"Unreadable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eye-crocodile!—and goes out, leaving me in my fur by the blazing fire, my teeth going like castanets. . . Did you ever hear of anything so stupid as this affair?" she concluded in a tone of extreme candour and a profound unreadable stare that went far beyond us both. And the stillness of her lips was so perfect directly she ceased speaking that I wondered whether all this had come through them or only had ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... saw him looking at her. Her face, silver-bright in the starlight, was as unreadable ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... but here's the other, as the world sees it. You're a sort of popular hero—African traveller, war correspondent, writer of books. Polar explorer, and I don't know what besides, though you can't yet be anywhere near thirty-five. You've got the figure of a soldier, and just the sort of dark, unreadable face that women rave about. What does money matter with a chap like that? Nothing. I wonder you've managed to escape the matchmaking mammas so long. They're quite as keen on a celebrity, in my country at least, as ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... threatened, but this was not the moment to face it. A few hours might turn storm to sunshine, or perchance increase the storm to a veritable cyclone against which no man could stand. He passed into the street and out of the crowd, his face firm set, unreadable. He showed no sign of fear, he seemed curiously indifferent to man's opinion of him. It was noted by some that he did not go in the direction of the Rue Valette, and when he had passed out of sight they told one another ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... which a few chairs had been uncovered, and a table cleared. A man rose from a chair beside the table, and he and Falloden shook hands. He was a round-faced and broad-shouldered person, with one of the unreadable faces developed by the life of a prominent solicitor, in contact with all sorts of clients and many varieties of business; and Falloden's sensitive pride had soon detected in his manner certain shades of expression to which the heir of Flood ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... what a fall was there, and yet neither Lamb's version nor Hunt's is satisfactory. His "Atys" pales before Cranstoun's, and his "Epithalamium," is almost unreadable; while the lines "On the death of Lesbia's Sparrow" naturally compel comparison with Byron's version. Nor will readers of the translations by Sir Theodore Martin or Robinson Ellis gain anything by turning ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the greatness of the "Divine Comedy." Voltaire called the "Inferno" revolting, the "Purgatorio" dull, and the "Paradiso" unreadable. The reason is because they are not rightly attuned for the acceptance of the great truths which the poem teaches, and because they look at it from a wholly mistaken standpoint. If anyone supposes that the "Inferno," for instance, is meant for a burning torture-chamber of endless torments and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... contemplated that refined and placid countenance with profound admiration. He remembered how her ladyship's grandson had compared her with the Sphinx; and it seemed to him to-night, as be studied her proud and tranquil beauty, that there was indeed something of the mysterious, the unreadable in that countenance, and that beneath its heroic calm there might be the ashes of tragic passion, the traces of a life-long struggle with fate. That such a woman, so beautiful, so gifted, so well fitted to shine and govern in the great world, should have ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... almost stupidly. He had liked Hannaford, and had often invited him to play chess in the evenings, hoping with unconquerable optimism to "wean him from the Casino." The quiet man, with his black patches, his calm manner and slow smile as unreadable as the eyes of the Sphinx, had seemed to George Winter a curiously tragic yet mysteriously attractive figure. "Hannaford dead!" he ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... it," continued Pembury; "it's rubbish, and unreadable; and though they condescend to let us see it, I don't suppose two fellows in the Form ever ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... of trustee for his readers. No matter how copious may be his notes, he cannot fully explain his processes or the reason of his confidence in one witness and not in another, his belief in one honest man against a half dozen untrustworthy men, without such prolixity as to make a general history unreadable. Now, in this position as trustee he is bound to assert nothing for which he has not evidence, as much as an executor of a will or the trustee for widows and orphans is obligated to render a correct account of the moneys in his possession. For this reason Grote has said, "An historian is bound ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... would have liked to vindicate the efficiency of his department by establishing the identity of that man. He was a loyal servant. That, however, appeared impossible. The first term of the problem was unreadable—lacked all suggestion but that ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... potential terror, a devouring enigma of space. Yes. But our lives have been nothing if not a continuous defiance of what you can do and what you may hold; a spiritual and material defiance carried on in our plucky cockleshells on and on beyond the successive provocations of your unreadable horizons." ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... calculated to do more efficient service than could have been expected, as the circumstances of the field were, from ten knights cumbered with bulky mail. Sir Harris Nicolas, the most candid English historian of the battle, and who prepared a very useful, but unreadable volume concerning it, after speaking of the bad arrangements adopted by the French, proceeds to say,—"The inconveniences under which the French labored were much increased by the state of the ground, which was not only soft from heavy rains, but was broken up by their horses during ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... a flowered pattern forms, with his shepherd's plaid trousers, his grey spats and patent-leather boots, a colour scheme of no mean order. Nor is it merely Mr. Smith's finely mottled face. The face, no doubt, is a notable one,—solemn, inexpressible, unreadable, the face of the heaven-born hotel keeper. It is more than that. It is the strange dominating personality of the man that somehow holds you captive. I know nothing in history to compare with the position ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... and the brow one that promised passion and power? A thousand other eyes might have looked on either one of them, and forgotten; these two looked—and remembered. You cannot tell why; it is the old story; the hidden, unreadable affinity making itself known to its counterpart; the sign and countersign of nature. But it was only nature that gave and took; not Diana ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... of which that girl had been a victim? It seemed hardly probable. It was not even easy to imagine. What struck me most was her—I suppose I must call it— composure. One could not tell whether she understood what she had done. One wondered. She was not so much unreadable as blank; and I did not know whether to admire her for it or dismiss her from my thoughts as a passive butt of ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... except in a few pieces, such as Lodge's Margarite of America, there is little attempt to utilise new scenes and conditions. But the whole class has special interest for us in one peculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and that is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play which is sometimes called Euphuism. Nor is this wonderful, considering that more than one of these "pamphlets" is directly connected with the matter and the personages ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... verities. His voice haunts me now, suggesting that, in spite of the reasons I have advanced, the general reader can scarcely be expected to read modern poetry, and that therefore his habit of skipping must continue. He would say that most modern poetry is unreadable, at least by the average man. He would say that if the infinitely complex study of emotional mind-states that lies behind the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, or the eerie otherworldliness of Yeats, or the harsh virility of Sandburg is to be regarded as an intensification ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... learned account of the Roman toilette. I here send you a companion to that work—not a direct translation, but a very minute abstract from a similar dissertation by Hartmann, (weeded of the wordiness which has made the original unreadable, and in consequence unread,) on the toilette and the wardrobe of the ladies of ancient Palestine. Hartmann was a respectable Oriental scholar, and he published his researches, which occupy three thick octavos, making in all one thousand four hundred and eighty-eight ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... I did fight it. I didn't really know you until to-night. You've been unreadable. Now I feel you are your real self. Not the daredevil who defied me and mocked me. Not the little meek mouse on the hearth. I love the woman you ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... despair, bedlam, and the shambles; putting the reader marvellously in mind of that well-known old book of the same era, 'Reynolds's God's Revenge,' in which, with all due pious horror and bombastic sermonising, the national appetite for abominations is duly fed with some fifty unreadable Spanish histories, French histories, Italian histories, and so forth, one or two of which, of course, are known to have furnished subjects for the ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite;—insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran. We read in it, as we might in the State-Paper Office, unreadable masses of lumber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses of a remarkable man. It is true we have it under disadvantages: the Arabs see more method in it than we. Mohammed's followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... a hand over his face, as if his body were suddenly tired; but the next moment it tautened again and he swung around. His face was unreadable. A multitude of conflicting emotions struggled there. He strode to a group of several of the ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... the door jamb and with a parting "I should bibble," started back to his goats, which he had refused to graze outside the Basin as Holman Sommers advised. Helen May began valiantly to struggle with the fine, symmetrical, but almost unreadable chirography of the man of many words. She succeeded in transcribing the human polyp properly lithified and correctly constituting the strata of the psychozoic age, when Vic stuck his head in at the ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... with the old look, like the back o' somethin', or like you'd rubbed down the page when the ink was wet, an' had blurred the whole thing unreadable. An' I judged that, like enough, she knew nothin' ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... by the consequent expansion of the field of view opened to rational observation, and that those scientific works which have, to use a common expression, become 'antiquated' by the acquisition of new funds of knowledge, are thus continually being consigned to oblivion as unreadable. However discouraging such a prospect must be, no one who is animated by a genuine love of nature, and by a sense of the dignity attached to its study, can view with regret any thing which promises future additions and a greater degree of perfection to general ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... my chessboard with my letters on it. I tried reading them downward, across, upward and diagonally, in the direction of the moves of different chess pieces—king, queen, rook and bishop. Nothing came of that, whatever I did; the thing was as unreadable as ever. But there remained one chess-move to try—the eccentric move of the knight; the move of one square forward, backward or sideways, and then one square diagonally, or, as it has sometimes been more concisely expressed, the move to the next square but one of a different colour from ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... the Nabob received a note from Hemerlingue, almost unreadable on account of the complicated scrawls, of abbreviations more or less commercial, under which the ex-sutler hid his entire want ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... people who have spent the night in China, as it were, superficial and amusing, full of the tinkling of temple bells; and there are other books written by people who have spent years in China and who know it well,—ponderous books, full of absolute information, heavy and unreadable. Books of the first class get one nowhere. They are delightful and entertaining, but one feels their irresponsible authorship. Books of the second class get one nowhere, for one cannot read them; they ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... rulers. He has the power of all strong natures of creating around him an atmosphere of uncertainty, apprehension, and fear. Of all the many problems of this Session of probably fierce personal conflict, this was the most unreadable sphinx. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... conflicts into a mere appendix of ecclesiastical history. Here it is evident how far we in our day are away from Feuerbach. His most beautiful passages in praise of the new religion of love are today unreadable. ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... breaks off abruptly. Herr Wichard Lange had some trouble in deciphering it from Froebel's almost unreadable rough draft, and here and there he had even to guess at a word or so. Froebel had intended to present this letter to the Duke of Meiningen at the close of 1827, when the negotiations began to be held about a proposed National Educational Institution at Helba, to be maintained by the ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... and pulled her blanket around her. She was typically Indian at the moment, unreadable and cold. But she nodded in acquiescence ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... dear Emerson, you must ask me no questions till— alas, till I know not when! After four weary years of the most unreadable reading, the painfulest poking and delving, I have come at last to the conclusion—that I must write a Book on Cromwell; that there is no rest for me till I do it. This point fixed, another is not less fixed hitherto, That a Book on Cromwell is impossible. Literally so: you ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 1734; 12mo, pp. 1040. A work written with upturned eyes of prostrate admiration for "DERO MAJESTAT ('Theiro' Majesty) AUGUST THE GREAT;" exact too, but dealing merely with the CLOTHES of the matter, and such a matter: work unreadable, except on compulsion, to the stupidest mortal. The same Fassmann, who was at the Fair of St. Germain, who lodged sometimes with the Potsdam Giant, and whose ways are all fallen dark to us.] "The King of Poland arrived upon us at Berlin on the 29th of May," says Wilhelmina; had been at ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... pure aesthetics which don't so much as present themselves to people like myself—that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the ordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artists regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is really not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of literature, just as Professor Radium of 'Comic Cuts' is its stock man ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... suddenly, it dawned upon her that Brandt also might be in this scheme to carry her off. She scouted the idea; but it returned. Perhaps Mordaunt was only a tool; perhaps he himself was being deceived. Helen turned pale at the very thought. She had never forgotten the strange, unreadable, yet threatening, expression which Brandt had worn the day she had refused ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... others, and more knowledge, and that I must care about the best things—but how am I to begin?" She wondered what books he would tell her to take up to her own room, and recalled the famous writers that she had either not looked into or had found the most unreadable, with a half-smiling wish that she could mischievously ask Deronda if they were not the books called "medicine for the mind." Then she repented of her sauciness, and when she was safe from observation carried up a miscellaneous ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... writing long-hand; others were pounding away at the typewriter; others were talking in undertones to "typists" taking dictation to the machine; others were reading "copy" and altering it with huge blue pencils which made apparently unreadable smears wherever they touched the paper. In and out skurried a dozen office-boys, responding to calls from various desks, bringing bundles of proofs, thrusting copy into boxes which instantly and noisily ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... unity seems due to want of interest in politics. It is often said that the history of India in pre-Mohammedan times is an unintelligible or, at least, unreadable, record of the complicated quarrels and varying frontiers of small states. Yet this is as true of the history of the Italian as of the Indian peninsula. The real reason why Indian history seems tedious and intricate is that large interests are involved only ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... (Unreadable) and almost exclusively absorbed by material concerns. The climate, too, variable and oppressive in summer and winter alike, imposed upon the Chaldaean painful exactions, and obliged him to work with an energy of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... sensibility: 'In contemplating the origin, rise, and fall of nations, the mind is alternately filled with a mixture of sacred pain and pleasure.' Would you read further? Then you will find Fauna and Flora, twin goddesses of ineptitude, flitting across the page, unreadable as a geographical treatise. His first masterpiece was translated into French, anno VI., and the translator apologises that war with England alone prevents the compilation of a suitable biography. Was ever thief treated with ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... him with a keen eye. He had studied the face of the big man from up north all during the scene, and he found the stern features unreadable. For one instant now he guessed that Sinclair was about ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... Morris Stories" is to sow the seed of pure, noble, manly character in the mind of our great nation's childhood. They exhibit the virtues and vices of childhood, not in prosy, unreadable precepts, but in a series of characters which move before the imagination, as living beings do before ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... same year he issued Shelley's second novel from his press, and entered into negotiations with him for the publication of more poetry. The new romance was named "St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian." This tale, no less unreadable than "Zastrozzi," and even more chaotic in its plan, contained a good deal of poetry, which has been incorporated in the most recent editions of Shelley's works. A certain interest attaches to it as the first known link between Shelley ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... form, may be expressed as 10/3.23.1." JULES RAULIN, Etudes chimiques sur la vegetation. Recherches sur le developpement d'une mucedinee dans un milieu artificiel, p. 192, Paris, 1870. We have seen in the case of yeast that this ratio may be as low as [Proofers note: unreadable symbol]] On the other hand, if we deprive the yeast of air entirely, or cause it to develop in a saccharine medium deprived of free oxygen, it will multiply just as if air were present, although with less activity, and under these ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... me, in that maddeningly unreadable cross-eyed expression of cold ferocity which the scars gave his ugly face. We had agreed on one-third each, the other two to split the other third between them. I was footing the bills, Jake was nearly ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... Dresden, he believed that, in spite of the open enmity which existed between them, he could persuade the horse-dealer to enter into a new alliance with him. He therefore sent off one of his men to him with a letter, written in almost unreadable German, to the effect that if he would come to Altenburg and resume command of the band which had gathered there from the remnants of his former troops who had been dispersed, he, Nagelschmidt, was ready to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... read, are not unreadable. They are tender in feeling, musical in verse, and pure in diction. They were mostly suggested by natural scenery, and are uniformly melancholy. Bowles could suck melancholy out of a landscape as a weasel sucks ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... to suppose that Shakspeare, like Mohammed, instead of going to a garret, went to a cave, and received his Koran from Gabriel; but then the mischief is, that Shakspeare is the most readable of authors, and the Koran, perhaps the most unreadable trash ever inflicted on a student—at least its translation is; and besides, no angel of them all could ever have shewn such an acquaintance with our (to a celestial) unkindred humanity as these poems ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... fascinated hackers (who tend to be intrigued by artificial languages in general). It is traditional for graphics printers, plotters, window systems, and the like to support a Feanorian typeface as one of their demo items. See also {elder days}. 2. By extension, any odd or unreadable typeface produced by a graphics device. 3. The typeface mundanely called 'B"ocklin', ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... for use in correspondence on postals that makes the matter unreadable unless the recipient has a duplicate key card is made as follows: Rule two cards the size of postal, one for the sender and one for the receiver, dividing them into quarters. These quarters are subsequently divided ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... singular confidence in her own abilities, infinite curiosity, untiring industry, and never-ending and inexhaustible energy. She wrote nearly as much as Voltaire, and barely excelled him in the amount of unreadable work, which, if printed, would fill over ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... attached to this singular expression. Much of that silly and obscene correspondence of James with Buckingham, while it adds one more mortifying instance of "the follies of the wise," must be attributed to this cause.[A] Are not most of the dramatic works of that day frequently unreadable from this circumstance? As an historian, it would be my duty to show how incredibly gross were the domestic language and the domestic familiarities of kings, queens, lords, and ladies, which were much like the lowest of our populace. We may felicitate ourselves on having escaped ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... who came in daily to perform such chores cleared away the things. Jessie, with an unreadable countenance, brought back the bottle of Scotch and the glasses and a bowl of cracked ice and ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... steady his teetering head, rested his chin on his hands, which were clasped over the top of his walking-stick. Occasionally his eyes roved to the portrait of his wife, and a melancholy, unreadable smile broke the severe line ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... low, Rina, true to her promise, came to attend upon Natalie. There was no change in her manner; her unreadable eyes expressed no consciousness of the events of the night before. She questioned Natalie in her best professional way. It was not yet necessary to disturb the dressings on the arm; but she volunteered to do Natalie's hair; and what other offices would contribute to her comfort. Garth, ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... innocent. But they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to precedent. In spite of their endeavours, the truth will out. Newspapers, even, have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon. One feels it as one wades through their columns. It is always the unreadable that occurs. I am afraid that there is not much to be said in favour of either the lawyer or the journalist. Besides, what I am pleading for is Lying in art. Shall I read you what I have written? It might do you a great deal ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... One of the most unreadable specimens of the sex on which he pronounced this highly original dictum, entered the room just then; and he found himself at once out of his ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the streets toward the central portion of the Bavarian capital the familiar sign, "American Cigar Store," looking like a ray of light penetrating through the gloom and mystery of the multitudinous unreadable signs that surround it, greets my vision, and I immediately wend my footsteps thitherward. I discover in the proprietor, Mr. Walsch, a native of Munich, who, after residing in America for several years, has returned to dream away declining years amid the smoke ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... pages of the great fascicle of manuscript that was called Book Two, he had found the word "Bushido" written with a particularly flourishing capital letter and twice repeated. "That was inevitable," said White with the comforting regret one feels for a friend's banalities. "And it dates... [unreadable] ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... refrain—but in order that these effusions may not be lost to the world, I offer them to the annuals for 1839; not so much for the sake of pecuniary compensation, but in order to improve the reading of some of that very unreadable ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Inquisition. The massacre of St. Bartholomew, the fires of Smithfield, the immolation of the Moors, the extermination of the West Indians, the fantastic horrors of the Piedmontese persecution, which make unreadable the too truthful pages of Morland,—these were the spectres, which, not as now, dim and distant through the mist of centuries, but recent, bleeding from still gaping wounds, flitted before the eyes of every Englishman, and filled his brain and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... a shadow should spread to her work was unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with Dante, with Pascal. A novelist—for as a poet, after trying hard to think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable—as a novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... the name of the author of which, Valmiki, has come down to us, is a poem yet more vast and unequal. There are portions which to us are quite unreadable, and there are others comparable to the most imposing and most touching in all epic poetry. Reduced to its theme, the subject of Mahabharata is extremely simple; it is the history of Prince Rama, dispossessed of his throne, who saw his beloved wife, Sita, ravished ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... covers. Suddenly she stiffened, sat upright in the bed, startled into wakefulness. Johnny put one dark, bony hand on her white shoulder, gently, reassuring. After a moment, finding herself, she turned away and lit a cigarette. Johnny finished pulling on his boots and stood, his hawk-like face unreadable in the cold gray light streaming through the huge ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... an effort, but only her outward self. In her eyes was a message unreadable. Never before had I seen woman's ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... go forth into the world without due acknowledgment being made to that worthy old Dominie, Richard Johnson, to whose erudite but somewhat unreadable work the author is so largely indebted. As he flourished at the end of the sixteenth century, and the commencement of the seventeenth, great allowances should be made for his style, which is certainly not suited to the taste of this generation. It is to be hoped that the present version, while ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... entirely different principle than any previous review; by restricting its attention to the most important works of each quarter, it gave extensive critiques of only a few books in each number and thus avoided the multitude of perfunctory notices that had made previous reviews so dreary and unreadable. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... lectures, to make his small salary as a teacher equal to the support of his family, his three children and his aged parents. There was his failure at literature, for his "History of the United States" brought him neither fame nor money, the public finding it dull and unreadable. ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... they might really be graded as wisdom—his analysis of men and women being particularly surprising. Those little twinkling, and sometimes sleepy, eyes of his, now that she began to study him the closer, reminded her of the unreadable eyes of an elephant she had once seen—eyes that presaged nothing but inertia, until whack went the trunk and over toppled the boy who ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... glistening coloured cover, entitled Fantomas. It was the seventh volume of an interminable romance which for years had had a tremendous vogue among the concierges, the workgirls, the clerks, and the cocottes of Paris. An unreadable affair, not even indecent, which nevertheless had enchanted a whole generation. To be able to enjoy it was an absolute demonstration of lack of taste; but did not some of his best friends enjoy books no better? And could he not any day in any drawing-room see ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... and Cabbins, and some run between Decks. The French gave 'em Quarters, and put the Prisoners on board the Victoire, the Prize yielding nothing worth mention, except Liberty to about fifteen Christian Slaves; she was carried into and sold with the Prisoners at [text unreadable]. The Turks lost a great many Men, the French not less than 35 in boarding, for they lost very few by the great Shot, the Sally Men firing mostly at the Masts and Rigging, hoping by disabling to carry her. The limited Time of their Cruize being out, the Victoire returned ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... expression, and every sentence broken by apology. I should have to write a dozen of letters before I could print a line, and the line, at last, would be only like a bit of any other botanical book—trustworthy, it might be, perhaps; but certainly unreadable. Whereas now, it will rather put things more forcibly in the reader's mind to have them retouched and corrected as we go on; and our natural and honest mistakes will often be suggestive of things we could not have discovered ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... England; the Etruria Vendicata praises the murder of the abominable Alessandro de' Medici by his kinsman, Lorenzaccio. None of the satires, whether on kings, aristocrats, or people, have lent themselves easily to my perusal; the epigrams are signally unreadable, but some of the sonnets are very good. He seems to find in their limitations the same sort of strength that he finds in his restricted tragedies; and they are all in the truest ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the face of the speaker to that of Ormuz Khan. But her scrutiny of those unreadable countenances availed her nothing. She was conscious of a great and growing uneasiness; and Mrs. McMurdoch, misunderstanding the expression upon her face, squeezed ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... read it aloud," she proposed calmly, "and I will assist in the corrections. For the French edition I may be able to suggest. The papers today are most amusing," she continued. "The German press is almost unreadable. No wonder that there is a price upon ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in some foreign language. In the lower left-hand corner was what appeared to be the name of the maker but this was so blotted out as to be unreadable. ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... representing the prejudices, as well as the interests, of the planters. The article in the Quarterly is valuable, as being an able and liberal digest of various narratives; some derived from Hayti itself. Rainsford's book is nearly unreadable, from the absurdity of its style; but it is truly respectable in my eyes, notwithstanding, from its high appreciation of L'Ouverture's character. It contains more information concerning Toussaint than can be found, I believe, anywhere ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... the town authorities certainly did not know, neither could they apparently find out. His name, as written by himself, was unreadable. His notes told nothing; his son could tell little more—of consequence. A report, to be sure, did come from the village, far up the mountain, that such a man and boy had lived in a hut that was almost inaccessible; but even this did not ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... appalling. Lately we have really begun to find out that capitalism cannot write, just as it cannot fight, or pray, or marry, or make a joke, or do any other stricken human thing. But this discovery has been quite recent. The capitalist newspaper was never actually unread until it was actually unreadable. ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... is inscribed with an anchor and the following lettering: 12 PDR Boat Howitzer 1856 J.A.D. U.S.N.Y. Washington 757 LBS. 58 PRE No. 45. The cannon on the right has inscriptions which are very worn and indistinct. There is an engraved anchor, but except for a letter here-and-there, the inscription is unreadable. ...
— The Fairfax County Courthouse • Ross D. Netherton
... are the most famous and the most unreadable in all Germany. Surely you have heard of his 'Treatise on Man?' A treatise on a subject in which everyone is interested, written in a style which ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... the officials of the port of St Malo to mark down in the records of the day the death of any townsman of especial note. Such an entry as this is the last record of the great pilot. In the margins of certain documents of September 1, 1557, there is written in the quaint, almost unreadable penmanship of the time: 'This said Wednesday about five in the morning died ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... Cardon looking out of the screen in his private office. The round, ordinarily cheerful, face was serious, but the innocent blue eyes were as unreadable as ever. He was wearing one of the new Mexican charro-style jackets, black ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... fantastic; yet it was something to annex for the first time the ocean, with all its marvels, to the scenery of adventure. Gombauld, the Beau Tenebreux of the Hotel de Rambouillet, secured a reading for his unreadable Endymion by the supposed transparence of his allusions to living persons. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin relieved the amorous exaltations of his Ariane, a tale of the time of Nero, by excursions which touch the borders of comedy. These are books on ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... concerns himself with diversities of early Christian belief, the course of country-dances in England, or the growth of mediaeval legends, he adds the grace of telling a tale and drawing a character. He has published nearly a hundred volumes, not one of them unreadable. But no one man may write with equal pen of German history, of comparative mythology and philology, of theological dissertations, and of the pleasures of English rural life, while he adds to these ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... frequently most unliterary, though they may be susceptible of a high literary polish. The sub-title "A True Story," which young writers think so valuable a part of the tale, is too often the trademark of an unreadable mess of conventional people, ordinary incidents and commonplace conversation. We find few genuinely true stories, and when we do find them we seldom care to read them through. I have read many stories which I knew to be literally ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... too Oriental and not Oriental enough. He had small store of Arabic at the time—Lane of the Nights is not Lane of the Dictionary—and his pages are disfigured by many childish mistakes. Worst of all, the three handsome volumes are rendered unreadable as Sale's Koran by their anglicised Latin, their sesquipedalian un English words, and the stiff and stilted style of half a century ago when our prose was, perhaps, the worst in Europe. Their cargo of Moslem learning was most valuable to the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... and primary—no fine shading or artistic handling to be seen. A title under the picture, and several inscriptions in French at the left side of the bottom, were so stained and blurred as to be totally unreadable with ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... deaths. It shan't happen again, though. Give me that book—" And, snatching Mell's treasure from her hands, Mrs. Davis flung it into the fire. It flamed, shrivelled: the White Cat, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast,—all, all were turned in one moment into a heap of unreadable ashes! Mell gave one clutch, one scream; then she stood quite still, with a hard, vindictive look on her face, which so provoked her step-mother that she gave her a slap as she hurried the children upstairs. Mrs. Davis did not often slap Mell. "I punish my own children," she would say, ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... character. They have been a theme upon which a "bookworm" could gloat, a chest of secret drawers into which the curious delight to pry, a difficult problem in Euclid for the mathematician to solve; and an unreadable book for the author. A conglomeration of languages for the scholar, a puzzle for the historian, and a subject for the novelist. These are points which it is not the object of this book to attempt to clear up and settle; all it aims at, as in the case of my "Cry of the Children from the Brick-yards ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... and stared. "What a tirade!" he thought. The silence and immobility of Councillor Mikulin impressed him. The bearded bureaucrat sat at his post, mysteriously self-possessed like an idol with dim, unreadable eyes. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... After this he resigned himself to a perfectly simple life, occupied with the writing of poetry, the care of pets, gardening, and carpentry. The bulk of his work consists of long moralizing poems, prosy, prolix, often trivial, and to-day largely unreadable. Same of them are in the rimed couplet and others in blank verse. His blank-verse translation of Homer, published in 1791, is more notable, and 'Alexander Selkirk' and the humorous doggerel 'John Gilpin' are famous; but his most significant ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... imparts such an air of heightened verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the new journalism. "The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are 'not for an age, but for all time,'" says Bernard Shaw, "has his reward in being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes trying to knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare peopling that same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire hunts, Ibsen photographing the local doctors and vestrymen ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... points of the system, the superficiality especially with which controversies are presented, the defective division, the frequent repetitions, with quite as good reason as the poetical reader frets at the mathematics put into rhythm which makes a great part of the poem absolutely unreadable. In spite of these incredible defects, before which every man of mediocre talent must inevitably have succumbed, this poet might justly boast of having carried off from the poetic wilderness a new chaplet such as the Muses had not yet bestowed on any; and it ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... solecisms in language and mistakes in science, the empty verbiage that dilates on a platitude in one place, and the jejune abstract that hurries over a knotty argument in another, without regretting that so unreadable a poet should ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Saxon reception of his magnanimities. [Valori, i. 211-219; OEuvres de Frederic, iii. 81-85. For details on Bruhl, see Graf von Bruhl, Leben und Charakter (1760, No Place): Anonymous, by one Justi, a noted Pamphleteer of the time: exists in English too, or partly exists; but is unreadable, except on compulsion; and totally unintelligible till after very much ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... nervously because of the look in the black, unreadable eyes of this straight, slim Indian girl who was so beautiful—and so silent. "They go muy fas', Ramon an' Beel. Poco tiempo—sure, ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... pocket or bag of what had been cream-colored satin embroidered with small bunches of heartsease, and which was aromatic with otto of roses. Awkwardly, and somewhat slowly he drew out of this a small locket, in the center of which was some unreadable legend in cabalistic looking character, and which blazed with the finest diamonds. Heaven alone knows the secret of that gem, or the struggle with which the Priest yielded it. He put it into Antoine's hand, ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... De Quincey's work is now unreadable because it deals with political economy and allied subjects, in which he fancied he was an expert. He is a master only when he deals with pure literature, but he has a large vein of satiric humor that found its best expression ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... to whom those that love reading Thro' all that's unreadable call very clever;— And whereas Mill Senior makes war on good breeding, Mill Junior makes war ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... unsteadily; the two men grasped hands and for an instant neither spoke. Darrell saw before him a tall, powerfully built man, approaching fifty, whose somewhat bronzed face, shrewd, stern, and unreadable, was lighted by a pair of blue eyes which once had resembled Whitcomb's. With a swift, penetrating glance the elder man looked searchingly into the ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... unmeaning. He seems to have been told that he has wit and humor, and—strange delusion!—to believe it. He writes as if he imagined that he possessed the inventive power: never was a greater mistake. These qualities and these mistakes make his prose writings unreadable and intolerable, at least all the later ones. But when to the charms of his ordinary style are added the attractions of verse, then the sense aches with the combined and heightened beauties. The present volume exaggerates all his literary vices. The plan of these ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... bigger than a hen's egg. The nut holdeth the book: there are as many leaves in his little book as the great Bible, and he hath written as much in one of his little leaves as a great leaf of the Bible." We are told that this wonderfully unreadable copy of the Bible was "seen by many thousands." There is a drawing of the head of Charles I. in the library of St. John's College, at Oxford, wholly composed of minute written characters, which, at a small distance, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Grimm studied his friend's unreadable face for an instant with an almost painful intensity. Then a smile swept away the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... [Transcriber's note: unreadable text] about sunset that evening, and the command went into camp and I went to Jim's new log house. He had built one and had started in to build the second, having two carpenters ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... that half-century, have not been exalted, how many have not been depressed! We have seen Tennyson advanced beyond Virgil and Victor Hugo beyond Homer. We have seen the latest freak of futurism preferred to The Lotus Eaters, and the first Legende des Siecles rejected as unreadable. In face of this whirlwind of doctrine the public ceases to know whether it is on its head or its feet—"its trembling tent all topsy-turvy wheels," as an Elizabethan has it. To me it seems that security can only ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... and, putting for the instant entirely out of question its peculiarities of subject, metre, and general treatment, it was a daring innovation in point of class. The eighteenth century had, even under its own laws and conditions, distinctly eschewed long narrative poems, the unreadable epics of Glover, for instance, belonging to that class of exception which really does prove the rule. Pope's Rape had been burlesque, and his Dunciad, satire; hardly the ghost of a narrative had appeared in Thomson and Young; Shenstone, Collins, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... An unreadable expression flitted briefly across the gambler's lean face. "I know what you mean. Let's just say that the laws of this planet discriminate slightly against Free Status people like yours truly. They require us ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... books of Moses have been made quite unreadable by a most melancholy, most incomprehensible, revision. The course of the history is everywhere interrupted by the insertion of innumerable laws, with regard to the greater part of which it is impossible to see ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... his eyes that gave him away, his eyes of rare green that from a distance looked black. Slanting, veiled, unreadable beneath the lowered silky lashes, there was the soul of a tiger in their sinister depths. It was his eyes that ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... Hugh Ingelow, but the sphinx was never more unreadable than he. He caught her glance, however, and ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... air, As one by one they open clear and high, And win the wondering gaze of infancy, They speak,—yet utter not. Fair heavenly flowers Strewn on the floor-way of the angels' bowers! 'Twas HIS own hand that twined your chaplets bright, And thoughts of love are in your wreaths of light, Unread, unreadable by us;—there lie High meanings in your mystic tracery; Silent rebukings of day's garish dreams, And warnings solemn as your own ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... God,[54:1] which is in itself a revelation of its main contents. The Dedicatory Epistle, which is dated May 20th, 1648, some twelve months prior to the outbreak of the Digger Movement, already recorded, is the most interesting and suggestive portion of this long, wearisome, and almost unreadable volume. It is addressed to—"The Despised Sons and Daughters of Zion, scattered up and down the Kingdom of England." He first reminds them that "they are the object of the world's hatred and reproach," "branded ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... tried, that he was not as availably clever as others of his family. Whether nature or dawdling was to blame, he had neither originality nor fire. He could not get his plots or his characters to work, even when his mother or Babie jogged them on by remarks: his essays were heavy and unreadable, his jokes hung fire, and he had so exhausted every one's patience, that the translations and small reviewing work which he could have done were now unattainable. He was now ready to do anything, and he actually ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... following this which are obliterated, defaced or unreadable. There are more to follow. In the future such gaps in the content will be ...
— The Issahar Artifacts • Jesse Franklin Bone
... of his thence despatched to some congenial spirit in Haworth, long since dead, has been lent to me by the courtesy of Mr. William Wood, one of the last of Branwell's companions, in whose possession the torn, faded sheet remains. Much of it is unreadable from accidental rents and the purposed excision of private passages, and part of that which can be read cannot be quoted; such as it is, the letter is valuable as showing what things in life seemed desirable and worthy of attainment to this much-hoped-in brother of the ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... the laborious unreadable, well-read style—the book about the book. You are as one (when you are in the book about the book) thrust into the shadow of the endless aisles of Other Books—not that they are referred to baldly, or vulgarly, or in the text. It is worse than this (for this ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... plays, they begin by an attack on their pet aversion, who has nothing to do with the matter in hand. They cannot praise A, B, C, and D, without first assailing E. It will generally be found that E is a popular author. But the great virtue of a reviewer, who would be unreadable and make others unread, is a languid ignorant lack of interest in all things, a habit of regarding his work as a tedious task, to be scamped as rapidly and ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... driven in a low pony-phaeton. But in one respect he was altogether unlike his father. His whole time was spent among his books, and he was at this moment engaged in revising and editing a very long and altogether unreadable old English chronicle in rhyme, for publication by one of those learned societies which are rife in London. Of Robert of Gloucester, and William Langland, of Andrew of Wyntown and the Lady Juliana Berners, he could discourse, if not with ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... photograph (given by Mr. George Pomeroy Keese) of a drawing made in Paris by Miss Susan Cooper. By permission of owner, James Fenimore Cooper, Esq. From left to right, Caroline Martha (Mrs. H.F. Phinney), Susan [unreadable] Fenimore, Anne Charlotte, Maria ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... the fact that he left her nothing in his will. It is distinctly ascertained that she expressly prohibited him from doing so; they continued to correspond to the last, and her affectionate, though unreadable, reminiscences, are sufficient proof that she at no time considered herself to be neglected, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... "It's the men who loaf, my dear," she said. "When you undertake the transcription of an author's scrawl at ninepence the thousand words you have to work unusually hard, especially when, as it is in this case, the thing's practically unreadable. Besides, the woman in it makes me lose my temper. If I'd had a man of the kind described to deal with ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... or so the alteration of perspectives will have gone so far that historians will be a little perplexed to explain the causes of the Great War. The militarist monomania of Germany will have become incomprehensible; her Welt Politik literature incredible and unreadable.... ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... profess an unlimited adoration) sits trembling in his apartment, and dare neither defend nor revenge his favourite. This is the blessed condition of the most absolute monarch upon earth, who o—— no l—— but his will. [Editor's note: Two words are unreadable due to damage to the book which may have occurred at the time of printing. It seems probable that the sentence should end ".. who owns no limit but ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... person is never searched. The man opened the thin volume, and found it inscribed with mysterious and strange characters. It was written in short-hand. He turned over the leaves; on every page the same unreadable signs met the eye. He held it by the top, and next by the bottom: it was equally inscrutable either way. He shut it, and examined its exterior, but there was nothing on the outside to afford a key to ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... certainly nothing either in the quantity or the quality of the performance which makes this incredible, for it does not fill quite two hundred pages of the ordinary 18mo size and not very closely packed type of the usual cheap French novel, and though it is not unreadable, any tolerably clever boy might easily write it between the time when he gets his scholarship in spring and the time when he goes up in October. The author had evidently read his Pigault and adopted that ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... establish the usage. On the other hand, the fact that any number of newspaper reporters agree in usage does not make the usage reputable. The style of newspaper reporters is not without merit; it is very rarely unreadable; but for all its virtue it is rarely a well of ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... order of interest among the reformers, lies dead and buried in the works of the learned and unreadable M'Crie. It remains for some one to break the tomb and bring him forth, alive again and breathing, in a human book. With the best intentions in the world, I have only added two more flagstones, ponderous ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... men and horses under that lonely bank. Certainly they would not be found before the aasvogels had picked them clean, and these would be at work upon them now. And if they were found, the paper would have rotted or been blown away, or, at the worst, rendered so discoloured as to be unreadable. For the rest, there was nothing to connect him with the murder, now that his confederates were dead. Hendrik would prove an alibi for him. He was a useful man, Hendrik. Besides, who would believe that it was a murder? Two men were escorting an Englishman to the river; they ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... could hardly bear to correct the proofs (The proofs of 'Animals and Plants,' which Lyell was then reading.), and you gave me fresh heart. I remember thinking that when you came to the Pigeon chapter you would pass it over as quite unreadable. Your last letter has interested me in very many ways, and I have been glad to hear about those horrid unbelieving Frenchmen. I have been particularly pleased that you have noticed Pangenesis. I do not know whether you ever had the feeling of having thought so much over a subject ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... concern, her pose languid, her eyes raised to him, but as unreadable as ever. He avoided looking into them for that very reason. He forgot himself in the contemplation of those passive arms, of these defenceless lips, and—yes, one had to go back to them—of these wide-open eyes. Something wild in their grey stare made him think of sea-birds ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... miss the more elaborate and sensational stories of Soviet life. But I have a word of consolation for him—they are eminently unreadable, and for myself I would never have read them had it not been for the hard duties of a literary critic. In this case as in others I prefer to go direct to the fountain-source and read Bely's Petersburg and the books of Remizov, which for all the difficulties they put in ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... shall be better treated this time," smiled Cervera, dropping into a chair opposite the detective, and fixing her sensuous, dark eyes on Nick's calm, unreadable face. ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... his treble position as banker, economic writer, and general litterateur, was his charming book 'Lombard Street.' Most writers know nothing about business, he sets forth, most business men cannot write, therefore most writing about business is either unreadable or untrue: he put all his literary gifts at its service, and produced a book as instructive as a trade manual and more delightful than most novels. Its luminous, easy, half-playful "business talk" is irresistibly captivating. It is a description and analysis of the London money ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... I may put it so vulgarly, off the hooks. I think he must have got on to the conference between the mineowners and the representatives of the miners, and struggled until the gas became too thick for him. At any rate, after several unreadable pages, the following unhappy fragment stands ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... that really belongs to themselves. Nor is it at all so easy to counteract as to confute them. A masterly confutation of the part of their works truly their own may, from its subject, be a very unreadable book: it can have but the insinuated poison to deal with, unmixed with the palatable pabulum in which the poison has been conveyed; and mere treatises on poisons, whether moral or medical, are rarely works of a very delectable order. It seems ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the expert Mr. Hobbs might vainly have tried to open; but even when that seal has already been rightfully broken and the contents of the letter exposed, those contents are to the eye of delicacy as unreadable as if written in that Bass language which Adam and Eve are said to have spoken while in the garden of Eden, and which, since the fall, none but angels have ever been able to comprehend. Now, if Cicero thought it ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... of it, and desiring to "put us to it," kept ordering these books sent them. They never took one of them from the postoffice, hence the accumulation in the postoffice grew until there was room for little else. These books were surveys and agricultural reports. Unreadable to say the least, but heavy in the extreme. The postoffice at Santa Fe was a little bit of a concern, and the postmaster said there was no room for the books there. Earlier in the year I had carried ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... with red and white—which, for the sake of a Court Beauty, there besieged with her father, he carried to the house; falling, however, struck by a chance bullet, or shot perhaps by one of his own party. A few of the young Officer's verses, written in the stilted fashion of the time, and almost unreadable now, have been preserved. The lady's portrait hangs in the white drawing room at Bligh; a simpering, faded figure, with ringlets and drop-pearls, and a ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith |
