant who followed Cromwell, who, when they were not slaughtering their enemies, would expound the harsh tenets of their unlovely creed to the grim circle of belted Ironsides. He has been described as taking the lead at religious meetings, as distributing tracts from tent to tent, as acting as aide-de-camp to his chaplains, and as consigning to perdition all ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... her: standing in the drift which had piled up against the gate almost knee-deep, the shabby skirt and the black water-proof flapping like torn sails, one hand out-stretched like that of a figure in a tableau, her brown face with its thin features mottled with cold and unlovely, her startled eyes fixed on him with a strange, wild tenderness that held something of the laughter of whole companionship in it mingling with a loyalty and championship that was almost ferocious—she looked an Undine of ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... their discovery no Utopian would have thought of constructing these lines just yet. An unlovely deposit of brown dust has worked a revolution upon the minds of men, upon the face of the country. It has ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... dispense from his tribunal sage advice, and prescribe remedial measures, which shall have untold efficacy, in dispelling mutual mistrust, restoring mutual confidence, and bringing about a lasting re-union. He will interpose, like some potent magician, to transform a discordant, recriminating, utterly unlovely couple, into a pair of harmless, peaceable, love-consumed doves. There rises before my mind a case for illustration. A couple lived on the Reserve, whose domestic life had become so completely embittered that every vestige of old-time happiness had fled. The agency of ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... Mrs. Campbell, that there are some trials that cannot do us any good. They only call out all there is in us that is unlovely and severe." ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... then the writer turned suddenly round upon Professor Huxley, and asked him how he proposed to cure all this vice and hideousness without religion. I confess I felt disposed to ask the asker this question: and how do you propose to cure it with such a religion as yours? How is the ideal of a life so unlovely, so unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so far removed from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, as is the life of your religious organization as you yourself reflect it, to conquer and transform all this vice and hideousness? Indeed, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... thought necessary, or even desirable, to send girls away from home to study in colleges in company with boys—to learn Latin, Greek, mathematics, and basketball—to read the indecencies of classic literature—and to mould themselves into an unlovely similitude to men. But there were frivolities in the education of women then which were almost as conspicuous as are the masculinities that have since ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... to do that? Did she want to sell her pearl-backed brush and mirror, her silver candlestick, her pendant, her lovely little necklace, and go dressed in drab like the Wherrys: the unlovely uncombed Wherrys, who were the "poor" to ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... watching them get into the coach. The young girl's face in the window, with her beflowered hat, a rose crowned with roses, in the dark setting of the window, was beautiful. Even the aunt's face, older and more colorless, except for an unlovely flush of excitement, was pathetically compelling and charmed. Mrs. Anderson, filling up the doorway with her stately bulk, swept around by her soft black draperies, her fair old face rising from a foam of lace, and delicately ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and plain. She would not do so, and did not; for any body so good, so sweet, so bright, must always carry about with her, even to old age, something which, if not beauty's self, is beauty's atmosphere, and which often creates, even around unlovely people, a light and glory as perfect as the ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... of Bacon and of Spedding, and distinguished as the hugest and faithfullest bit of literary navvy work I have ever met with in this generation. Bacon is washed clean down to the natural skin; and truly he is not nor ever was unlovely to me; a man of no culpability to speak of; of an opulent and even magnificent intellect, but all in the magnificent prose vein. Nothing or almost nothing of the 'melodies eternal' to be traced in him. Spedding's Book will last as long as there is any earnest ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... lingered on it all, taking everything greedily in. She had looked on so many unlovely places in her life, poor child; but this was as lovely as ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of Japanese metal lacquer wares, which towards the close of the eighteenth century were so largely imported into this country, are often neglected, yet many of them are truly antiquarian and by no means unlovely. ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... Patton" (Ruth had told her name), "I am surprised and pained by what you have told me. I never knew that Luella—Miss Ferguson—had such unlovely traits. To me she has ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... distinguished than Prior Street, with its sombre symmetry, its air of delicate early Georgian reticence. But its atmosphere is a shade too professional; it opens too precipitately on the unlovely and unsacred street. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... Hammerlock Smith had taken more time than I had thought it would. The big, stupid ape had been in a vicious mood, reeking of whisky and roaring insults at everyone. His cursing was neither inventive nor colorful, consisting of only four unlovely words used over and over again in various combinations with ordinary ones, a total vocabulary of maybe a ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... picture, and do not belong by any necessity to the actual carcasses of animals. In the shambles, the sense of disgust and repulsion overcomes any pleasure in light and color. In the parlor, if the spectator were persuaded by the picture to hold his nose, the thing would be as unlovely as it is in nature. Imitation pleases only so far as it is known to be imitation. If deception by imitation were the object of art, then the material of the sculptor should be wax, and not marble. Every visitor mistakes the sitting figure of Cobbett, in Madame Tussaud's collection of wax-works, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... always been taught that old age must be respected, no matter how unlovely, and as Mrs. Perkins counted her aches and pains in a weak, whining voice, pity got the better of Lloyd's disgust. She began to feel sorry for this poor old creature, for whom no one else seemed to have any sympathy. She complained bitterly ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the new abode of Goldilind; amongst whom was a goodly band of men-at-arms, led by an old lord pinched and peevish of face, who kneeled to Goldilind as the new burgreve of Greenharbour; and a chaplain, a black canon, young, broad-cheeked and fresh-looking, but hard-faced and unlovely; three new damsels withal were come for the young Queen, not young maids, but stalworth women, well-grown, and two of them hard-featured; the third, tall, black-haired, and ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris
... conversation was vapid or vulgar, a manner pretentious, a speech lacking in sincerity. Consciously he stood aside, no longer out of humility or indifference, but critically observant, challenging things however familiar, and passing judgment upon them. For example, the unlovely character of Mrs. Lovegrove's drawing-room engrossed his attention—the dirty-browns and tentative watery blues of it, the multiplicity of flimsy, worthless, little ornaments revealing a most lamentable ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... had been lured by them, a few times, out of his beaten path. But he carried in his memory a picture that, when his eyes turned inward, held their gaze so fixedly that all other images grew dim or unlovely. And so, with a sigh, he would turn again to the old way and move ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... in human history, it is this utter devotion to the spiritual and eternal which is seen to bring forth the most abundant fruits in the temporal sphere; giving not only the strength to do difficult things, but that creative charity which "wins and redeems the unlovely by the power of its love."[50] The man or woman of prayer, the community devoted to it, tap some deep source of power and use it in the most practical ways. Thus, the only object of the Benedictine rule was the fostering of goodness in those who adopted it, the education of the soul; and it ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... think of two cousins that I knew once. One was obedient, unselfish, and kind to everybody; and although she did not have a beautiful face, she was loved by all who knew her. The other girl had a beautiful face; but she had such an unlovely disposition that nobody cared for her, and so she was left very much to herself. Her beauty, like this lovely flower, was quite hidden by the ugly weeds growing up ...
— A Hive of Busy Bees • Effie M. Williams
... Girard College, looking up at its five massive marble edifices, strolling in its shady walks or by its verdant play-grounds, or listening to the cheerful cries of the boys at play, the most sympathetic and imaginative of men must pause before censuring the sterile and unlovely life of its founder. And if he should inquire closely into the character and career of the man who willed this great institution into being, he would perhaps be willing to admit that there was room in ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... upper and lower limbs. Their eyes were close together and non-protruding; their ears were high set, but more laterally located than those of the Martians, while their snouts and teeth were strikingly like those of our African gorilla. Altogether they were not unlovely when viewed in comparison ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... life, then, is the result of this growth of productive capital, and its application and constant reapplication to the production of wealth. It made its way by virtue of an intense individual initiative and a fierce competitive struggle. But unlovely as were these things, many of their phases were necessary at a certain stage. It was this fierce competition that compelled capital to pay the lowest possible wages in order to market cheap goods. But the ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... was—merely an example of simple, old-fashioned "solid comfort" in comparison with the Burroughs palace. He had never liked, but, being a true New Yorker, had greatly admired the splendor of that palace, its costly art junk, its rotten old tapestries, its unlovely genuine antiques, its room after room of tasteless magnificence, suggesting a museum, or rather the combination home and salesroom of an art dealer. This evening he found himself curious, critical, disposed to license a long-suppressed sense of humor. While ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... with its high mansarde roof; the shabby stateliness of its architecture matching plaintively with the field of beet-root that grew up to its very walls; around it the flat, rich fields, with their thin lines of poplars; the slow, canalized streams; the unlovely farms and cottages; the mire of the lanes; and, shrouding all, a hot autumn mist sweeping slowly through the damp meadows and blotting all cheerfulness from the sun. And in the midst of this pale landscape, so full of ragged edges to an English eye, the English couple, ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but a radical and imaginative justice. So the Buddhist stretches his sympathy to all real beings and to many imaginary monsters; so the Christian chooses for his love the diseased, the sinful, the unlovely. His own salvation does not seem to either complete unless every other creature ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the door brought to a sudden end this little touch of moralizing, and a wrinkled old porter thrust out a very withered and unlovely face. ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... instinct what is right, and does it joyously. She does not think of one wrong act as harmless, of another as of no consequence, and of another as not intended. To her pure soul all evil is equally unlovely. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... quality. While, if we had but a few handfuls of good soil in some small boxes by the windows—— Come, I will show you. Here, and here, where the sun comes in the morning. I could secure them myself if you would not think them unlovely to have in view." ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... decent of you!" She turned toward him, trying to be affectionate. But his eyes were pink and unlovely in the flare of the match with which he lighted his dead and malodorous cigar. His head drooped, and a ridge of flesh scattered with pale small bristles bulged out under ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... examples. I merely wished to indicate as simply and clearly as possible an underlying, fundamental principle. It is at work in countless ways, in everybody's life, nearly all the time. Personal impulses and inclinations may be very short-sighted, very unlovely, very unworthy. Greed, murder, arson, lust, theft, lying, betrayal—are only a few samples of the variety of impulses which may come and do come frequently to various ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... imprisoned thus, I presently came wandering disconsolately back to the hay-pile and lying there began to ponder upon the extreme unlovely deportment of this strange creature whose almost every speech and look and gesture outraged all my preconceived ideas of "the sex", and bitterly to deplore my ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... renders art offensive. Not for us Madonnas leaning from their starry thrones Ineffable, nor any heaven-wrought dream Of sculptor or of poet; we prefer Such nightmare visions as in morbid brains Take shape and substance, thoughts that taint the air And make all life unlovely. Will it last? Beauty alone endures from age to age, From age to age endures, handmaid of God. Poets who walk with her on earth go hence Bearing a talisman. You bury one, With his hushed music, in some Potter's Field; The snows and rains blot out his very name, ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... was Mr. Arnold Forster. I must be pardoned if, as an Irishman, I always see something genial and not wholly unlovely even in the most violent Irish enemy. We all like Johnston of Ballykilbeg—most of us rather like Colonel Saunderson, and Mr. Dunbar Barton is decidedly popular. But this Arnold Forster—with his dry, self-complacent, self-sufficient fanaticism—is intolerable and hateful. He never gets up ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... simple measures. Well, the moral is this: take my love-letters as real (in their way) as the play, or rather, the opera; infinitely true for the moment, unreal for the hour, eternal as the dead passions of the ages. Further, it is better to feel the aromatic attributes of love than the dangerous or unlovely reality. You can flirt with number nine or marry number ten, but I shall be stored away in your drawer ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... to be divine. There is the touch of nature here, but it is not the touch which makes the whole world kin. That touch we ourselves supply; and it speaks eloquently for Moore's art that in picturing these unlovely beings he throws us back on our better selves. Beyond the vision of these celibates here revealed we see a passionate humanity, working, hating, sorrowing, and dying, yet always loving, and in loving finding its fullest ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... Barlow again walking in Summerfield; but this time she is hurrying along the straight, unlovely cinder-strewn path which forms a short cut from the back of The Haven to Summerfield station; and the still, heavy calm of a late November afternoon broods over the rough ground on either side ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... to love this Little Country because I am a usual man. Perhaps I would have felt as much for it even had I not been held to it by a memory that would bind me to any spot howsoever unlovely. But I rejoiced always in its beauty, and more than ever when it made easier for me the only life it once appeared that I should live. I quote again from our visiting poet: "The aspect of this country was to me enchanting beyond any ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... a gentleman—kept him from putting any questions to Mary Ann. Indeed, his own delicacy repudiated the images that strove to find entry in his brain, even as his fastidiousness shrank from realising the unlovely details of Mary Ann's daily duties—these things disgusted him more with himself than with her. And yet he found himself acquiring a new and illogical interest in the boots he met outside doors. Early one morning he went half-way up the second ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... back the shawl that covered her child, with a faint, far-off gleam of pride in her eyes. There was something horribly pathetic in the whole picture. The child-mother, her rough, unlovely face lighted for a moment with that gleam from Paradise which men never know; the huge man bending over her, and between them the wizened, disease-stricken little waif ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... the best of the Reformer died out with that correspondence. It is after this, of course, that he wrote that ungenerous description of his intercourse with Mrs. Bowes. It is after this, also, that we come to the unlovely episode of his second marriage. He had been left a widower at the age of fifty-five. Three years after, it occurred apparently to yet another pious parent to sacrifice a child upon the altar of his respect for the Reformer. In January 1563, Randolph writes to Cecil: "Your Honour ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who have condoned our criminal inactivity as regards Mexico and, above all, as regards the questions raised by the great world war now raging, and who have applauded our abject failure to live up to the obligations imposed upon us as a signatory power of The Hague Convention, are, at best, an unlovely body of men, and taken as a whole are probably the most undesirable citizens that this ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... every summer morning in Virginia City. This little mining-town, dry, sterile, and unlovely, and built at an absurd angle up the mountain, is the poor relation of her fortunate cousins of the high Alps; yet shares with them their birthright—an open, boundless breadth of view, an endless depth of unpolluted, sparkling air, the fresh, ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... the time being nothing which was unclean or unlovely, nothing which was bettered by ignorance. She was lost in its light and mystery. In the Theban valley it seemed as if she would live on light, that it would supply food for both soul and body. In Egypt God is made ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... unshaven, haggard face, bloodshot eyes, and slovenly dishevelled dress, had appeared repulsive enough while in the boat; but, now, as he stood dripping with water and covered with mud, there was a touch of the ridiculous in his appearance that brought a grin to the unlovely face of his rescuer, and caused her to exclaim with unnecessary frankness: "I'll be dad burned if you-all ain't a thing ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... he seems willing to make to the critics of the Salvation Army is in the matter of its hymns. He confesses that some of those hymns are crude and unlovely; but examine this confession and you find that it is only the language which causes him uneasiness. Approach him on the subject of dogma, the dogma crudely expressed but truthfully expressed in the worst of those hymns, and he is as hard as Bishop ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... curiously round the room; sparely furnished, bare, unlovely, it seemed a most cheerless sort of spot to be considered ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... his friend which he scarce perceptibly, though measuredly, lifted and let fall throughout the length of all the curious performance. The voice was not unmusical, nor was the quaint old ballad-air adopted by the singer unlovely in the least; simply a monotony was evident that accorded with the levity and chance-finish of the improvisation—and that the song was improvised on the instant I am certain—though in no wise remarkable, for other reasons, ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... her father's people. She was so thankful to have grown up in Oldfields that she could not find it in her heart to rail at the fate that had kept her away from Dunport; but the years of silence had been very unlovely in her aunt. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... little more than a year ago—— She wavered back to her bare seat alone, and sat there, looking up at him till his peroration came to an end. In these few minutes many things flew through Lady Markland's thoughts,—unspeakable offence, revolt against the unlovely duty presented to her, a sudden fierce indignation against him who had thus thrust himself into her life and claimed to command it. At that moment, after all the agitation he had made her suffer, and before the sacrifice he thus ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... have us believe that romance and beauty are dead, that the spirit of heroic achievement and chivalry has been crushed by the juggernautic wheels of civilisation. Poor blind, sad-hearted fools—their dreary, unlovely minds have risen like gaunt weeds from the ashes of their wasted opportunities. Romance dead? Never! And in order to disprove their dismal forebodings, I have included in my portrait gallery studies of such national heroes as—Snurge, Spout, Puffwater ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... in him, which was significant. Something had gone wrong, that was all. The young man who had looked out on the world, half challenging, half expectant, must have seen too suddenly that part of life which is unlovely. However, the thing may not be thus easily explained. The soul of a man, when bent or distorted under stress, is a weird and fearful growth. One may contemplate it in awe; but ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... as now often occurs, does nothing more than represent misery as still more unlovely than it is already, by so doing she sins against the German people. The cultivation of the ideal is at the same time the greatest work of culture, and if we wish to be and remain an example in this to other nations the whole people must work together to that end; if ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... sneeze, you think, and the lady must surely be left destitute. 'The perilous, hairbreadth ridi' was our word for it; and in the conflict that rages over women's dress it has the misfortune to please neither side, the prudish condemning it as insufficient, the more frivolous finding it unlovely in itself. Yet if a pretty Gilbertine would look her best, that must be her costume. In that and naked otherwise, she moves with an incomparable liberty and grace and life, that marks the poetry of Micronesia. Bundle her in ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this is a serious case," he said, teasingly. "Are you sure, mother, that she has not treated you to enchantment? I heard the same lady described a few days ago, and the picture drawn was that of an atheistical revolutionist, an unlovely and unlovable type." ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... of this purpose. That he should ever have come to love Mandy Haley, the overworked slattern on her father's Ontario farm, while a thing of wonder, was not the chief wonder to him. His wonder now was that he should ever have been so besottedly dull of wit and so stupidly unseeing as to allow the unlovely exterior of the girl to hide the radiant soul within. That in two brief years she had transformed herself into a woman of such perfectly balanced efficiency in her profession as nurse, and a creature of such fascinating comeliness, was only another proof ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor |
