"Unbeautiful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... found it to be in darkness and switched on the green-shaded lamp which was suspended above the table. Its light revealed a bare apartment having distempered walls severely decorated by an etching of a former and unbeautiful Commissioner. The blinds were drawn. A plain, heavy deal table (bearing a blotting-pad, a pewter ink-pot, several pens and a telephone), together with three uncomfortable chairs, alone broke the expanse of highly polished floor. Dunbar ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... blue wherever the light touched it, and it encircled the white prominent temple like a piece of rich black velvet; a dark shadow defined the delicate nose, and hinted at thin indecision of lips, whilst a broad touch of white marked the weak but not unbeautiful chin. ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... little dry "writers-down of verse" with which, in Paris, the Middle Ages died; they were not a swarm, for they were not living; they were a heap of dust. All his early work is touched with the learned, tedious, unbeautiful industry which was all that the elder men round Louis XII could bring to letters. By a happy accident there were mixed in him, however, two vigorous springs of inspiration, each ready to receive the new ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... state that black means hatred and malice. Red, of all shades from lurid brick-red to brilliant scarlet, indicates anger; brutal anger will show as flashes of lurid red from dark brown clouds, while the anger of "noble indignation" is a vivid scarlet, by no means unbeautiful, though it gives an unpleasant thrill; a particularly dark and unpleasant red, almost exactly the colour called dragon's blood, shows animal passion and sensual desire of various kinds. Clear brown (almost ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... Arethusa's shirtwaist for her, and her skirt, and even manipulated that uncompromisingly unbeautiful protection which Miss Eliza insisted was all that kept the healthy Arethusa from dying of pneumonia in the winter season, in such a very capable way that it could not possibly show; and slipped the dainty gown over the ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... "Beauty" by the other men of the fort. No one knew his first name, and in general he was known in the country as Beauty Smith. But he was anything save a beauty. To antithesis was due his naming. He was pre-eminently unbeautiful. Nature had been niggardly with him. He was a small man to begin with; and upon his meagre frame was deposited an even more strikingly meagre head. Its apex might be likened to a point. In fact, in his boyhood, before he had been named Beauty by his fellows, he ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... for from no other man, I was confident, could have issued so sepulchral a plaint. It was unmusical, unbeautiful, unlively, and indescribably doleful. Yet the words showed that it should have ripped and crackled with high spirits and lawlessness, for the words poor ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... without her gates, at a safe distance. I, a newcomer, venture to apply what I believe to be a new superlative, and to call her the most maligned city in the world. Even sympathetic observers have exaggerated all that is uncouth, unbeautiful, unhealthy in her life, and overlooked, as it seems to me, her all-pervading charm. One must be a pessimist indeed to feel no exhilaration on coming in contact with such intensity of upward-striving life as meets one on every hand in this league-long island city, stretching oceanward ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... his expression as a scientific man defends his, and demonstrate that they are true upon any assumptions whatsoever. Any loud fool may stand in front of a picture and call it inaccurate, untrustworthy, unbeautiful. That last, the most vital issue of all, is the one least assured. Loud fools always do do that sort of thing. Take quite ignorant people before almost any beautiful work of art and they will laugh at it as absurd. If one sits on a popular evening in that long ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... should they wish to peep at the author's physiognomy for curiosity's sake, may—if that curiosity prove its own punishment—leave those first pages uncut until the book falls to pieces on the bookshelf. For myself, I hate to read some beautifully written thought, only to have the author's distinctly unbeautiful face always protruding between me and my delight—like some utterance of the commonplace in the middle of a discussion ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... saw the stuccoed court That led to dim secluded rooms within. She followed, dutiful, the dame unbeautiful, Who told her that the Christian world means sin. Some day, full soon, she would go forth a bride - Of one whose face she never had beheld. Something within her, wakened, and rebelled; She flung aside her ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... who must keep their hands employed. Perhaps it is because she is always quietly at work herself, and so sympathizes with her busy human friends. And possibly there is no needful occupation which is wholly unbeautiful. The beauty of work depends upon the way we meet it—whether we arm ourselves each morning to attack it as an enemy that must be vanquished before night comes, or whether we open our eyes with the sunrise to welcome ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... an empire or a court, this woman who managed the thronged, buzzing Convent with the lifting of her finger, with the softest tone of her soft West of Ireland voice, devoid of all trace of the unbeautiful brogue, cultured, elegant, refined. As I have said, the lessons that she taught bore great fruit during that red time of war that was coming, and will ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... one of endless energy, endless determination; with a dash of that finer dissatisfaction which is always seeking out new embodiments, under all difficulties, of Man's pursuit, in a difficult, and often an unbeautiful world, of Truth and Beauty. Above all, he was a consummate draughtsman, and as Francisco Pacheco, the father-in-law of Velasquez, wrote in his "Arte de la Pintura" (1649): "Drawing is the life and soul of painting; drawing, ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... boom superlatives. Even when they are showered on an author who is the just victim of a boom—and, on a reasonable estimate, at least fifty per cent of the booms have some justification—they are as unbeautiful as rotten apples unless they have this personal kind ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... color, the play of motion and the surprise of idea. It is usually a saddening effect that beauty produces and perhaps this is because beauty is something like an illumination that while admirable in itself throws into pathetic evidence all the ugly and unbeautiful ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Seminary," Forrest went on. "As I had already enunciated before I was so rudely interrupted, the one thing only that can balm and embalm this savage breast is the 'Maiden's Prayer.' Listen, with all your ears ere I chew them off in multitude and gross! Listen, silly, unbeautiful, squat, short-legged and ugly female under the piano! Can you recite ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... drawing-room, also, unbeautiful and grave to sadness though it was. The walls were wainscotted to the ceiling with ancient oak, so that though the north light entered at four high windows the room seemed dark. The furniture was ugly, miscellaneous ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... really so that most women say no to camp life because they are afraid of being uncomfortable and looking unbeautiful? There is no reason why a woman should make a freak of herself even if she is going to rough it; as a matter of fact I do not rough it, I go for enjoyment and leave out all possible discomforts. There is no reason why a woman ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... mercifully deliberate on-coming of age draws on all of us were, it is true, nearly obliterated, but in their place was a certain blankness that was very unbeautiful indeed. ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... short of breath. His other pursuers, appearing now in their true shapes to the fugitive, proved also to be but elves, each wearing the skin of the beast, whose whole likeness he wore but now, and showing an aspect, wild and savage enough, yet which would not have been unbeautiful to innocent eyes. With a bland smile and light wave of ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... I know, abominate the roadside sign. It seems to them a desecration of nature, the intrusion of rude commercialism upon the perfection of natural beauty. But not I. I have no such feeling. Oh, the signs in themselves are often rude and unbeautiful, and I never wished my own barn or fences to sing the praises of swamp root or sarsaparilla—and yet there is something wonderfully human about these painted and pasted vociferations of the roadside signs; and I don't know ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... being received by Papa Haydn even while he was writing to Polzelli, rejoicing in the closing of two of those four baleful eyes that forbade their union. And let us not judge too harshly the Italian woman who had given this unbeautiful Austrian of such beautiful genius so much of her sunshine and tenderness. Nor let us judge too harshly the enamoured English widow. Why indeed need ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... of her, unbeautiful, enfeebled, her high spirit dimmed, stirred in him a new, strange tenderness. His arm tightened about her, his look lost its jealous ardor and wandering over her blighted face, melted to a passionate concern. The appeal of her beauty ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... came in the afternoon many of the children refused to lie down: some consented but only to sing and talk as they lay. Only one, a child of 2-1/2, slept, because he cried himself to sleep from sheer strangeness. This apparently unbeautiful picture is only the first battle of the individual on his entrance to the ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... stepped in he caught sight of the unbeautiful countenance of Mr. Boyd squinting wickedly at him from far down ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... her. Of the party she liked Mrs. Fisher least, in fact she did not like her at all. She was the only one of the four ladies who had not yet smiled. True she was old, true she was unbeautiful, true she therefore had no reason to smile, but kind ladies smiled, reason or no. They smiled, not because they were happy but because they wished to make happy. This one of the four ladies could not then, Francesca decided, be kind; so she handed her the macaroni, being unable to hide ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... ever stop to think how that would take the coquetry out of a girl's eyes, and leave the sweet simplicity of the natural unspoiled soul? We have come to associate such a look with a plain, homely face, a dull complexion, careless, severe hair-dressing and unbeautiful clothes. Why? ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... seen her at Claridge's and at the marvelous flat in Knightsbridge. Now, at Buyukderer, he found her in a small, but beautifully arranged and furnished, villa with a lovely climbing garden behind it. Evidently she could not live in ugly surroundings or among cheap and unbeautiful things. He saw at a glance that the rugs and carpets on the polished floors of the villa were exquisite, that the furniture was not merely graceful and in place but really choice and valuable, and that the few ornaments and pieces of china scattered ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... some small and common kind of merit. If I should meet with it in a collection I should know it again; only, in that case it would look plain and homely to me—this little bird that for a time made all others seem unbeautiful. ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... that some one at his side was pouring forth a stream of not unbeautiful language in a low, frightened voice. Looking round, he saw a small, ugly, malaria-yellow woman, gazing at him with frightened black eyes and clasped hands, and talking rapidly in a curious blend of ancient and modern Greek. What she appeared to ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... wrote, and the delight of finding that he could not tear it out of his heart. He was a silent person, and a rather neglected person, and unbusinesslike, and unsuccessful, and uncultured, and unsociable, and unbeautiful. So there was nothing worse than emptiness where his secret story used to be. He had not found it worth while to fill the space. He had not found it worth while to ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... may have to put up through life with the unceasing clatter of the tongue of Misticoosis, she will be from this time the unbeautiful aspen tree, while her tongue shall be the leaves that will never again be still even in the gentlest breeze. The leaves of other trees shall rest at times, but the aspen leaves, now the tongue of Misticoosis, shall ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... world there is no other river like this. The phenomenal in form predominates: the water has grooved a channel for itself over a mile below the surrounding country, which is a desert uninhabited and uninhabitable, terraced with long series of cliffs or mesa-fronts, verdureless, voiceless and unbeautiful. It is a land of soft, crumbling soil and parched rock, dyed with strange colors and broken into fantastic shapes. Nature is titanic and mad: the sane and alleviating beauty of fertility is displaced by an arid and inanimate desolateness, which glows with alien splendor in evanescent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... state rooms of Holland House; and by great good luck had a glimpse of George Eliot getting out of a cab. She stood for a moment while she gave her fare to the cabman, and Katy looked as one who might not look again, and carried away a distinct picture of the unbeautiful, ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... unbeautiful beast, and he permitted himself startling liberties; crowding himself in between his mistress and her companion, helping himself without ceremony to a bunch of asters which Sir Bryan had in his hand, and neighing ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... the entrance into Edinburgh is delightful, but via Rosslyn it is unbeautiful enough until one actually drops down into ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... more acutely sensitive to results or to processes, we find the most agreeable effect nearer to one or to the other of these extremes of a tedious beauty or of an unbeautiful expressiveness. But these principles, as is clear, are not coordinate. The child who enjoys his rattle or his trumpet has aesthetic enjoyment, of however rude a kind; but the master of technique who should give a performance wholly without sensuous charm would be a gymnast ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... it with them you are lost, as far as a true conception of it goes. Beauty is something as absolute as truth, and whatever varies from it, as it was ascertained, we'll say, by the Greek sculptors and the Italian painters, is unbeautiful, just as anything that varies from the truth is untrue. Charm, fascination, atmosphere, are purely subjective; one feels them and another doesn't. But beauty is objective, and nobody can deny it who sees it, whether he likes it or not. You can't get away from it, any more than you can get away ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells |
