|
|
|
More "Repellent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The repellent look was still on John's face as he replied more ungraciously than before: "Nay, I can think o' nowt. I can tell thee, though, that the maister's told me to have the carriage ready to catch the train that goes east at nine" (he turned ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... square built; his skin was tanned to a deep mahogany colour; his hair and bushy beard were jet black, as also were his piercing, restless eyes; and though rather a handsome man, his features wore a fierce and repellent expression, which, however, passed away as soon ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... stiff formality in the man's tone. How could any woman see past that glacial front and glimpse the big, aching heart beyond? Austin was harsh and repellent when the least bit self-conscious, and now he was striving deliberately to heighten ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... children of pure reason, but of temperament, environment, necessity, and interest. Most of us take sides in life and forget the one we reject. But our conscience tells us it is there, and we can on occasion state it with a fairness and fulness which proves that it is not wholly repellent to our reason. During the crisis I write of, the attitude of Cargill and Vennard was not that of roysterers out for irresponsible mischief. They were eminently reasonable and wonderfully logical, and in private conversation they gave their opponents a very bad time. Cargill, who had hitherto ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... their hatred and affections and their various strongholds in the more eminently desirable parts of residential London, affect one like portions of some monstrous stone-fronted edifice, impressive but repellent. I have some curiosity to see, with Mr. GALSWORTHY'S help, how the Forsyte castle stands the disintegration ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... can improve. I'll tell you what I mean. My wife is a modest, intelligent woman, of good manners, and she is always neat, and tastefully dressed. Now, if she goes to take the cars, she is not permitted to go into a clean car with decent people, but is ordered into one that is repellent, and is forced into company that any refined woman would shrink from. But along comes a flauntingly dressed woman, of known disreputable character, whom my wife would be disgraced to know, and she takes any place that money will buy. It is this sort ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... two or three weeks Charnock occupied himself with his duties and everything went smoothly at the store and hotel. He was popular in the neighborhood, since his weaknesses were rather attractive than repellent to people who did not suffer from them. Men who drove long distances from their lonely farms liked a cheerful talk and to hear the latest joke; others enjoyed a game of cards in the back office when Mrs. Charnock was not about. Besides, it was known that Keller's was straight; one got ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... had to acknowledge that his manner had undergone a radical change. He no longer alarmed her by aggressive pursuit, nor sought to lead the conversation to those personal topics which she had found so repellent. Furthermore, he never alluded to the threat he had made to her that day at the hunt, nor even mentioned his rejected suit. And yet she felt apprehensively that he had not given up ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... as utilitarian. Its halls, bare and cheerless, echoed to the tread and were repellent as those of a barracks. The visitor felt chilled, disappointed, as if he had been met by the insolent servant of an indifferent hostess. It seemed the home of the mathematical, the mechanical, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... benefited. He was by no means successful as an instructor of the higher mathematics. Although the theories of light and motion were doubtless a branch of learning which the cadets particularly detested, his methods of teaching made it even more repellent. A thorough master of his subject, he lacked altogether the power of aiding others to master it. No flashes of humour relieved the tedium of his long and closely-reasoned demonstrations. He never descended ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... child, herself has seen it and felt it, but never, in her blameless innocence and purity, suspecting the cause, 'There is,' she said to me last night, confidentially, 'something strangely antagonistic and repellent in our natures, some undefined and nameless barrier between our ever understanding each other.' You comprehend, Mr. Hathaway, she does full justice to your intentions and your unquestioned abilities. 'I am not blind,' she said, 'to Mr. Hathaway's gifts, and ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... shown an aptitude at his lessons that had created in his guardian's mind some ambition for him, and she held him down to his books with rigid assiduity. He was naturally studious, but the feeling that he was being driven made his tasks repellent, although he performed them without outward sign of rebellion, while ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... call. It was cool but Carol huddled on the porch, rocking, meditating, rocking. The house was lonely and repellent, and though she sighed, "I ought to go in and read—so many things to read—ought to go in," she remained. Suddenly Erik was coming, turning in, swinging open the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... sitting on the porch, leaning against a pillar, her hands clasped about her knees, her head drooping a little, he could scarcely believe in the rigidity which met him at every turn. Was there something repellent in him? Was it, ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... in its sleep. Fillmore had chosen an unfortunate expression. To the novice in finance the word gold-mine had repellent associations. If there was one thing in which Sally had proposed not to invest her legacy, it was a gold-mine; what she had had in view, as a matter of fact, had been one of those little fancy shops which are called Ye Blue Bird or Ye Corner Shoppe, or something ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... from the reserved Cecil, who had lately been so conspicuously repellent? He thought the change too good so be believed, and, without another asking, accompanied her to the arbour; but she insisted on the ostensible motive of their going there being ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... into a number of rooms all well and comfortably furnished, but although my imagination may have been responsible for the idea, they all seemed to possess a chilly and repellent atmosphere. I felt that to essay sleep in any one of them would be the merest farce, that the place to all intents and purposes was uninhabitable, that something incalculably evil presided over ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... which go with midnight, solitude, and a candle. It is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... the only representatives of the lordly sex to whom the idea of women's equality was repellent. Anti-slavery brethren, too, were flinging themselves into all postures of self-defence against the dangerous innovation, which the sisters Grimke were letting into the social establishment, by itinerating "in the character of public lecturers and teachers." Amos A. Phelps was quite as ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... Malay military policemen are always on guard, and two scornful-looking Bengalis in white trousers, white short robes, with sashes of crimson silk striped with gold, and crimson-and-gold flat hats above their handsome but repellent faces, make up the visible part of the establishment. One of these Bengalis has been twice to Mecca, at an expense of 40 pounds on each visit, and on Friday appears in a rich Hadji suit, in which he goes through the town, and those Mussulmen who are not Hadji ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... delicate appreciation of color and fragrance, let the blossom alone, since it secretes no nectar; and one would naturally infer either that it can fertilize itself without insect aid—a theory which closer study of its organs goes far to disprove—or that the carrion-scent, so repellent to us, is in itself an attraction to certain insects needful for cross-pollination. Which are they? Beetles have been observed crawling over the flower, but without effecting any methodical result. One inclines ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... the stealthy opening and closing of the drawers in his wardrobe. Presently the footsteps drew near to his bed. For a moment he was obliged to set his teeth. A little waft of peculiar, unanalysable perfume, half-fascinating, half-repellent, came to him with a sense of disturbing familiarity. She paused by his bedside. He felt her hand steal under the pillow, which his head scarcely touched; search the pockets of his dressing gown, search even the bed. He listened to her soft breathing. The consciousness ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... have just been insisting, you sustain the interest by ignoring all the parts which will not bear a steady gaze. Whatever fascinates the eye, or agitates the heart by mimicry of life is selected and emphasized, and what is felt to be intractable or repellent is authoritatively set aside. The poet has an unlimited discretion. But on a theme so great as man he has no discretion at all. This resource is denied. You can give the truth only by giving the whole truth. In treating a common ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... know that planets and moons are held in their orbits by this attraction. But gravitation is a very simple affair compared to the force, or rather forces, of crystallization. For here the ultimate particles of matter, inconceivably small as they are, show themselves possessed of attractive and repellent poles, by the mutual action of which the shape and structure of the crystal are determined. In the solid condition the attracting poles are rigidly locked together; but if sufficient heat be applied the bond of union is dissolved, and in the state of fusion the poles are pushed so far asunder ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... balze form an appropriate preface to the gloomy and repellent isolation of Canossa. The rock towers from a narrow platform to the height of rather more than 160 feet from its base. The top is fairly level, forming an irregular triangle, of which the greatest length ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... his shoulder, Frank saw the dark, excited face of a youth of twenty or twenty-one. That face was almost wickedly handsome, although there was something decidedly repellent about it. The eyes were black as midnight, while the lips were ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... known that the emission of heat from a polished metallic surface is very slight, but from a surface of porcelain, paper, or charcoal, heat is discharged profusely. Even many of the best non-conductors are powerful radiators, and throw off heat with a repellent energy difficult ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... of such rare and positive beauty, had now shut down into a hard, repellent little mask of hate. Mr. Bristol looked at her for a moment in silence, and then at Sylvia, sobbing, her arm crooked over her face, hiding everything but her shining curls. "And what has this little girl to do with ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... lust and cruelty. But Shakespeare prudently showed scant respect for their handling of the narrative. By diverting the course of the plot at a critical point he not merely proved his artistic ingenuity, but gave dramatic dignity and moral elevation to a degraded and repellent theme. In the old versions Isabella yields her virtue as the price of her brother's life. The central fact of Shakespeare's play is Isabella's inflexible and unconditional chastity. Other of Shakespeare's ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... least fatigued, but she was too well brought up to remonstrate in any way. The maid was hovering in the background; an elderly woman with a capable face and slightly repellent manner. It was plain to Kate that her relatives would not receive her till they had learned more of the details of her banishment from home from her father, and had made up their minds how to treat her. She felt that even the serving woman regarded her somewhat in the light ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... shudder to my spine. I gazed at the room inquiringly, and of course I found no answer. It was one of those rooms whose spacious and consistent ugliness grows old into a sort of beauty, formidable and repellent, but impressive; an early Victorian room, large and stately and symmetrical, full—but not too full—of twisted and tortured mahogany, green rep, lustres, valances, fringes, gilt tassels. The green and gold drapery of the two high windows, and here and there a fine curve in a piece ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... the repellent, truculent countenance of the Captain-General Urquiza, who was the Dictator's right-hand man, a ferocious cut-throat if ever there was one, who had upheld his authority for many years in the rebellious upper provinces, but who had just ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... life, as it existed a quarter of a century or more ago, was extremely severe and indeed to our mind quite repellent. In those days—and no doubt they are so even yet in many places—the conditions were too often forbidding and deterrent. Otherwise how can we explain the very general tendency among the younger people to move from the ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... that only the unpleasant, the gloomy, and repellent could be right or religious. There is a type of conscience that determines action by the rule that if a thing is pleasant or beautiful it must be sinful and wrong. To such souls it is a sin to be sunny in disposition, to delight in the Father's fair world, with ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... Pedler, glancing up at me through his narrowed eyelids, and chuckling. "A paradise you might call it—ah! a paradise or a—garden of Eden, wi' Eve and the serpent and all!" and he broke out into a cackling laugh. And, in the look and the laugh, indeed about his whole figure, there was something so repellent, so evil, that I was minded to kick and trample him down into the ditch, yet the leering triumph ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... woman, at once servile, despotic, and obsequious, had placed his cup on the table, he buried his nose in a book, and by his repellent attitude compelled her ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... temperamental difference in this mere setting things to rights. It can be done so that every chair has a stiffly repellent look, and the conspicuous absence of dust makes one painfully conscious that it has not always been thus, while the fingers inadvertently stray over one's attire, plucking a shred here and a thread there. Even flowers ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... a repellent spectacle, but Rolfe, who had seen unpleasant sights of various kinds in his career, bent over the body with keen interest, noting these details, with all his professional instincts aroused. For though Rolfe had not yet risen very ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... statesman of the eighteenth century. Certainly in this respect he compares favourably with his awe-inspiring father. Not that Pitt possessed the charm of affability. On most persons his austere self-concentration produced a repellent effect; and it must be confessed that the Grenville strain in his nature dowered him with a fund of more than ordinary English coldness. Such was the opinion not only of the French emigres, whom he designedly kept at arm's length, but even of his followers, to ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... churches are more than chilling. In the simplest English village church one receives some impression of the friendliness of religion; but in Holland—of course I speak as a stranger and a foreigner—religion seems to be a cold if not a repellent thing. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... a man must worship a God, love a woman, or find a real friendship, to make life endurable. God was too dim, too nebulous, for Hollister's need. Friendship was almost unattainable. How could a man with a face so mutilated that it was grotesque, repellent, cultivate the delicate flower of friendship? Doris loved him because she could not see him. When she could see, she would cease to love. And there would be nothing left for him—nothing. He would live ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the most amusing questions concerning the short story is why a form which is singly so attractive that every one likes to read a short story when he finds it alone is collectively so repellent as it is said to be. Before now I have imagined the case to be somewhat the same as that of a number of pleasant people who are most acceptable as separate householders, but who lose caste and cease to be desirable acquaintances when gathered ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... a guilty feeling through Lorraine, until she remembered that a slow horse might save her from this man who was all bad,—except, perhaps, just on the surface which was not altogether repellent. She looked around at the tiny basin set like a saucer among the pines. Already the dusk was painting deep shadows in the woods across the opening, and turning the sky a darker blue. Skinner rolled over twice, ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... the otherwise delightful romantic atmosphere. For a single illustration, the description of the House of Alma in Book II, Canto Nine, is a tediously literal medieval allegory of the Soul and Body; and occasional realistic details here and there in the poem at large are merely repellent ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the roof anything to do with your divination?" asked Vendale, holding his light towards a gloomy ragged growth of dark fungus, pendent from the arches with a very disagreeable and repellent effect. "We are famous for this growth in this ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... Unity is to be no roseate fiction, no gainful pretense, but a living reality. The United States of the future will be no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellent commonwealths, but a true exemplification of 'many in one'—many stars blended in one common flag—many States combined in one homogeneous Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls. The merchant of Boston or New-York will visit Richmond ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Talbot's eyes, that an observer might discern anything but the most careless gayety. To Talbot, however, there was something beneath all this, which was very plainly visible; and to her, with her profound insight into Brooke's deeper nature, all this nonsense offered nothing that was repellent; on the contrary, she found it most touching and most sad. It seemed to her like the effort of a strong man to rid himself of an overmastering feeling—a feeling deep within him that struggled forever upward and would not be repressed. It rose up constantly, seeking to break ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... interesting of the night-travellers, but by far the most curious and wonderful animals in the world. They are hideously ugly, reminding one more of a miniature, closed-up umbrella than an animal! They are coarse, awkward, when not in flight, and repellent; yet they have such highly developed senses that they have no rivals in the animal world. They excel most birds in flight, are able to make long nightly journeys, in which they use their wings not only for flight, but as air-bags in which they catch all kinds ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... may easily come to its own, based and reinforced as it is by the larger poetical structure. The isolated magazine lyric, on the other hand, is like one swallow trying to make a summer. Even the lyrics collected in anthologies are often "mutually repellent particles," requiring through their very brevity and lack of relation with one another, a perpetual re-focussing of the attention, a constant re-creation of lyric atmosphere. These conditions have been emphasized, during the last decade, by that ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Church school which was chiefly elaborated and which chiefly flourished under the Stuarts, has produced a great part of the most learned theology of Christendom, and had in its early days little or no tendency to Rome. It was exclusive and repellent on the side of Nonconformity, and it placed Church authority very high; but the immense majority of its members were intensely loyal to the Anglican Church, and lived and died contentedly within its pale. There were, however, ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... swirl about their graceful figures. Sparkling glances here and there eclipsed the lights and the blaze of the diamonds, and fanned the flame of hearts already burning too brightly. I detected also significant nods of the head for lovers and repellent attitudes for husbands. The exclamation of the card-players at every unexpected coup, the jingle of gold, mingled with music and the murmur of conversation; and to put the finishing touch to the vertigo of that multitude, intoxicated by all the seductions the world can ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... was evidently much struck with me. He asked me to dance with him twice—he is a charming dancer, by-the- by, and so am I: you can't think how well I did—I was astonished at myself. My lord was very complimentary too—rather too much so in fact—and I thought proper to be a little haughty and repellent; but I had the pleasure of seeing his nasty, cross wife ready to perish with ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... look up, and it struck me from Eliza's face that she might be going to cry. I therefore made a point of saying that the butter was better than we had been having lately, and that it looked like being a fine day after all. Anything like weakness is repellent to me, but still, when one sees that one's words have gone home, one is justified in ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... impression of being one of those men whose ears are always on the stretch, who take everything in and give little out. There was a curious air of watchfulness and of secrecy about him in private matters which was as repellent—to Ransford's thinking—as it was hard to explain. Anyway, in private affairs, he did not like his assistant, and he liked him less than ever as he glanced at him on ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... idealizations of him, have their root in a common fallacy. Both spring from taking stages of a growth or movement as something cut off and fixed. The first fails to see the promise contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by themselves, are uncompromising and repellent; the second fails to see that even the most pleasing and beautiful exhibitions are but signs, and that they begin to spoil and rot the moment ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... There is something repellent in counting our advantages under the shadow of so great a tragedy but we must try to be as practical as those who are fond of accusing us of materialism. Does any one think that the steam-roller of admirably ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in the society of women. That there were men too who were wholly men, and that these perforce could find neither pleasure nor interest away from their own sex. He had always felt himself to be wholly male, and this was why the present age, so essentially the age of women, was repellent to him. ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... surprise came into Annie's face. To this young woman, whose one idea of matrimony was steadfast loyalty to the man whose life she shared and whose name she bore, there was something repellent and nauseating in a woman permitting herself to be talked about in ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... Carnock could not make any headway in English political life. It is worth our while to reflect that the intelligence of such men is lost to us in our home government. They have no taste for the platform, the very spirit of the political game is repellent to them, and they recoil from the self-assertion which appears to be necessary to political advancement in the House of Commons. No doubt the intelligence of men like Mr. J.H. Thomas or Mr. William Brace, certainly of Mr. Clynes, is sufficient for the crudest of our home needs, ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... to undertake her defence," Thorn went on, "for she bestows as little of her fair countenance upon me as she can well help. But try as she will, she cannot be so repellent as she ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... and the United States, and had done, was doing, and would continue to do, all in his power to promote it; but that while the Americans were cordially meeting Germany half way, the British were cold, suspicious, and repellent. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... cast-iron sculptures Major Amberson had set up in opening the Addition years before. Minerva was intact, but a blackish streak descended unpleasantly from her forehead to the point of her straight nose, and a few other streaks were sketched in a repellent dinge upon ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... some sort of a change in her. She could not go on exactly as she had gone on before. The nature of this anticipated change concerned me very much,—too much, I assured myself. Would she be more rigid and repellent than she had been before the advent of the wasp? But this would be impossible. On the other hand, would she be more like other people? Would she relax a little, and work like common secretaries? Or,—and I whistled as I thought of it,—having once ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... by aiding in the ruin of one whom he knew and Spain knew to be her determined foe, did all he could through his ambassador to frustrate their efforts and bring on a catastrophe. The States-General and Maurice were now on as confidential terms with Carleton as they were cold and repellent to Boississe ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the next two hours.' 'But it will be dark then,' objected the caller. 'Well, my good {106} sir,' was the retort, 'we can walk in the dark, I suppose'—which Blake would naturally much prefer. Edward Blake's outward bearing was cold and unsympathetic. He was often repellent to those desiring to be his friends. Intimates he appeared to have none: he would not allow people to be intimate with him. He would hardly even, when leader of the Opposition, accept the co-operation of his supporters ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... unpopular that their political careers ended with their terms. Protect him I must, though the task would be neither easy nor pleasant. It involved a collision with my clients,—a square test of strength between us. What was to me far more repellent, it involved my personally taking a hand in that part of my political work which I had hitherto left to Woodruff and ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... such terms as freedom and slavery, or "anti-slavery" and "pro-slavery," with reference to the principles and purposes of contending parties or rival sections, has had immense influence in misleading the opinions and sympathies of the world. The idea of freedom is captivating, that of slavery repellent to the moral sense of mankind in general. It is easy, therefore, to understand the effect of applying the one set of terms to one party, the other to another, in a contest which had no just application whatever to the essential ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... and cared for had become hateful to her, and her unjust hatred and anger had resulted in that cruel outrage. Now she understood the reason of that change in Mary, when she grew silent and stern and repellent before that fatal morning when she went away to carry out her heartless scheme of revenge. But revenge for what? —and Fan could only moan again and again, "What had I done? what had I done?" What had she ever done that she should not be loved and allowed to live ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... recasting into modern form and in literary English of the old Irish legends, preserving the atmosphere of the original tales as much as possible, but clearing them from repetitions, redundant expressions, idioms interesting in Irish but repellent in English, and, above all, from absurdities, such as the sensational fancy of the later editors and bards added to the ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... disgustedly. It was hard to communicate with the district leader by means of a headband. There was a repellent characteristic about the man's mental emanations, and he seemed to fail to comprehend nuances of meaning. Similes, he ignored completely. Thoughts had to be completely and clearly detailed, then phrased into ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... the girl ironically; and she added, with the kind of repellent lure with which women know how to leave men the responsibility of any reciprocal approach, "I don't know whether it won't need ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... depository for his hat and stick and opened the door of the sitting-room. She had barely smiled. Indeed she had not smiled. She had not mentioned the weather. On the other hand, she had not been prim or repellent. She had revealed nothing of herself. Her one feat had been to stimulate mightily his curiosity and his imagination concerning her—rampant enough even before he ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... stranger so tall, commanding, and dignified, in spite of his rough hunting-dress, his eyes keen and flashing, and his well-cut features seeming noble by comparison with Gunson's, whose care-lined and disfigured face, joined with his harsh, abrupt way, made him quite repellent. ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... Spain or Mexico, and its discovery would throw needed light on the location of Tusayan and the course Cardenas followed.*** The distance of this whole region from a convenient base of supplies, and its repellent character, prevented further operations at this period, and when these explorers traced their disappointed way homeward, the Colorado was not seen again by white men for over half a century; and it was more than two hundred years ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... She has given a faint indication of intending to speak. "Mr. Rouncewell, our views of duty, and our views of station, and our views of education, and our views of—in short, ALL our views—are so diametrically opposed, that to prolong this discussion must be repellent to your feelings and repellent to my own. This young woman is honoured with my Lady's notice and favour. If she wishes to withdraw herself from that notice and favour or if she chooses to place herself under the influence of any one who may in his peculiar opinions—you ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... upon me with something of the fabled fascination of a serpent's. I knew instinctively that he would have the power, and use it, of probing every wound he might suspect in me to the quick. Yet he interested me; and there was something not entirely repellent to me about him. Above all for Olivia's sake, should we find her still living, I was anxious to study his character. It might happen, as it does sometimes, that my honor and straight-forwardness might prove a match for ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... the bank of Spirit Lake, or Lake Calhoun, Iowa, lived Cloudy Sky, a medicine-man, who had been made repellent by age and accident, but who was feared because of his magic power. At eighty years of age he looked for a third wife, and chose the daughter of a warrior, his presents of blankets and calicoes to the parents winning their consent. The girl, Harpstenah (a common name for a third daughter ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... state of the nerves. There was a satirical mischievous cast in the mould of the face, though individually the features were not amiss except for their thinness, and in fact the unpleasantness of the expression had insensibly been softened during this last month, and there was nothing repellent, though much that was quaint, in the slight figure, with the indescribably one-sided air, and stature more befitting ten than fourteen years. What would the visitor think of him? The Doctor called to him, "Come, Peregrine, your uncle, Sir Peregrine Oakshott, has been good enough to come over ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Before the end of 1863, a hundred thousand coloured men were already serving, as combatants or as labourers, on military work in about equal number. They were needed, for volunteering was getting slack, and the work of guarding and repairing railway lines was specially repellent to Northern volunteers. The coloured regiments fought well; they behaved well in every way. Atrocious threats of vengeance on them and their white officers were officially uttered by Jefferson Davis, but, ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... already were in town and were "tanking up." Harley found this to be true, and the red men failed to arouse in him either respect or admiration. If they had ever had any nobility of the wilderness, it was gone now, and they seemed to him a sodden, depressed, and repellent race. A half-dozen or so, in various stages of drunkenness, through whiskey surreptitiously obtained, increased the ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... projected his unshaven chin, cunningly interrogative. The intervening months had altered him, not pleasantly. The tramp of the Dear Me had been unattractive; this man was repellent. ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... upon the center table and more books upon a low tier of shelves on either side of the fireplace. The girl tried to amuse herself by reading, but she found her thoughts continually reverting to the unhappy situation of the king, and her eyes momentarily wandered to the cold and repellent face ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... this kind of life, he began to want some more fierce excitement. He had tried making downright love to Elsie, with no great success as yet, in his own opinion. The girl was capricious in her treatment of him, sometimes scowling and repellent, sometimes familiar, very often, as she used to be of old, teasing and malicious. All this, perhaps, made her more interesting to a young man who was tired of easy conquests. There was a strange fascination in her eyes, too, which at times was quite irresistible, so that he would feel himself drawn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... come upon a fact that seems to us startling and incongruous, we do well to pause upon that fact, and to endeavour to understand it. For if this doctrine contained nothing more than is seen in it by its assailants inside and outside the churches, if it were in its true meaning as repellent to the conscience and the intellect as it is found to be by many thoughtful Christians, then it could not possibly have exercised over the minds and hearts of men a compelling fascination, nor could it have been the root of heroic self-surrenders, of touching and pathetic examples of self-sacrifice ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... had begun, and he turned towards his house. But he couldn't sleep; the house was repellent, and he waited among the thorn-bushes and ferns. Of what use to lie in one's bed when sleep is far and will not be beckoned? and his brain being clear as day he went away to the woods and watersides, saying: 'Life ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... in some respects, exceedingly unattractive. Indeed, it may truly be said to be in many respects repulsive. There are usually odours in such a camp which are repellent to the nose, dishes that are disgusting to the taste, sights that are disagreeable to the eyes, sounds that are abhorrent to the ear, and habits that are ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... supervened, and the sufferer became stone dead to everything except the more superficial aspects of those material objects with which he came most in contact. The expression on the faces of these people was repellent; they did not, however, seem particularly unhappy, for they none of them had the faintest idea that they were in reality more dead than alive. No cure for this disgusting fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease has ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... courage to attack the lamb—and he found reason to regret it. Afterwards came fowls stuffed with raisins, parsley, and crumbled bread, and the banquet ended with pastry of weird forms and repellent aspect. ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... and morally repellent was the very recent statement by Major-General von Disfurth, in an article contributed by him to the Hamburger Nachrichten, which so completely illustrates Bernhardiism in its last extreme of avowed brutality that ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... knowledge, it was another affair. Mrs. Ellison trembled at her triumph, and began to think that failure would have been easier to bear. Were they in the least suited to each other? Would she like to see poor Kitty chained for life to that impassive egotist, whose very merits were repellent, and whose modesty even seemed to convict and snub you? Mrs. Ellison was not able to put the matter to herself with moderation, either way; doubtless she did Mr. Arbuton injustice now. "Did you accept him?" ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... in explaining why. In trying to account to myself for my own sensations, I could only put it that one felt in the man a complete absence of the sympathetic faculty. There was nothing outwardly repellent about him. He was not ill-mannered, or vicious, or dull—indeed, he could be remarkably interesting. But I received the impression that there could be no human creature whom he would not sacrifice in the pursuit of his schemes, in his task of imposing himself and his will ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... the products of the interior upland and the coastal lowland is mainly induced by the difference of climate, those grasses and herbs growing on the tableland, while repellent in appearance and colour, compared to the richer herbage of the coast, possess qualities that render them invaluable as fodder plants. Once let the grasses of the coast lose their moisture from drought, and they become ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... and neutralizes the power of gravitation, is but one of those powers that awaits the growing genius of man to utilize. The magnetic force is the attractive or centripetal power; the electric force is the repellent or centrifugal power. A machine will be invented, in the near future, that will combine these into a single electro-magnetic force, and with this force the power of gravitation will be neutralized. Then the world's traffic will be as readily carried in the air as now it is upon the ground. The forces ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... wound up the clock and placed it on the mantelpiece, and, with a few deft touches, had made the room a trifle less repellent, she saw her landlady come into the room with three bottles and two glasses (one of these latter had recently held stout) tucked ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... it until I saw the girl today. She certainly seems to be a very superior person; she will find the Cove very lonely, I am sure. It is not probable she will stay there long. I must see what I can do for her, but her manner seemed rather repellent, don't you think?" ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... for a man is to be God's slave. The harsh, repellent features of that wicked institution assume an altogether different character when they become the features of my relation to Him. Absolute submission, unconditional obedience, on the slave's part; and on the part of the Master complete ownership, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... mad. Let us rather consider what such an appearance can portend, and who the man is who is thus presented. I cannot explain to you why this appearance inspires me with so great a revulsion. I can only say that in its presence I seem to be brought face to face with some abysmal and repellent wickedness. It is not that the form he wears is hideous. Last night I saw him exactly as I saw him at Oxford—his face waxen pale, with a sneering mouth, the same lofty forehead, and hair brushed straight up so as almost to appear standing on end. He wore the same long coat of green cloth ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... part and parcel of the mechanism of human thought on the one hand, and of practical civilization on the other. Such a phrase as "fundamental principles" may seem at first thought a hard saying, but the idea it implies is less repellent than the phrase itself, for the fundamental principles in question are so closely linked with the present interests of every one of us that they lie within the grasp of every average man and woman—nay, of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... holding out his hand in token of amity; but he quickly withdrew his hand and retreated out of sight, for a cold, repellent look from Kahle's eyes had met his. From some short distance in the rear, out of the reach of those severe eyes, he attentively viewed his prostrate foe; then he turned on his heels and made off through the woods, towards ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... harder light than had accompanied the significant reference to the patriotic impulse which she had nipped in the bud. It was probably only the old, old look of the lioness whose whelp is threatened, but it was something new to me in Catherine Evers, something half-repellent and ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... the negative is more readily dissipated than the positive. But, so far as we at present know, this question enters into the discussion scarcely, if at all. Our knowledge seems rather to point to the substances upon which the charges are collected. The self-repellent nature of electricity compels it to manifest itself at the more prominent parts of the surface, the level being forsaken for the point. The tension of the charge, or its tendency to fly off, is proportionately ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... That repellent horror which is thought of when we speak of death was absent from the room. In the numbness of everything, in the mother's attitude, in the indifference on the doctor's face there was something that attracted and touched the heart, that subtle, almost ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Vanney's. For himself, he unaffectedly disliked and despised publicity; for the interests which he represented, he delegated it to others. He would rarely be interviewed; his attitude toward the newspapers was consistently repellent. Consequently his infrequent utterances were treasured as pearls, and given a prominence far above those of the too eager and over-friendly Mr. Vanney, who, incidentally, was his associate on the directorate of the Law Enforcement Society. The newspapers did not like Willis Enderby ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... her chair a little and looked at him. She was astonished at the change in his appearance. His hideous obesity seemed no longer repellent, for his eyes wore a new expression; they were incredibly tender now, and they were moist with tears. His mouth was tortured by a passionate distress. Margaret had never seen so much unhappiness on a man's face, and an overwhelming ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... Newton and his successors up to our own day, to try to conceive the world dynamically within the limits of their spectator-consciousness and thus to form a dynamic interpretation of the universe based on its heliocentric aspect. This was just as repellent to Goethe as ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... the Western mind to give the Kashmiri credit for any virtues, his failings being so conspicuous and repellent; for not only is he an outrageous coward, but he feels no shame in admitting his cowardice. He is a most accomplished thief, and the truth is not in him. He and his are much fouler than Neapolitan lazzaroni, and his morals—well, let us give the Kashmiri his due, and turn to his virtues. ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... Bowen's relenting was not continuous, however. There were times that seemed to be times of question and of struggle with her, when she vacillated between the old cordiality and the later alienation; when she went beyond the former, or lapsed into moods colder and more repellent than the latter. It would have been difficult to mark the moment when these struggles ceased altogether, and an evening passed in unbroken kindness between them. But afterwards Colville could remember an emotion of grateful surprise at a subtle word or action of hers in which she ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... his mouth flew open, his tongue swelled, his whole countenance became convulsed with the most unparalleled, and for that reason indescribable, expression of agony, whilst the yellowness of his complexion deepened to a livid, lurid black, that was so inconceivably repellent and hellish that I sprang away from the bed—appalled. There was then a gasping, rasping noise, and a voice that, despite its unnatural hollowness, I identified as that of Ralph, broke forth: 'I have been wanting to speak to you for ages, but something, I cannot explain, has always ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... war of the Austrian Succession, and earned by his courage and his abilities an honorable name. He was destined to make that name famous by the part he was to play in the events that were taking place in Canada. The red-haired, unattractive soldier, whose cold and almost repellent manner concealed some of the highest qualities, was fated to do as much for the glory of the English Empire in one part of the world as Clive in another. But there could hardly be two men more different than Clive and Wolfe. The one was always an adventurer—a gentleman adventurer, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... and Holgrave is no more than a spectator, mechanically necessary to the action and useful in other ways, but he does not affect us as a character. There remains Judge Pyncheon, on whom Hawthorne evidently exhausted his skill in the effort to make him repellent. He is studied after the gentleman who was most active in the removal of Hawthorne from the Custom House, and was intended to be a recognizable portrait of him in the community. Perhaps the knowledge of this fact interferes with the proper ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... and around him seemed confused, senseless, and repellent. Yet in this very repugnance to all his circumstances Pierre found a kind ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... was his real name—was far from being unamiable or repellent. That he was cowardly, untruthful, selfish, and lazy, was undoubtedly the fact; perhaps it was his peculiar misfortune that, just then, courage, frankness, generosity, and activity were the dominant factors in the life of Redwood Camp. His submissive gentleness, ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... about and 'poke their noses where they're not wanted.' They are more like merchants with books to sell." The only person who failed to see the attraction in them was Ed Brann, who was popularly supposed to be engaged to Maud. He grew daily more sullen and repellent, toward Albert ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... natural relief, but it is none the less fatal. There might even be method in the colonel's manner, and Loring curbed, with long-practiced hand, both tongue and temper. It would have been warrantable to say that the manner of both the General and his chief-of-staff had been too repellent to to invite calls, but he knew that, whatever the merits of the case, superior officers, like inferior papers, always have the last word. He might be only inviting reprimand. Without a word, therefore, he faced about, went straight ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... intimately conscious of a soilure, a moral stain, as the result of her recent contacts with the man of business in her husband. Why had she not been able to keep femininely aloof from those puzzling and repellent matters, ignorant of them, innocent of them? And Ethel, too! Twelve days of the office had culminated for Ethel in a slight illness, which Doctor Hawley described as lack of tone. Her father had ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... of them, long of limb, broad-chested, with faces tanned by sun and wind. And all five displayed, planted on an enormous neck and shoulders, the same small head with the low forehead, thin lips, beaked nose and hard and repellent cast of countenance. They were feared and disliked by all around them. They were a money-grubbing, crafty family; and their word was not to ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... long have barred that voracious and implacably relentless enemy, but against that lethal green emanation even that ravening Jovian jungle could not prevail, but fell back, impotent. Writhing and crawling, loathesomely palpitant with an unspeakable exuberance of foul and repellent vigor, possible only to such meteorological conditions as obtained there, it threw its most hideously prolific growths against that ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... comfortable and happy. He is not felt as a thing foreign and incongruous, but as homogeneous. To break up the usual order, and to bend all to meet his personal prejudices and peculiarities, is only to so disturb the family sphere as to make it actually repellent. He is then felt as an unassimilated foreign body, and all secretly ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... the diffusion of these things among children involves serious dangers alike to their morals and to their health. Speaking generally, upon adults pornographic objects have rather a repellent than a sexually exciting effect. In the case of children in whom no sexual sensibility has as yet developed, they exercise no sexual stimulation, but may later give rise to ill effects. But it is to ripening children and young persons, who do not ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... beyond all control. But we find the river very sinuous, and the momentum of current consequently lessened. For example, striking in an arm of the river, by the inertia of the moving volume, the water is thrown, and with less velocity, upon the opposite bank, which it pursues until it meets another repellent obstacle, from which it refracts, taking direction again for the other side. Above the Missouri, the river is principally directed by the natural trough of the valley. Below this, however, the channel is purely the work of the river itself, shaped according to the necessities ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that be so, what a change passes on the aspect of law, when we take Christ as being our living embodiment of it! Everything that was hard, repellent, far-off, cold, vanishes. We have no longer 'tables of stone,' but 'fleshy tables of the heart'; and the Law stands before us, a Being to be loved, to be clung to, to be trusted, and whom it is blessedness to know and perfection to resemble. The rails upon ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... change in the soldier's voice; it had grown harsh and repellent. "Monsieur, I proceed from Rouen to Rochelle; are you ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... had never come within ten leagues of gentility, and who, one and all, were absorbedly and unabashedly bent on the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored spot—the pushing of their individual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be, perhaps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and repellent miscellany. ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... all the young people of to-day. The study now is how to make our houses more comfortable, and to furnish them most luxuriously. Then, perhaps, there was but one sofa in the house, and that was repellent rather than attractive. Easy-chairs were few and far between. Lounging of any kind was out of the question. In the drawing-room, the furniture was of the same uncomfortable description, and there were none of the modern appliances which ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... with small lilac-blue flowers that yield an aromatic oil. Aromatic plant (Hedeoma pulegioides) of eastern North America, having purple-blue flowers that yields an oil used as an insect repellent ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Gertrude, so quickly followed by a strange appearance of friendship. Wendot knew his countrymen and his nation's characteristics, and knew that fierce acts of treachery were often truly charged upon them. What if — But the thought was too repellent to be seriously pursued, and shaking it off by an effort, he raised his voice and called his ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... rhymes where they are peculiar are often repellent, and so far from adding charm to the verse that they appear as obstacles. This must not blind one from recognizing that Gerard Hopkins, where he is simple and straightforward in his rhyme is a master ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... such a mood, so sweet, so tranquil, so unwonted, have been the harbinger of good? Alas, no good came of it! I Presently the rude Real burst coarsely in—all evil grovelling and repellent ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... wife, was evidently much struck with me. He asked me to dance with him twice—he is a charming dancer, by-the- by, and so am I: you can't think how well I did—I was astonished at myself. My lord was very complimentary too—rather too much so in fact—and I thought proper to be a little haughty and repellent; but I had the pleasure of seeing his nasty, cross wife ready to perish with ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... influence he exercises on those about him, the distrustful look of the nurse as she brings baby Paul into his presence, the shrinking form of little Florence as the frightened child cowers with folded hands behind her repellent father's chair, are finely depicted in the etching of The Dombey Family. In Mrs. Dombey at Home, the proud, haughty beauty chafing under the consciousness that she has been sacrificed to the wealth of the heartless merchant, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... a weird stretch of the repellent cactus, whose great gnarled branches locked and intertwined themselves in a verdureless mass of thorns and spikes which well might have daunted even an Indian. The hedge was many feet in width and higher than Ninian's shoulder, still green ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... luck was not good. There was already talk of a white rising to drive the heathen from the field, and Done found his mates entirely in sympathy with the common sentiment; to him; also the Celestials became exceedingly repellent as he grew more familiar with their habits and manners, although he was opposed to making differences of race ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... had assembled in your apartments the aristocracy of the French literary world—George Sand was of course one of the company. On the way home Chopin said to me "What a repellent [antipathische] woman the Sand is! But is she really a woman? I am inclined to ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... stain his name with a deed that would brand him throughout Europe. Weber, however, had spoken of a morganatic marriage, and fearful pressure might be brought to bear. A country so energetic and advanced as Germany had clung, nevertheless, to many repellent principles of medievalism. A nation listened with calm acceptance and complacency, while its Kaiser claimed a partnership, and not altogether a junior partnership either, with the Almighty. Much could be forgiven to an Auersperg, ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... passed with friendly greeting, had wreathed their hats with the living flame. The tiny shifting lamps were everywhere; pale yellow, purely white, or green as the underside of a northern wave. By day but an ugly, repellent worm; but darkness comes, and lo, a star alight. Nature is full for us of seeming inconsistencies and glad surprises. The world's asleep, say you; on your ear falls the nightingale's song and the stir of living creatures in bush and brake. The ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... discern anything but the most careless gayety. To Talbot, however, there was something beneath all this, which was very plainly visible; and to her, with her profound insight into Brooke's deeper nature, all this nonsense offered nothing that was repellent; on the contrary, she found it most touching and most sad. It seemed to her like the effort of a strong man to rid himself of an overmastering feeling—a feeling deep within him that struggled forever upward and would not be repressed. It rose up constantly, seeking ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... Mrs. Mumpson came tearing in, quite oblivious of the fact that she had left a goodly part of her calico skirt on a nail of the fence. She was rushing toward Holcroft, when he said sternly, and with a repellent gesture, "Stop and listen to me. If there's any more of this quarreling like cats and dogs in my house, I'll send for the constable and have you all arrested. If you are not all utterly demented and hopeless fools, you ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... as if to offer her his arm, and checked himself. Firmly persuaded as he was that her mind was deranged—readily as he admitted that she claimed, in virtue of her affliction, every indulgence that he could extend to her—there was something repellent to him at that moment in the bare idea of touching her. The image of the beautiful creature who was the object of her monstrous accusation—the image of Mercy as she lay helpless for a moment in his arms—was vivid in ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... point of departure for a vigorous denunciation of the bigotry that had driven him from place to place and denied him peace among the living. The poem foresees a time when streams of blood shall flow for the honor of calling him son. There is no effort at portraiture, and no suggestion of any repellent or pitiable traits.[35] We get not Byron's "self-torturing sophist", but a martyred sage who suffered and died at the hands of Christians,—'he who makes out of Christians human beings'. Toward the end he is apostrophized as the 'Great Endurer, and bidden to leap joyously into Charon's ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... have dwelt on the repellent view of Negro funeral custom, I must in justice to them cite their better view. There is a custom that I missed much on going south of Calabar, for it is a pretty one. Outside the villages in the Calabar districts, by the sides ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... done in the beater, the size is thoroughly incorporated with the fibers as these revolve or flow around the engine. This sizing renders the paper more nearly impervious to moisture. The difference between a paper that is sized and that has a repellent surface which prevents the ink from settling into it when it is written upon, and an ordinary blotting-paper with its absorbent surface, is due entirely to the fact that the former is most carefully treated with sizing ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... found deeply rooted, positive, unquestioning. The belief is implanted in man by the wish; it answers one of the most imperative, unsilenceable longings of human nature. For, in proportion as life is pleasant and precious, death is hideous and repellent. The idea of utter destruction, of ceasing to be, is intolerable to the mind; indeed, the senses revolt against it, the mind refuses to grasp and admit it. Yet death is very real, and it is inevitable; and all ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... the reading of those pages was to be a repellent task to him; it was a task to which he could not bring himself at the moment; to-night, in the privacy of his own chamber, he would sift Mr. Taggett's baleful fancies. Thus temporizing, Mr. Slocum dropped the volume into his pocket, locked ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and of Mrs. Twemlow, who saw eye to eye with him in these matters, things were done properly at the castle, with the correct solemnity. To Mr. Beach and Mrs. Twemlow the suggestion that they and their peers should gather together in the same room in which they were to dine would have been as repellent as an announcement from Lady Ann Warblington, the chatelaine, that the house party would ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... woman, and possessed of considerable means; but she was vain to a degree, and cared for nothing but money. Pride and greed had gradually imprinted on her features an expression of harshness so striking that, with all her beauty, her looks were repellent. She was violently opposed to religion, and was thus without any restraint on her conduct. By every means in her power she sought to make the lives of her husband's parents miserable. If she knew ...
— The Basket of Flowers • Christoph von Schmid
... run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... go with midnight, solitude, and a candle. It is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only the sick in mind crave cleverness, as ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... for a period, the paths of the two composers were parallel. Tschaikovsky did not admire Moussorgsky, spoke slightingly of his abilities, though he conceded that with all his roughness he had power of a repellent order. Turgenieff did not understand him. The opera La Khovanchtchina, notwithstanding the preponderance of the chorus—in Russia choral singing is the foundation of musical culture—I found more "operatic" than ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... were but a merry-go-round with him. "If that's a specimen of the bridegroom cometh," said he to himself, "I've got no more use for matrimony than I have for the catechism." And doubtless to this gay and nonchalant spirit the deeply religious temperament of the Parson seemed a sombre and repellent thing,—a thing to be lamented, yet indulged as something too solemn ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... usually lasts from five to seven days). There is more sexual desire during pregnancy, especially toward the end, than at any other time. She never refused normal intercourse to her husband, but any abnormal or perverted method of sexual gratification is repellent. She was awakened one night about the third month of pregnancy by her husband inserting his penis in ore; the child was born with palate defect and she is herself inclined to believe that this incident ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... lives' last thread in some obscure cell or dim closet, where pride of authorship, as we may feel and enjoy it, there was none, when beyond the walls of a convent or those of a native town their names were unknown, their personality unrecognised. Except to the theologian or ritualist how repellent and illegible this mass of printed and manuscript matter must ever seem! How deficient in human sympathy and pertinence! These treatises, so erudite, so prolix, and so multifarious, were composed by men (Universal, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... however, she had to acknowledge that his manner had undergone a radical change. He no longer alarmed her by aggressive pursuit, nor sought to lead the conversation to those personal topics which she had found so repellent. Furthermore, he never alluded to the threat he had made to her that day at the hunt, nor even mentioned his rejected suit. And yet she felt apprehensively that he had not given up his ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... for people who indulged their fancy. In Harry and Lucy, for instance, Lucy, who is the only human figure in the book, is perpetually being snubbed by the terrible hard-headed Harry, with his desperate interest in machinery, by the repellent father who delights to explain the laws of gravity and the parabola described by the stone which Harry throws. What was undervalued in those old, dry, high-principled books was the charm of vivid apprehension, of fanciful ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... prompts him to be sober and temperate, then his phantasm resembles a man; but on the other hand, if he has given way to his carnal and bestial cravings, then his phantasm is earthbound, in the guise of some terrifying and repellent animal—maybe a wolf, bear, dog, or cat—all of which shapes are far from uncommon ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... this young woman's face with her hand as she said it. This young woman was seated on the floor, pondering in the foreground of the afflicted. There was nothing repellent either in her face or head. Many, apparently worse, varieties of epilepsy and hysteria were about her, but she was said to be the worst here. When I had spoken to her a little, she still sat with her face turned ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... be her determined foe, did all he could through his ambassador to frustrate their efforts and bring on a catastrophe. The States-General and Maurice were now on as confidential terms with Carleton as they were cold and repellent to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... integrated into every phase of community life, Congressman Chet Holifield told the Secretary of Defense, and he passed on a warning from his California constituents that "any attempt to forestall this ambition by treating them as a group apart is extremely repellent to them and gives rise to demoralization and hostility."[15-4] If the Department of Defense considered racial information essential, Holifield continued, why not make the determination in a less objectionable manner? He suggested a ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... and was the first representative of many important tenor roles, among which may be mentioned those of "Benvenuto Cellini," "Les Martyrs," "La Favorita," "Dom Sebastien," "Otello," and "Lucia." Duprez was insignificant, even repellent in his appearance, but, in spite of these defects, his tragic passion and the splendid intelligence displayed in his vocal art gave him a deserved prominence. Duprez composed many songs and romances, chamber-music, two masses, and eight operas, and was ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... syllable. Indeed, it might just as well be "inuberance." It does not long to make an impression or, in vulgar phrase, to "get a rise"; but tends to be self-contained. It is not boisterousness. It is generous and infectious, while boisterousness is inclined to be selfish and repellent. Most of us would rather spend a week among a crowd of mummies than in a gang of boisterous young blades. For boisterousness is only a degenerate exuberance, drunk and on the rampage. The royal old musician and poet was not filled with ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... miles from a county town. Yet what of that? Five miles of irregular upland, during the long, inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who "conceive and meditate of ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... lady mother and his two young lady sisters, haughty and repellent women that they were, had objected to entertaining his dependents, but the young gentleman was resolved that they should enjoy themselves. ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... unequivocal enough in his declarations, his determinations, and his promises. The Diva had shown herself a Diva at every point. She had wept, she had smiled, she had been scornful, she had been suppliant, she had been repellent, she had been loving! And in every mood she had seemed to the fascinated eyes of the Marchese more lovely than in that which preceded it. Finally, she had conquered. Instead of coming away from her, never to see her again, ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the hall as she indicated the depository for his hat and stick and opened the door of the sitting-room. She had barely smiled. Indeed she had not smiled. She had not mentioned the weather. On the other hand, she had not been prim or repellent. She had revealed nothing of herself. Her one feat had been to stimulate mightily his curiosity and his imagination concerning her—rampant enough even before he entered ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... hard, and despises everything but work. I think she suffers from her husband's shiftlessness. She always speaks of me as "This" or "that woman." The family consists of a grown-up son, a shiftless, melancholy-looking youth, who possibly pines for a wider life; a girl of sixteen, a sour, repellent-looking creature, with as much manners as a pig; and three hard, un-child-like younger children. By the whole family all courtesy and gentleness of act or speech seem regarded as "works of the flesh," if not of "the devil." They knock over all one's things without apologizing or picking them ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... and a young man of about his own age entered. Without being in the least ill-looking, there was something repellent about the new comer. His eyes were shifty and too close together to be trustworthy. Otherwise no fault could be ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... regards himself as a Grand Seigneur with a paramount "Jus Primis Noctis." True, the majority of men are abashed in the presence of innocence and deal gently with it,—but others follow in a repellent way their instinct of possession. Any neurologist of experience has cases where sexual frigidity and neurasthenia in a woman can be traced back to the shock of ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... tweeds, the folding crease strongly marked down the front of the trousers and the coat sleeves rather too long. His face bore a strong impress of vulgarity, but at the same time had a certain ingenuousness, a self-absorbed energy and simplicity, which saved it from being wholly repellent; the brow was narrow, the eyes small and bright, and the coarse lips half hid themselves under a struggling reddish growth. In these lineaments lurked a family resemblance to Godwin Peak, sufficient ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... contemptuously called it, likening it, in point of texture, digestibility and nutritive properties, to the product of picked oakum, which it in many respects strongly resembled. The pork, though it lost less in the cooking, was rancid, putrid stuff, repellent in odour and colour-particulars in which it found close competitors in the butter and cheese, which had often to be thrown overboard because they "stunk the ship." [Footnote: To disinfect a ship after she had been fouled by putrid rations or disease, ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... them to the point at which they must turn aside to reach either entrance. Before them rose the old boarded-up, dismal doorway, weather-beaten, stained, repellent as bitterness. There was another fateful pause. Cynthia felt the quiver that ran through the frames of the old men as for the first time in long years they stood side by side before the doorway about which as children they had played, ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... and very striking, and it merits particular comment, as its ideal was so radically different from those adopted by Story and Gould in their statues of the Egyptian Queen.... The effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellent. Apart from all questions of taste, however, the striking qualities of the work are undeniable, and it could only have been produced by a sculptor of very genuine endowments."—Great ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... thousand obliging questions; a flash of lightning made her squeeze their hands; a peal of thunder would drive her to embrace them, but with the return of the calm, the Princess resumed her stiffness, her reserve, and her repellent air, and passed all by without taking the slightest notice of any one, until a fresh storm restored to her at once her dread and her affability. [Which reminds one of the elder (and puritanic) Cato who said that he "embraced" his wife only when it ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... Haynes-Cooper's, had proved her faithful slave, and she had not abused his devotion. Indeed, she hardly considered it that. The sex side of her was being repressed with the artist side. Most men found her curt, brisk, businesslike manner a little repellent, though interesting. They never made love to her, in spite of her undeniable attractiveness. Fascinating Facts drove her about in his smart little roadster and one night he established himself in her memory forever as the first man who had ever asked her to marry him. He did ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... ignoring all the parts which will not bear a steady gaze. Whatever fascinates the eye, or agitates the heart by mimicry of life is selected and emphasized, and what is felt to be intractable or repellent is authoritatively set aside. The poet has an unlimited discretion. But on a theme so great as man he has no discretion at all. This resource is denied. You can give the truth only by giving the whole truth. In treating a common didactic ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... common fallacy. Both spring from taking stages of a growth or movement as something cut off and fixed. The first fails to see the promise contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by themselves, are uncompromising and repellent; the second fails to see that even the most pleasing and beautiful exhibitions are but signs, and that they begin to spoil and rot the moment they ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... a sparse vegetation of scrub and tufts of coarse grass and weeds, and the poor horses were hard put to get enough, even though they grazed all night. The country, which was more broken and seamed with gullies and rivers of sand, Sha Ho, had taken on a hard, sunbaked, repellent look, brightened only by splendid crimson and blue thistles. The wells were farther apart, and sometimes they were dry, and there were anxious hours when we were not sure of water for ourselves, still less for the horses. One well near a salt lake was rather brackish. This ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... Historical romance had fascinations for me, but Alphonse Daudet attracted both of us to the artistic possibilities that lay in selecting the romance of real life for treatment in fiction as against the crude and repellent naturalism of Zola and his school. This fact is not a little significant in view of the turn toward historical romance which exercised all the activities of Robert Neilson Stephens after the production of his play, "An Enemy to ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... at her keenly; a deep frown settled between his eyes at sight of her enthusiasm. His face suddenly looked older, and seemed more dour, more repellent ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... any longer; it was not the air that pushed the fog; the floating bubbles, the infinitesimally small ones as well as those that were quite perceptible, simply displaced the lighter atmosphere. I wondered what kept these bubbles apart. Some repellent force with which they were charged? Something, at any rate, must be preventing them from coalescing into rain. Maybe it was merely the perfect evenness of their flow, for they gathered thickly enough on the twigs and the ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... knew them to be bride and bridegroom. The man was tall and broad, with dark hair and eyes, and a sensual and cruel face. He seemed, however, to be quite enslaved by the woman by his side, whom I hardly even now like to think of, there was something to me so repellent in her presence. ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... out from the castle of De Stutevill, Father Claude dismounted from his sleek donkey within the ballium of Torn. The austere stronghold, notwithstanding its repellent exterior and unsavory reputation, always extended a warm welcome to the kindly, genial priest; not alone because of the deep friendship which the master of Torn felt for the good father, but through the personal charm, and lovableness of the holy ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... associated the idea of him with embarrassing recollections. But now, on the very day when his brother's marriage to another woman had consummated his brother's treason towards her, there was something vaguely repellent in the prospect of seeing him. The old nurse (who remembered them both in their cradles) observed her hesitation; and sympathising of course with the man, put in a timely word for Henry. 'He says, he's going away, my dear; and he only wants to shake hands, and say good-bye.' This plain ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... lay in ruins. Her theories were scattered like the autumn leaves that were scuddering over the fields. His voice, the very roughened bitterness of it; his eyes, with their peremptory challenge, their sore accusingness; the very contradictions of the man's personality, now delightful, now repellent, and, breathing through them all, the passion she must needs divine—of these various impressions, small and great, she was the struggling ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... congregation by appearing with a dark veil over his face. The veil itself is a familiar object; on a woman or a bonnet it would pass unnoticed; but on the minister it becomes a portentous thing, at once fascinating and repellent. Yesterday they knew the man as a familiar friend; to-day he is a stranger, and they fear him with a vague, nameless fear. Forty years he wears the mysterious thing, dies and is buried with it, and in all that time ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... being sure that it was his duty to be. There was about the young man's mental condition a sort of infantile unsophistication. The New England mind often seems to inherit from bygone Puritanism a certain repellent quality through which it takes long for anything savoring of worldliness or worldly wisdom to penetrate. When once this covering is broken, it may be added, the result is much the same as in the case of ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... mounted and came to him for final instructions Buck forced himself to be almost repellent in order to be capable of coherent speech. Hopalong glanced sharply at him and then understood, Red was all attention and eagerness and remarked nothing ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... restricted, many acts were forbidden which were not in themselves laborious. The Sabbath was hedged in by a formidable array of enactments. To an outside critic it is not wonderful that the Jewish Sabbath has a repellent look. But to the insider things wear another aspect. The Sabbath was and is a day of delight. On it the Jew had a foretaste of the happiness of the world to come. The reader who wishes to have a spirited, and absolutely true, picture of the Jewish Sabbath cannot do better than ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... was the master's most important task on this occasion to portray was then but twenty-four years of age, and youth served not indeed to hide, but in a slight measure to attenuate, some of his most characteristic physical defects. His unattractive person even then, however, showed some of the most repellent peculiarities of his father and his race. He had the supreme distinction of Charles but not his majesty, more than his haughty reserve, even less than his power of enlisting sympathy. In this most difficult of tasks—the portrayal that should be at one and the same time true in its ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... after analyzing the book, it may be claimed for this "Francesca da Rimini," that it reflects the age in which the tragedy occurred. Much artistic construction is shown in the contrast of the Polenta and Malatesta families, and, repellent as he is at times, D'Annunzio has moments of great poetic fervour; his fire swings forth in many of Francesca's speeches, that alternate with the ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... excitement, of nights without sleep, much smoke, and, perhaps, much wine, in his eyes. What a woman feels who has to hand over her spotless child, the most dear and pure thing upon earth, to a man fresh from those indulgences and dissipations which never seem harmless, and always are repellent to a woman, is not to be described. Fortunately the bride herself, in invincible ignorance and unconsciousness, seldom feels in that way. To Elinor her lover looked tired about the eyes, which was very well explained by his night journey, and by the agitation of the moment. ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... nature something that revolted instinctively from the singular person who stood at his shoulder. Their organisations and appetites were different, I suppose, and repellent. Cold and glittering was the 'gelidus anguis in herba'—the churchyard grass—who had lifted his baleful crest close to ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... correspondence with Scott and the rest of that brilliant school. Who ever thinks of George Ellis? But Ellis was the most learned of antiquaries, and devoid of the pedantry which so often makes antiquarian discourses repellent. His polished expositions have the charm that comes from a gentle soul and an exquisite intellect, while his criticism is so luminous and just that even Mr. Ruskin could hardly improve upon it. Then there were Mr. Skene, Joanna Baillie—alas, poor forgotten Joanna!—Erskine, the Shepherd, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... might some day lead him to her own unhallowed height of questionable illumination. To be sure d'Ardeche reviled her as a bad old woman, being himself in that state of enthusiastic exaltation which sometimes accompanies a boyish fancy for occultism; but in spite of his distant and repellent attitude, Mlle. Blaye de Tartas made him her sole heir, to the violent wrath of a questionable old party known to infamy as the Sar Torrevieja, the "King of the Sorcerers." This malevolent old portent, whose gray and crafty face was often seen in the Rue M. ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... of the pork and ham shop and other riches in her arms, entered a repellent doorway in a spirit of great good cheer and Dart followed her. Past a room where a drunken woman lay sleeping with her head on a table, a child pulling at her dress and crying, up a stairway with broken balusters and breaking steps, through a landing, upstairs ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... graceful figures. Sparkling glances here and there eclipsed the lights and the blaze of the diamonds, and fanned the flame of hearts already burning too brightly. I detected also significant nods of the head for lovers and repellent attitudes for husbands. The exclamation of the card-players at every unexpected coup, the jingle of gold, mingled with music and the murmur of conversation; and to put the finishing touch to the vertigo ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... must certainly be some sort of a change in her. She could not go on exactly as she had gone on before. The nature of this anticipated change concerned me very much,—too much, I assured myself. Would she be more rigid and repellent than she had been before the advent of the wasp? But this would be impossible. On the other hand, would she be more like other people? Would she relax a little, and work like common secretaries? Or,—and I whistled as I thought of it,—having ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... be no roseate fiction, no gainful pretense, but a living reality. The United States of the future will be no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellent commonwealths, but a true exemplification of 'many in one'—many stars blended in one common flag—many States combined in one homogeneous Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... books upon the center table and more books upon a low tier of shelves on either side of the fireplace. The girl tried to amuse herself by reading, but she found her thoughts continually reverting to the unhappy situation of the king, and her eyes momentarily wandered to the cold and repellent face of ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... thin figure, vaguely repellent, upon realizing that I was set on departure, and conducted me out by way of the front door. ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... to be all brain; one whose pleasures lay manifestly on the intellectual side. One thing Gifford quickly noted, as he looked at the man with a painful curiosity, was that the face before him lacked much of the suggestion of evil which in the brother he had found so repellent. This man could surely be hard enough on occasion, the strong jaw and a certain hardness in the eyes told that, but except perhaps for an uncomfortable excess of sharpness, there was none of his brother's rather brutally scoffing cast ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... a strange bluish drab colour, and a conservative, round Panama hat without the cock-a-loop indentations and cants with which Northern fanciers disfigure the tropic head-gear. Moreover, he was the homeliest man I have ever seen. His ugliness was less repellent than startling—arising from a sort of Lincolnian ruggedness and irregularity of feature that spellbound you with wonder and dismay. So may have looked afrites or the shapes metamorphosed from the vapour of the fisherman's vase. As he ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... Liszt has been to me. I must enter a little more deeply into the character of this friendship, which to many has seemed paradoxical; indeed, I have been compelled to appear repellent and hostile on so many sides, that I almost feel the want of disclosing all that relates to this ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... embrace of sorrow. All savage wildness was repulsive to him. In music, in literature, in the conduct of life, all that approached the melodramatic was painful to him The frantic and despairing aspects of exaggerated romanticism were repellent to him, he could not endure the struggling for wonderful effects, for delicious excesses. "He loved Shakspeare only under many conditions. He thought his characters were drawn too closely to the life, and spoke ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... the change in the soldier's voice; it had grown harsh and repellent. "Monsieur, I proceed from Rouen to Rochelle; are you ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... There was but one way for him to cross the river, and that was to swim. And the best time to swim was when the tide brimmed over the current and trembled at its turn, a broad and limpid expanse of water, cold, dangerous, repellent to the chilled plunging body; but safer and more easily paddled through than when the current, angular as a skeleton, sought the bay at its ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... power in the presentation of old Paris streets and tumble-down houses, Lalanne has achieved several remarkable plates of this order. One is his well-known Rue des Marmousets. This street is almost as repellent-looking as Rue Mouffetard at its worst period. Ancient and sinister, its reputation was not enticing. In it once dwelt a pastry cook who, taking his crony the barber into his confidence, literally made mince-meat of a stranger and sold the pies to ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Wordsworth, of course, is still one of the poets' poets, and the Spectator, that Mrs. Micawber of literature, will, of course, never desert him; but I doubt very much whether he has yet reached the harbour of Ultimately. His repellent personality has blinded a good many of us to his exquisite qualities; on the Greek Kalends of criticism, however, may I be there to see. I shall certainly vote for him if I am one of the examiners—or ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... the night Baree heard the savage dirge of the wolves. Once it was a wild paean of triumph as the hunters pulled down their kill less than half a mile away in the deep forest. But the voice no longer called to him. It was repellent—a voice of hatred and of treachery. Each time that he heard it he stopped in his tracks and snarled, while his ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... the impression of being one of those men whose ears are always on the stretch, who take everything in and give little out. There was a curious air of watchfulness and of secrecy about him in private matters which was as repellent—to Ransford's thinking—as it was hard to explain. Anyway, in private affairs, he did not like his assistant, and he liked him less than ever as he glanced at him on ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... circles of Paris recall the glowing descriptions of the fret and fever of existence in the Austrian capital during the historic Vienna Congress a hundred years ago. Dancing became epidemic and shameless. In some salons the forms it took were repellent. One of my friends, the Marquis X., invited to a dance at the house of a plutocrat, was so shocked by what he saw there that he left almost at once in disgust. Madame Machin, the favorite teacher of the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... with a repellent gesture, but Elsie seized it, and clasping both her palms over the cold fingers, said, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... was who saw, in a faint stream of moonlight, a female arm uplifted towards her, from under a table, with a threatening motion. It was bare to the elbow, and draped above. It showed first a clenched fist, and next an open hand, palm outwards, making a repellent gesture. Then the back of the hand was turned, and it motioned her away, as if she had been an importunate beggar. But at this moment, one of the doors opened, and a dark figure passed through the room towards the opposite door. Everything that could be called ghostly, ceased instantaneously. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... point of exasperation: 'I should like to stick red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his handwriting.' By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic reader finds repellent in George Eliot's later work might perhaps never have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigour a censorship of the press and the post-office which kept every disagreeable whisper ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... ago, with all her independence, Rachel would not have been so ready to repel one whose advances, however unwarrantable in themselves, were yet marked by so many evidences of sympathy and consideration. She had not always been suspicious and repellent; and she sighed to think how sadly she must have changed, even before the nightmare ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... Gospels did their best to fill the gap by inventing or developing stories, pretty, silly, or repellent, which only show how little they understood the original Gospels ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... repellent in counting our advantages under the shadow of so great a tragedy but we must try to be as practical as those who are fond of accusing us of materialism. Does any one think that the steam-roller of admirably organized and Government-fostered ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... can believe she sees and hears from the world of the disembodied what she feels she does, one can not but realize that she is a great woman and has a wonderful theory of how human souls return to earth. But I tell her that it seems to me repellent that we have to come back here through Dame Nature's processes, after a period of such great freedom in the occult world, and again go through with teething, mumps, measles, and similar inflictions. The truth is, I can ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... his brain. He opened the damper of his stove, and set it roaring again; then he pulled down the upper sash of his window and looked out on a world whose elements of wood and snow and stone he tried to co- ordinate. There was nothing else in that world but these things, so repellent of one another. He suffered from the incongruity of the wooden bulk of the hotel, with the white drifts deep about it, and with the granite cliffs of Lion's Head before it, where the gray crags darkened under the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... strife engendered by Christian dogma in those times. No sooner had the Franciscans and the Dominicans arrived in Japan than a fierce quarrel broke out between them and the Jesuits—a quarrel which even community of suffering could not compose. "Not less repellent was an attempt on the part of the Spaniards to dictate to Ieyasu the expulsion of all Hollanders from Japan, and an attempt on the part of the Jesuits to dictate the expulsion of the Spaniards. The former proposal, couched almost in the form of a demand, was twice formulated, and accompanied ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... binding; so confident in his own greatness that he knew nothing of envy or of hatred, courteously acknowledged other men's merits, and compassionately forgave other men's faults; an excellent officer and a refined diplomatist without the repellent special impress of either calling, uniting Hellenic culture with the fullest national feeling of a Roman, an accomplished speaker and of graceful manners—Publius Scipio won the hearts of soldiers and of women, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... observant Madge seemed most marked at first, however, was her perfect ease. Her slightest movement was grace itself. Her entire self-possession was indicated by the manner in which she greeted the men who sought her attention, and many there were. She could be perfectly polite, yet as repellent as ice, or she could smile with a fascination that even Madge felt would be hard to resist. This girl, who was such an immense contrast to herself, wholly fixed her attention as she stood for a few moments, like a queen, surrounded ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... into Annie's face. To this young woman, whose one idea of matrimony was steadfast loyalty to the man whose life she shared and whose name she bore, there was something repellent and nauseating in a woman permitting herself to be talked about ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... white-wood. The bark is very thick and cork-like, exhaling an odor peculiarly pungent and agreeable; the buds and tender twigs in the spring have a taste entirely individual and unique, very pleasant to some persons, but quite repellent to others. Gray squirrels and the young of the fox-squirrel eat the buds and flowers as well as the cone-shaped fruit. Humming-birds and bumble-bees in the blossoming-time make a dreamy booming among the shadowy sprays. A saccharine, sticky substance, not unlike honey-dew, may often be found ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... this continued I can only surmise. All my ideas were confused. It seemed an age before any rational sense was felt. During these terrible hours there was frequent recurrence of those harsh, grating accents and repellent looks from sinister faces. Of these experiences I can give no clearer account. The brain-pressure caused by the temple blow produced queer sensations ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... become repellent; and Charles was groping around for an excuse when a letter came from Professor Henslow, saying, among other things, that the Government was about to send a ship around the world on a scientific surveying tour, especially to map the coast of Patagonia and other parts of South America and Australia. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... thought of it all, there was present the happy conviction that she had been more sinned against than sinning. She had forgiven, whereas she might have exacted forgiveness. She had been gracious, whereas she might have followed her mother's advice and have been repellent till she had brought him to her feet. As it was, her strong desire to have him once again had softened her, and now she had the double reward. She had what she wanted, and was able to congratulate herself at the same time on her virtue. ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... Natalya's sentence, after she was dressed in her own little jacket and hat again and just ready to go, one of the most repellent women of the street said to her, "I am staying in here and you're going out. Give me a kiss for good-by." Natalya said that this woman was a horror to her. "But I thought it was not very nice to refuse this; so I kissed her a good-by kiss and ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... follow that such study, to be scientific, shall be made repellent by the use of technical terms the significance of which the reader is left to guess at, but finds unexplained. I fear such treatment of vocal physiology has brought it into disrepute. The aim of the writer will be to give a clear scientific treatment of the subject, ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... were going to spring upon the audience, a long, skinny finger would be shaken before their faces, or pointed as if to drive his words into their hearts. His speech was a torrent of epigram, sarcasm, invective. He was bitter; if you knew nothing about the man or his cause, you would find this repellent and shocking. You had to know what his life had been—an unceasing conflict with oppression; he had got his Socialist education in jail, where he had been sent for trying to organize the wage-slaves of a gigantic corporation. His rage was the rage of a tender-hearted poet, ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... was devoted to books of travel, my father asked me to parse Kane's "Arctic Voyages." I found the volumes cold and repellent. They gave me a rooted prejudice against the North Pole which even the adventure of Doctor Cook has never enabled me ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... to get into the car, but Rick stopped him. "Let's go to the drugstore. I want to get a spray can of insect repellent." ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... which operates in causing men to move generally presents one of two aspects, viz., attractive and repellent. "Men are either drawn or driven to break the ties which bind them to their native locality." Again, the causes of migration are classified as positive advantages and satisfactions, and negative discomforts and compulsions. The ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... she noticed it in the impatient tone of his voice, and then she suddenly lost courage. Oh, if he looked at her like that, so coldly, and if his voice sounded so repellent, how difficult it was to find the right word. But it must be done, he looked so pale and was so thin, his round face had positively become long. What had struck her before struck her with double force now, and she got a great fright. "Wolfgang," ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... the outset let me say in all frankness that I would never, from personal choice, write upon a subject of this character. Its sensationalism is personally repellent to me. On the other hand, no matter how carefully the public prosecutor may preserve the legal viewpoint and the legal temperament, his work may lead him into situations where he feels that he cannot, ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... encouragement, I gradually acquired a taste for alcohol. And suddenly, one evening, like a flash it came upon me that I had shaken off the cursed yoke that held me down: that I never wanted to see the inside of a drugstore again. Cocktails, at first repellent, have at last become palatable to me. I drink highballs for breakfast. I ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... lashed his horse. The mere fact of being in a swiftly moving carriage which wayfarers had to avoid nimbly, maintained their spirits. They had a near glimpse of the cathedral. The cab halted with a bump, in a small square, in front of a repellent building which bore the sign, 'Hotel de Vezelay.' The horse was bleeding. Gerald instructed Sophia to remain where she was, and he and Chirac went up four stone steps into the hotel. Sophia, stared at by loose crowds that were promenading, gazed about her, and saw ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... given a faint indication of intending to speak. "Mr. Rouncewell, our views of duty, and our views of station, and our views of education, and our views of—in short, ALL our views—are so diametrically opposed, that to prolong this discussion must be repellent to your feelings and repellent to my own. This young woman is honoured with my Lady's notice and favour. If she wishes to withdraw herself from that notice and favour or if she chooses to place herself under the influence of any one who may in his peculiar ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... through the Imagination, and that lack of Imagination is at the bottom of all pessimism in philosophy, religion, and personal experience. A fact taken by itself and detached from the whole of which it is part is always hard, bare, repellent; it must be seen in its relations if one would perceive its finer and inner beauty; and it is the Imagination alone which sees things as a whole. The theologians who have stuck to what they call logic have spread a veil of sadness over the world which the poets must dissipate. "I ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... furnished by the doctor. The idea had long been forgotten, only to reappear as a compulsion. The natural desire for a child was strong in her, but was repressed as unholy in an unmarried woman. The associated childish idea of drug-taking was not repellent to her moral sense and was used as a substitute for the real ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... slight sketch placed before us in Captain Wybrow is elaborated into minute completeness, and at the same time freed from all that made Wybrow even superficially repellent. Handsome, accomplished, and gentlemanly; loving and lovable; finding his keenest enjoyment in the enjoyment of others; irreproachable in life, and free from everything bearing the semblance of vice,—what more could the most exacting fictionist desire to make up his ideal hero? Yet, ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... led the way was cold, drab, repellent to the general gay sense of the summer morning. Spargo shivered involuntarily as he entered it and took a first glance around. But the young barrister showed no sign of feeling or concern; he looked quickly about him and stepped alertly to ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... love was too strong for me, I must dwell among mine own people. There, at least, was the bond of custom, there was the affection which grows out of habit; but in the world what hope had I to win love from strangers, with my repellent looks, awkward movements, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... hospital looked bare and grim, the smell of iodoform was more repellent than ever, after the sweet scents of the country. Claire knew her way by this time, and ascended by lift to the women's ward, where Sophie lay. Beside almost every bed one or two visitors were seated, but Sophie was alone. Down the length of the ward Claire caught a glimpse of a recumbent form, and ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... fantastic oddities of his expression there was such a marvellous power of description that I am unable to give even so much as a faint indication of it. Antonia inherited all her mother's amiability and all her mother's charms, but not the repellent reverse of the medal. There was no chronic moral ulcer, which might break out from time to time. Antonia's betrothed put in an appearance, whilst Antonia herself, fathoming with happy instinct the deeper-lying character of her wonderful father, sang one of old Padre Martini's[9] motets, which, she ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... a gay and civil wisdom, and fly from all sourness and austerity of manners, all repellent, mien being suspected ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Rachel's cold, repellent manner was in full force, and she went towards the poor little man, whose girlish face was ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at Halford Castle? Ought she not to feel flattered in having a noble lord for a lover? The thought did not stir her blood. Why was she averse to receiving his attentions? What was there about him that made the thought repellent? Was he not a gentleman? Was he not polite? Did he not show proper respect not only to herself but to everybody? Why not make an effort to overcome her repugnance to him? Would any other girl in Boston or anywhere else ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... parsons were not lacking in Pentonville) was not so insidiously repellent as the blue-cheeked, blue-chinned Passy priest; but he was by no means to me a picturesque or sympathetic apparition, with his weddedness, his whiskers, his black trousers, his frock-coat, his tall hat, his little white tie, his consciousness of ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... watching the waging of a droll little farmyard warfare. Just now her life was running very smoothly, and the shadows of memory were steadily receding. She had almost forgotten the few unpleasant moments when she had first beheld the repellent ugliness of Devil's Hill nearly a week ago. Since then nothing had occurred to raise fresh alarm, and memory, with that pleasant knack inspired of perfect physical health, had gently mellowed and lost something ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... antique occiput (of which a goodly number, more or less mutilated, are constantly brought to light by the peasants) upon Lollianus' vacant shoulders. Anything more comical and at the same time more repellent than this hybrid statue it would be impossible to imagine, yet Lollianus of the unknown head remains a favourite with the people of Pozzuoli. Leaving the Largo del Municipio, with its weird senator and its dusty palms, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... was quite as utilitarian. Its halls, bare and cheerless, echoed to the tread and were repellent as those of a barracks. The visitor felt chilled, disappointed, as if he had been met by the insolent servant of an indifferent hostess. It seemed the home of the mathematical, the mechanical, the material; but this was a ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... towards which I was steering. While this remained stationary in the centre all was well. When it moved along any one of the lines, the vessel was obviously deviating from her course in the opposite direction; and, to recover the right course, the repellent force must be caused to drive her in the direction in which the image had moved. To accomplish this, a helm was attached to the lower division of the main conductor, by which the latter could be made to move at will in any direction within the limit of its rotation. Controlling ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... Philosophy would, in my opinion, be more readily and widely appreciated than it is at present, if the translators of philosophical works had been somewhat more concerned to throw their versions into a form less strange and repellent to the western reader than literal renderings from technical Sanskrit must needs be in many passages. I am not unaware of the peculiar dangers of the plan now advocated—among which the most obvious is the temptation it offers to the translator ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... charm or expressive potentiality hitherto felt to be lacking. Is that true? Has a rock of offense been removed? Has a mephitic odor been changed to a sweet savor by the subtle alchemy of the musical composer? Has a drama abhorrent, bestial, repellent, and loathsome been changed into a thing of delectability by the potent agency of music? It used to be said that things too silly to be spoken might be sung; is it also true that things too vile, too foul, too nauseating for contemplation may be seen, so they be insidiously and wickedly glorified ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... metallic surface is very slight, but from a surface of porcelain, paper, or charcoal, heat is discharged profusely. Even many of the best non-conductors are powerful radiators, and throw off heat with a repellent energy difficult ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... Juke, is part of the make-up of very nearly every human being; it has to be fought down, like the notorious ape and tiger. But he thought that Gideon and Katherine Varick had less of it than any one else he knew; the mediocre was repellent to them; cant and sentiment made them sick; they made a fetish of hard truth, and so much despised most of their neighbours that they would not experience the temptation to grab at popularity. In fact, they would dislike it ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... within ten leagues of gentility, and who, one and all, were absorbedly and unabashedly bent on the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored spot—the pushing of their individual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be, perhaps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and repellent miscellany. ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... him wildly; then a light of recognition kindled in his black eyes. It changed to that baleful gleam of hatred. His hair lay low upon his forehead and through it he glared. His face was covered with a smut of beard which made him even more repellent. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... spite of the repellent aspect of the place, and our driver went to the foot of the line, where he fed his own horse. Cousin Egbert, already at one of the open-air tables, was rapping smartly ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... of this paper to show that Socialism is not a scheme for the betterment of humanity to be accomplished by a sufficiently zealous and intelligent propaganda, but that it is, on the contrary, a consistent, (though to many repellent) monistic philosophy of the cosmos; that it is from its Alpha to its Omega so closely and inextricably interlocked that its component parts cannot be disassociated, save by an act of intellectual ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... Chinese original partly cloaked: for by transferring Eastern thoughts into Western moulds, things that are like nails in the hands of soft sensitive Oriental beings are made to appear to the steel-clad West as cold-blooded, evolutionary necessities which may be repellent but which are never cruel. The more the matter is studied the more convinced must the political student be that in this affair of the 18th January we have an international coup destined to become classic in the new text-books of political science. All the way through the twenty-one articles ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... tablet over dead ashes, had its functions superseded by an air-tight drum in the corner, warmed at second-hand from the dining-room below, and offered no attractive seclusion; the sofa against the wall was immovable and formally repellent. He was obliged to draw a chair beside the table, whose every curve seemed to facilitate his wife's easy withdrawal from ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... door of the hotel, and left for Mink Run by the back streets. He did not return to town for a week, and when he made his next appearance there, upon strictly a business visit, did not go near the Treadwells', and wore such a repellent look that no one ventured to speak to him about his encounter with Fetters and McRae. He was humiliated and ashamed, and angry with himself and all the world. He had lost Graciella already; any possibility ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... affection and kindliness as a ripe pear, and the voice that proceeded from her ever-smiling lips was a hoarse and dove-like coo of love. Ellen at first started a little aghast at this gigantic fleshliness, this general slough and slump of outline, this insistency of repellent curves, and then the old woman spoke and thrust out a great, soft hand, and the heart of the child overleaped her artistic sense and her reason, and she thought old Mrs. Mitchell beautiful. Mrs. Mitchell never ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Ago.—Rural life, as it existed a quarter of a century or more ago, was extremely severe and indeed to our mind quite repellent. In those days—and no doubt they are so even yet in many places—the conditions were too often forbidding and deterrent. Otherwise how can we explain the very general tendency among the younger people to move from the country ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... brow, his eyes travelled from the clock in the corner to a photograph on the mantel-shelf—the photograph of a man's face, dark, haughty, beautiful, yet repellent in its beauty, and with a certain hard sternness in its outline—the face of Theos Alwyn. From this portrait his glance wandered to the table, where, amid a picturesque litter of books and papers, lay a square, simply bound volume, with an ivory leaf-cutter thrust in it to mark the place ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... expanse, glitters the Lake of Scutari. Round a small dim spur of land running into the lake, lies Scutari itself, which is, however, not visible. To the left a forbidding chain of magnificent mountains, dwarfing the intervening hills into insignificance, fascinate him by their repellent grandeur. Snow-clad, except in the height of summer, these mountains seem symbolical of the land they border, that savage and unknown Albania. A glimpse of a green valley below can just be caught, there lies Podgorica, our destination. At our feet a long, low-lying plateau ends abruptly in a ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... Browning, emphasized, in this earlier time, with a bewildering vivacity and an affluence of courtesy. In his mature phase he was still courteous and agreeable when he chose to be so, but was also occasionally supercilious and repellent, and assiduously cultivated smart society. I once asked him, in 1879, why he made his poetry so often obscure, and he replied, frankly, that he did so because he couldn't help it; the inability to put his thoughts in clear phrases ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... forgotten all about it until I saw the girl today. She certainly seems to be a very superior person; she will find the Cove very lonely, I am sure. It is not probable she will stay there long. I must see what I can do for her, but her manner seemed rather repellent, don't you think?" ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... terror—a fear of him—of the passion that dominated him, a passion like the devils that made men gash themselves and leap from precipices into the sea. To unaccustomed eyes the first sight of passion is always terrifying and is usually repellent. One must learn to adventure the big wave, the great hissing, towering billow that conceals behind its menace the wild ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... the plea that it would bore her to listen. If the work bores the mother it is not surprising that the child attacks it with mind fixed on metal more attractive and eyes seeking the clock. Occupations which are repellent in early life leave behind them a memory calculated to render them forever distasteful. It is therefore a grave mistake not to make music study from the outset throb with vital interest. An appeal ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... negative is more readily dissipated than the positive. But, so far as we at present know, this question enters into the discussion scarcely, if at all. Our knowledge seems rather to point to the substances upon which the charges are collected. The self-repellent nature of electricity compels it to manifest itself at the more prominent parts of the surface, the level being forsaken for the point. The tension of the charge, or its tendency to fly off, is proportionately increased. And if at a given moment the tension attains a certain intensity, the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... in Greek, but, finding he "understood German," he made the profound remark that the plums on the road were delicious. And now, hear how Heine draws the contrast between the Hellenic Teuton and himself, the Teutonic Hebrew: "At bottom Goethe and I are opposite natures and mutually repellent. He is essentially a man on whom life sits easily, who looks on enjoyment of life as the highest good, and though at times he has glimpses and vague feelings of the ideal life and expresses them in his poems, yet he has never comprehended it, much less lived it. I, on the contrary, am essentially ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... editions. Behind such a rampart of printed matter he is well defended against profane curiosity. It needs courage and perseverance to penetrate into this labyrinth of text, all bristling with theology and exegesis and metaphysics. But only cross the threshold of the repellent enclosure, grow used to the order and shape of the building, and it will not be long ere you are overcome by a warm sympathy, and then by a steadily increasing admiration for the host who dwells there. The hieratic face of the old bishop lights up, becomes ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... other end of the room. Not long afterwards I took my leave. My spirits were depressed; a dark cloud of uncertainty seemed to hang over the future. Even the prospect of returning to Frankfort, the next day, became repellent to me. I was almost inclined to hope that my aunt might (as Mr. Keller had ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... record of lust and cruelty. But Shakespeare prudently showed scant respect for their handling of the narrative. By diverting the course of the plot at a critical point he not merely proved his artistic ingenuity, but gave dramatic dignity and moral elevation to a degraded and repellent theme. In the old versions Isabella yields her virtue as the price of her brother's life. The central fact of Shakespeare's play is Isabella's inflexible and unconditional chastity. Other of Shakespeare's alterations, like the Duke's abrupt proposal to marry Isabella, seem hastily ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Cecil, who had lately been so conspicuously repellent? He thought the change too good so be believed, and, without another asking, accompanied her to the arbour; but she insisted on the ostensible motive of their going there ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... eyes, that an observer might discern anything but the most careless gayety. To Talbot, however, there was something beneath all this, which was very plainly visible; and to her, with her profound insight into Brooke's deeper nature, all this nonsense offered nothing that was repellent; on the contrary, she found it most touching and most sad. It seemed to her like the effort of a strong man to rid himself of an overmastering feeling—a feeling deep within him that struggled forever upward and would not be repressed. It rose up constantly, seeking to break through ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... compensate the world by presenting a concept of beauty in place of a general notion of repellent ugliness. Instead of being regarded as a "Hottentot with clicking palate, whom the meanest of the rest look down upon for all his glimmering language and spirituality," he wished the world to find in him fitness for survival, conformity with civilization's ideal, example ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... relations should come tumbling in when they chose to cross the Atlantic. He would not have it, and took discreet steps to prevent any accident of the sort. He wrote to America occasionally himself, and knowing well how to make himself civilly repellent, so subtly chilled his parents-in-law as to discourage in them more than once their half-formed plan of paying a visit to their child in her new home. He opened, read and reclosed all epistles to and from New York, and while Mrs. Vanderpoel ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... great; his power immense. He was a veritable dictator of the realms of finance; an assiduous, repellent little man, with his devil's eye, who rode roughshod over every obstacle in his path. His every movement bred fear; his veriest word could bring ruin to any one who dared cross his purposes. The war of 1812 ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... is, in some respects, exceedingly unattractive. Indeed, it may truly be said to be in many respects repulsive. There are usually odours in such a camp which are repellent to the nose, dishes that are disgusting to the taste, sights that are disagreeable to the eyes, sounds that are abhorrent to the ear, and habits that are uncongenial to ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... herself to remember that respect is, in some sort, due to everything—however unbeautiful, however even vile or repugnant—which is a constant quantity in human affairs and human character, due to everything in the realm of Nature also, however repellent, if it ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... not gone out of my memory. Often, as I walked my rounds, would the picture of that dimly-lit room rise unbidden. Often would I find myself looking once more into that ghastly face, so worn, so wasted and haggard, and yet so far from repellent. All the incidents of that last night would reconstitute themselves with a vividness that showed the intensity of the impression that they had made at the time. I would have gladly forgotten the whole affair, for every incident of it was fraught with discomfort. But it clung to my memory; ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... stairs that awakened them. The door was quickly unlocked, it was thrown open, and the hairy face of O'Sullivan Og, who held it wide, looked in. Behind him were two of the boys with pikes—frowsy, savage, repellent figures, with drugget coats tied by the sleeves ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... Allen arrived she greeted him, and ushered him into her new domain with a pride which had in it something almost repellent. At supper-time she led him into the dining-room and glanced around, ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... despises everything but work. I think she suffers from her husband's shiftlessness. She always speaks of me as "This" or "that woman." The family consists of a grown-up son, a shiftless, melancholy-looking youth, who possibly pines for a wider life; a girl of sixteen, a sour, repellent-looking creature, with as much manners as a pig; and three hard, un-child-like younger children. By the whole family all courtesy and gentleness of act or speech seem regarded as "works of the flesh," if not of "the devil." They knock over all one's things without apologizing ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... on the other, while the railway from Manchester to Birmingham passes over a high viaduct above the city and the whole valley. Stockport is renowned throughout the entire district as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes, and looks, indeed, especially when viewed from the viaduct, excessively repellent. But far more repulsive are the cottages and cellar dwellings of the working-class, which stretch in long rows through all parts of the town from the valley bottom to the crest of the hill. I do not remember to ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... weeks of this kind of life, he began to want some more fierce excitement. He had tried making downright love to Elsie, with no great success as yet, in his own opinion. The girl was capricious in her treatment of him, sometimes scowling and repellent, sometimes familiar, very often, as she used to be of old, teasing and malicious. All this, perhaps, made her more interesting to a young man who was tired of easy conquests. There was a strange fascination in her eyes, too, which at times was quite irresistible, so that he would feel ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was directed against Lady Emily; and she it was who saw, in a faint stream of moonlight, a female arm uplifted towards her, from under a table, with a threatening motion. It was bare to the elbow, and draped above. It showed first a clenched fist, and next an open hand, palm outwards, making a repellent gesture. Then the back of the hand was turned, and it motioned her away, as if she had been an importunate beggar. But at this moment, one of the doors opened, and a dark figure passed through the room towards the opposite door. Everything that could be called ghostly, ceased instantaneously. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... of seeing a member of the family branded by law as a mental incompetent, and, to a degree, stigmatized by the prevailing unwarranted attitude of the public toward mental illness and the institutions in which mental cases are treated. The very thought was repellent; and a mistaken sense of duty—and perhaps a suggestion of pride—led them to wish me out of such an institution as long ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... little jealous of an interloper," thought Mr. Danforth, noticing the repellent manner of young Dawkins. "Never mind, they ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... with parcellaire division and the service of machinery? How shall the man who, by the effect of his labor, has become a slave,—that is, a chattel, a thing,— again become a person by the same labor, or in continuing the same exercise? Why is it not seen that these ideas are mutually repellent, and that, if, by some impossibility, the proletaire could reach a certain degree of intelligence, he would make use of it in the first place to revolutionize society and change all civil and industrial relations? And what I say is no vain exaggeration. The ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... an aptitude at his lessons that had created in his guardian's mind some ambition for him, and she held him down to his books with rigid assiduity. He was naturally studious, but the feeling that he was being driven made his tasks repellent, although he performed them without outward sign of rebellion, while ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the only true one. The man who does not believe he is to be blotted out when his body ceases to breathe, who holds all history for his heritage and the wide present for his battle-ground, believes also the future is no repellent void but a widening and alluring world. If in his travel he is scrupulous in detail, it is in the spirit of the mariner who will neither court a ship-wreck nor be denied his adventure. He cannot deny to others the right to hesitate and halt by the way, but his spirit asks no less ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... a voice which calls ceaselessly to those human hearts tuned to its messages: hostile and harsh, it draws and urges; repellent, it profligately awards health and wealth; inviting, it kills. And always it keeps its own counsel; it is without peer in its lonesomeness, and without confidants; it heaps its sand over its secrets to hide them from its ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... awful face it was!—what a thing of distorted passion and pain! What an agony was expressed in every line of the features!—agony in which the traces of a divine beauty lingered only to render the whole countenance more repellent and terrific! A kind of sentient solemnity, mingled with wrath and terror, glared from the painted eyes,—the lips, slightly parted in a cruel upward curve, seemed about to utter a shriek of menace,—the hair, drooping in black, ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... whole countenance became convulsed with the most unparalleled, and for that reason indescribable, expression of agony, whilst the yellowness of his complexion deepened to a livid, lurid black, that was so inconceivably repellent and hellish that I sprang away from the bed—appalled. There was then a gasping, rasping noise, and a voice that, despite its unnatural hollowness, I identified as that of Ralph, broke forth: 'I have been wanting to speak to you for ages, but something, I cannot ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... eyes wide with a curious conviction that there was a cat in the room, and then all in a moment she met the cool, repellent stare of the black-browed doctor whom Burke ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... stirs up the slime in the shallows, and this is the Backwash of War. It is very ugly. There are many little lives foaming up in the backwash. They are loosened by the sweeping current, and float to the surface, detached from their environment, and one glimpses them, weak, hideous, repellent. After the war, they will consolidate again into the ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... she seemed as calm as I was agitated. Her demeanor was a singular one. She was not exactly frigid or repellent. She was rather shy and reserved. It was rather the constraint of timidity than of dislike. Dislike? No. Not a bit of it. Whatever her feelings might be, she had no reason for dislike. Still she was cold—and her ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... nature is the expression of joy, and it is a revelation to us that the Creator's holiness is not repellent and severe. God tries to win you by his Spirit, which clothes the world with beauty, to trust him, to give up your evil that you may find deeper communion with him, and to recognize the charm of goodness which alone is harmony with the ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... it existed a quarter of a century or more ago, was extremely severe and indeed to our mind quite repellent. In those days—and no doubt they are so even yet in many places—the conditions were too often forbidding and deterrent. Otherwise how can we explain the very general tendency among the younger people to move from the ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... sinuous, and the momentum of current consequently lessened. For example, striking in an arm of the river, by the inertia of the moving volume, the water is thrown, and with less velocity, upon the opposite bank, which it pursues until it meets another repellent obstacle, from which it refracts, taking direction again for the other side. Above the Missouri, the river is principally directed by the natural trough of the valley. Below this, however, the channel is ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... hand with a repellent gesture, but Elsie seized it, and clasping both her palms over the cold fingers, said, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... person who is struggling to hide, by effrontery, the chagrin she is conscious of deserving: no person took any notice of her entrance, and all appearance of the good meal she wanted was removed. There was a certain something in the usually-smiling faces of the heads of the mansion that acted as a repellent to her, and she sat for some time silent; but at length she spoke to Ellen, who, from her gentle meekness, was ever easy of access, and whom, intending to mortify, she accosted thus—"Nelly, did you eat ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... quite as utilitarian. Its halls, bare and cheerless, echoed to the tread and were repellent as those of a barracks. The visitor felt chilled, disappointed, as if he had been met by the insolent servant of an indifferent hostess. It seemed the home of the mathematical, the mechanical, the material; but this was a mistake. It was a house of dreams. The ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... culpably daring in listening. He wondered that he was not more shocked, being sure that it was his duty to be. There was about the young man's mental condition a sort of infantile unsophistication. The New England mind often seems to inherit from bygone Puritanism a certain repellent quality through which it takes long for anything savoring of worldliness or worldly wisdom to penetrate. When once this covering is broken, it may be added, the result is much the same as in the case of the cracking ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... word, a most sooty and repellent bearer of a lady's greeting!" laughed Theos lightly, as he sauntered arm in arm with his host on the downward path leading to the garden and palace— "And I have yet to learn the true meaning ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... growth on the roof anything to do with your divination?" asked Vendale, holding his light towards a gloomy ragged growth of dark fungus, pendent from the arches with a very disagreeable and repellent effect. "We are famous for this growth in ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... turn: could the fierce, repellent, whisky-craving woman be the mother of her gracious Gibbie? Could she be, and look so lost? But the loss of him had lost her perhaps. Anyhow God was his Father, whoever was ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... that they are in no sense a warlike nation, in spite of their turbulent history of the past, and, indeed, few things could be more incompatible than turbulence and modern warfare. It demands on the part of the masses of combatants an obedience and a disregard of life which are repellent to human nature, and the Belgians are above all things human. Germany is governed by soldiers, and France by officials. Unlike the frogs in the fable, the Belgians ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... felt after the first course; and that if it showed languor he should be moved to the side of some other partner. "He had great charm," writes to me another old friend, "in a quiet winning way, but was 'dark' with rough and noisy people." So it came to pass that his manner was threefold; icy and repellent with those who set his nerves on edge; good- humoured, receptive, intermittently responsive in general and congenial company; while, at ease with friends trusted and beloved, the lines of the face became gracious, indulgent, affectionate, the sourire des ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... she likes," replied his wife; "but she has a curious temper; and there is something very repellent about her when she does not like people. Strange, is it not, that she should not ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... trembled at her triumph, and began to think that failure would have been easier to bear. Were they in the least suited to each other? Would she like to see poor Kitty chained for life to that impassive egotist, whose very merits were repellent, and whose modesty even seemed to convict and snub you? Mrs. Ellison was not able to put the matter to herself with moderation, either way; doubtless she did Mr. Arbuton injustice now. "Did you accept him?" ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... befell—drop o' silent in the din. Let us enter that silence ere the belchings re-begin. Through a ragged rift aslant in the cannonade's smoke An iron-clad reveals her repellent broadside Bodily intact. But a frigate, all oak, Shows honeycombed by shot, and her deck crimson-dyed. And a trumpet from port of the iron-clad hails, Summoning the other, whose flag never trails: "Surrender that frigate, Will! Surrender, Or ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... particular mental atmosphere mysteriously, inevitably woven round the soul by the conditions of special breeding and special life. If, then, this affair were real it was sordid, and if it were sordid it was repellent to suppose that her family could be mixed up in it; but her people were mixed up in it, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... youths, of the corresponding class, with whom I have come in intimate contact in the United States. Their language about, their whole mental attitude towards, woman was during my first years in America an amazement and a shock to me. It has never ceased to be other than repellent. ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... dogma in those times. No sooner had the Franciscans and the Dominicans arrived in Japan than a fierce quarrel broke out between them and the Jesuits—a quarrel which even community of suffering could not compose. "Not less repellent was an attempt on the part of the Spaniards to dictate to Ieyasu the expulsion of all Hollanders from Japan, and an attempt on the part of the Jesuits to dictate the expulsion of the Spaniards. The former proposal, couched almost in the form of a demand, was twice formulated, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the judge appointed juries of women to make examination. No artist has yet dared to paint the picture of the gloating female inquisitors grouped around their naked and trembling victim, a scene that was to be enacted in many a witch trial. And it is well, for the scene would be too repellent and brutal for reproduction. In the use of these specially instituted juries there was no care to get unbiassed decisions. One of the inquisitors appointed to examine Cystley Celles had already served as witness ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... tell you in so many words that you're physically repellent to me? That the thought of letting you kiss me horrifies and disgusts me?" In spite of her ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... never in life forget that proud, repellent lifting of her head as I spoke. Diana might have looked so at Actaeon, although, poor fellow, he had never come so near to the virgin charms of that Olympian lady as I to those of the queenly virgin before me on the preceding night. ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... marked just then; the stranger so tall, commanding, and dignified, in spite of his rough hunting-dress, his eyes keen and flashing, and his well-cut features seeming noble by comparison with Gunson's, whose care-lined and disfigured face, joined with his harsh, abrupt way, made him quite repellent. ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... emission of heat from a polished metallic surface is very slight, but from a surface of porcelain, paper, or charcoal, heat is discharged profusely. Even many of the best non-conductors are powerful radiators, and throw off heat with a repellent energy difficult to conceive. ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... size. Had these two great men of New England been matched in training as they were matched in endowment, and had they then faced each other in debate, they would not have been found to differ so greatly in power. Their natures were electrically repellent, but from which did the greater force radiate? Their education differed so radically that it is impossible to compare them, but if you translate the Phi Beta Kappa address into politics, you have something ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... fisherman he was a sailor for a great part of his life, and doubtless his recklessness was washed into him on the high seas, where in his time men made a crony of death, and drank merrily over dodging it for another night. To me his roars of laughter without cause were as repellent as a boy's drum; yet many faces that were long in my company brightened at his coming, and women, with whom, despite my yearning, I was in no wise a favorite, ran to their doors to listen to him as readily as to the bell-man. Children scurried from him if his mood ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... not close his eyes, but they looked misty and heavy, and his fingers played lazily with one another on the arm of his chair; Agatha laid her own upon them—she could not help it. She lost her fear of the repellent Mr. Harper in the old man, so helpless and feeble. She wished she had come oftener to Kingcombe Holm, and been more attentive and daughter-like to ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... staff upon the floor, and, contracting his brows and opening his mouth to its fullest extent, laughed in a dreadful, unnatural way. He had lost the sight of one eye, and its colourless pupil kept rolling about and imparting to his hideous face an even more repellent expression than ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... in amount and unsatisfactory in quality. Two or three times she had passed Old Swallowtail on the street, but he had not seemed to notice her. Always the old man stared straight ahead, walking stiffly and with a certain repellent dignity that forbade his neighbors to address him. He seemed to see no one. He lived in a world known only to himself and neither demanded nor desired ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... influence men of the most opposite characters. It would be difficult to conceive a more complete contrast than that which William Romaine (1714-1795) presented to the two worthies last mentioned. Grave, severe, self-restrained, and, except to those who knew him intimately, somewhat repellent in manners. Romaine would have been quite unfitted for the work which Grimshaw and Berridge, in spite—or, shall we say, in consequence?—of their boisterous bonhomie and occasionally ill-timed jocularity were able ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... from the stormy North, This modern Cyclops marched repellent forth, To slake his thirst for blood and plundered wealth, Not as the soldier, but by fraud and stealth; To waft the gales of death with horror rife On helpless age, and wage with women strife: To leave at Baltimore and New Orleans The drunkard's name, or worse, the gibbet's ...
— The American Cyclops, the Hero of New Orleans, and Spoiler of Silver Spoons • James Fairfax McLaughlin
... and grim, the smell of iodoform was more repellent than ever, after the sweet scents of the country. Claire knew her way by this time, and ascended by lift to the women's ward, where Sophie lay. Beside almost every bed one or two visitors were seated, but Sophie was alone. Down the length of the ward Claire ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... her mistress at Halford Castle? Ought she not to feel flattered in having a noble lord for a lover? The thought did not stir her blood. Why was she averse to receiving his attentions? What was there about him that made the thought repellent? Was he not a gentleman? Was he not polite? Did he not show proper respect not only to herself but to everybody? Why not make an effort to overcome her repugnance to him? Would any other girl in Boston or anywhere else hesitate a moment over such an opportunity as had come to her to be called ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... face him they saw an unclean, tousled man, very tall, with stooping shoulders, protruding black eyes, spiky hair, and a generally repellent appearance. ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... first syllable. Indeed, it might just as well be "inuberance." It does not long to make an impression or, in vulgar phrase, to "get a rise"; but tends to be self-contained. It is not boisterousness. It is generous and infectious, while boisterousness is inclined to be selfish and repellent. Most of us would rather spend a week among a crowd of mummies than in a gang of boisterous young blades. For boisterousness is only a degenerate exuberance, drunk and on the rampage. The royal old musician and poet was not filled with ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... and his beard many shades whiter. Short of stature, with very high shoulders, that suggest physical deformity, squarely built and stout, a square, rugged face, with light, steely eyes and overhanging brows. It is a repellent face and form, and Floyd Grandon ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... an ineffectual attempt to be kindly, than by real kindness bestowed ungraciously. Mill's great qualities should not be overlooked because they were hidden by a manner which seems almost deliberately repellent. He devoted himself through life to promote the truth as he saw it; to increase the scanty amounts of pleasures enjoyed by mankind; and to discharge all the duties which he owed to his neighbours. He succeeded beyond all ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... heart from those so much better than he, who loved her so much more honestly; and this memory had helped her in a way. She had tried to be true to it, that dead, lost thing, of which this man who came once a year to see her, and now, lying with his life at stake in the hospital, was the repellent ghost. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... illustrious colleague too well to follow him down any of those by-paths of knowledge in which he delighted to wander. To his intensely shrewd and practical mind there was something repellent in the waste of energy involved in a discussion upon the Early Church or the twenty-seven principles of Mesmer. It was his custom to slip past such conversational openings with a quick step and ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... failed to call up a smile. They stood in the hall near the front door, and here Dr. Hartwell found them when he left the sickroom. Eugene looked up as he approached them, and stepped forward with a smile of recognition to shake the extended hand. Beulah's countenance became instantly repellent, and she was turning away when ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... disconcerted and repelled the other. Hugh could remember a mute and appealing look that he gave him; but though he felt that he was acting ungenerously and even basely, he could only meet it with a blank and repellent gaze, and the friendship had been broken off, never to be renewed. He had made, too, friends with women both of his own age and older; but the moment that the friendship seemed cemented, the emotion on Hugh's part cooled into a camaraderie which was both misunderstood and ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the world find a way to keep themselves democratic surely men of less importance should be able to do the same? The snob is about as offensive a person as could be described. He is usually a hypocrite or an ignoramus—sometimes both. His pomposity is naturally repellent. We easily become accustomed to dodging such characters. The detriment is theirs—not ours. They are left by the wayside and sooner or later wake up to the fact that they stand ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... every vestige of decency; vile thoughts which had never crossed the threshold of John Denny's normal mind seemed bred without restraint in the caldron of his diseased brain. His was a vital sturdiness which, for ten years, refused death, but during the last of these he was physically and morally repellent. Sentiment, that too-often fear of unkind gossip, or ignorant falsifying of consequences, stood between this family and the proper institutional and professional care, which could have given him more than any family's love, and protected those who had their lives to live ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... V. repel, push from, drive apart, drive from &c 276; chase, dispel; retrude^; abduce^, abduct; send away; repulse. keep at arm's length, turn one's back upon, give the cold shoulder; send off, send away with a flea in one's ear. Adj. repelling &c v.; repellent, repulsive; abducent^, abductive^. centripetal Phr. like charges repel; opposite charges attract; like ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... brain; one whose pleasures lay manifestly on the intellectual side. One thing Gifford quickly noted, as he looked at the man with a painful curiosity, was that the face before him lacked much of the suggestion of evil which in the brother he had found so repellent. This man could surely be hard enough on occasion, the strong jaw and a certain hardness in the eyes told that, but except perhaps for an uncomfortable excess of sharpness, there was none of his brother's rather brutally scoffing cast ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... that there are no souls in it making it comfortable to the spiritual sense? That the knowledge of such presence would make most people uneasy, is no argument against the fancy: truth itself, its intrinsic, essential, necessary trueness unrecognised, must be repellent. ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... apartment; its fireplace, sealed by an iron ornament like a monumental tablet over dead ashes, had its functions superseded by an air-tight drum in the corner, warmed at second-hand from the dining-room below, and offered no attractive seclusion; the sofa against the wall was immovable and formally repellent. He was obliged to draw a chair beside the table, whose every curve seemed to facilitate his wife's easy ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... young men wanted to be integrated into every phase of community life, Congressman Chet Holifield told the Secretary of Defense, and he passed on a warning from his California constituents that "any attempt to forestall this ambition by treating them as a group apart is extremely repellent to them and gives rise to demoralization and hostility."[15-4] If the Department of Defense considered racial information essential, Holifield continued, why not make the determination in a less objectionable manner? He suggested a series of questions concerning the ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... strangely aloof. Of late years John Barton had had a repellent power about him, felt by all, except to the few who had either known him in his better and happier days, or those to whom he had given his sympathy and his confidence. People did not care to enter the doors of one whose very depth of thoughtfulness rendered him moody and ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... as he was alive to bind the antagonistic forces of Naples and Milan together by the link of his own personal influence. He, in a word, was the subtle acid holding in chemical combination many mutually repellent substances. When his influence was withdrawn by death, within a few months they had all fallen apart, the triple alliance was forgotten and Italy was doomed. Even by those with whom he was nominally at war he was resorted to for advice. He it was that kept Innocent VIII from taking up a position ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... volunteer; a man who seemed too early old, too early embittered by some cross, for, though grim of countenance, rough of speech, cold of manner, a keen observer would have soon discovered traces of a deeper, warmer nature hidden behind the repellent front he turned upon the world. A true New Englander, thoughtful, acute, reticent, and opinionated; yet earnest withal, intensely patriotic, and often humorous, despite a ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... necessary grime with the perhaps too facile disdain of the clean-faced southerner, who is apt to forget that coal cannot walk up unaided out of the mine, and that the basin in which he washes his beautiful purity can only be manufactured amid conditions highly repellent. Well, my impressions of the platform of Knype station were unfavourable. There was dirt in the air; I could feel it at once on my skin. And the scene was shabby, undignified, and rude. I use the ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... to be a brilliant comedy, and that you were to be one of the graceful figures in it. I found it to be a revolting and repellent tragedy, and that the sinister occasion of the great catastrophe, sinister in its concentration of aim and intensity of narrowed will power, was yourself stripped of the mask of joy and pleasure by which you, no less than I, had been ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... I saw that he was a young man, with a certain expression in his face which a first glance might have taken for fearlessness and power of some sort, but which notwithstanding, I felt to be rather repellent than otherwise. The moment the carriage-door was opened, he called the servant by his ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... through sympathy, from which they detached themselves, in intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere theory that would take nothing for granted, and assent to no approximate or hypothetical truths. In their unfriendly, repellent attitude towards the Greek religion, and the old Greek morality, surely, they had been but faulty economists. The Greek religion was then alive: then, still more than in its later day of dissolution, the higher view of it was possible, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... surpassed in no other part of the world. Even the colors of the Painted Desert in northern Arizona and the wonderful flowers of the California plains are less pleasing. In the Painted Desert the patches of red, yellow, gray-blue, white, pale green, and black have a garish, almost repellent appearance. In California the flame-colored acres of poppies in some places, of white or yellow daisylike flowers in others, or of purple blossoms elsewhere have a softer expression than the bare soil of the desert. Yet they lack the delicate blending and harmony of colors ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... in the middle of the room. When her friend made a step or two from the door, she put forth her hands with an involuntary repellent gesture, so expressive that Miriam at once felt a great chasm opening itself between them two. They might gaze at one another from the opposite side, but without the possibility of ever meeting more; or, at least, since the chasm could never be bridged over, they ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a man is to be God's slave. The harsh, repellent features of that wicked institution assume an altogether different character when they become the features of my relation to Him. Absolute submission, unconditional obedience, on the slave's part; and on the part of the Master complete ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... cannot know people save through the Imagination, and that lack of Imagination is at the bottom of all pessimism in philosophy, religion, and personal experience. A fact taken by itself and detached from the whole of which it is part is always hard, bare, repellent; it must be seen in its relations if one would perceive its finer and inner beauty; and it is the Imagination alone which sees things as a whole. The theologians who have stuck to what they call logic have spread a veil of sadness over the world ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... the profitless deeps and rot beneath, Slung northward, for a hunted beast's retort On sovereign power; there his final stand, Among the perjured Scythian's shaggy horde, The hydrocephalic aerolite Had taken; flashing thence repellent teeth, Though Europe's Master Europe's Rebel banned To be earth's outcast, ocean's lord ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that as there were no men present she would tell a certain story. "Grandmother," interposed Isabel, vaguely startled, "please do not say anything that you would not say before a man;" and for an instant, amid the hush, the child and the woman looked at each other like two repellent intelligences, accidentally meeting out of the heavens ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... them. We entered; it was the hour of dinner. The place sparkled with gems, and the naked backs of the women gleamed in the electric light. Course followed upon course; champagne flowed, a fine band played, everything was costly; everything was, in a sense, repellent. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... presented me with an expensively repellent gift in the form of a brown earthenware jug, a cross between a Mexican idol and a pitcher. A hideous thing, calculated to frighten children or sober drunken men. I know I should have nearly died of thirst before I ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... one of those men whose ears are always on the stretch, who take everything in and give little out. There was a curious air of watchfulness and of secrecy about him in private matters which was as repellent—to Ransford's thinking—as it was hard to explain. Anyway, in private affairs, he did not like his assistant, and he liked him less than ever as he glanced at him on ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... at heart she is cold and callous or warm and loving. So far as we were justified in drawing conclusions regarding the character of Nature as a whole from what we saw of her manifestations in the life of the forest, we came to the conclusion that she was not so hard and repellent as she assuredly would be to us if her guiding principle of action were the survival of the fittest. We inferred, rather, from our observations of her in the forest that she was actuated by an aspiration towards what we ourselves hold to be of most worth and value. ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... and then fell back, horror and loathing depicted on her face. She stretched out one hand, with a repellent gesture, as if warning them to keep him away, and with the other hand she clutched at her throat, from which came a choking sound. The woman offered to support her, but she sprang up in a moment, pointed straight at the ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... they are, these balze form an appropriate preface to the gloomy and repellent isolation of Canossa. The rock towers from a narrow platform to the height of rather more than 160 feet from its base. The top is fairly level, forming an irregular triangle, of which the greatest length is about ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of the repellent aspect of the place, and our driver went to the foot of the line, where he fed his own horse. Cousin Egbert, already at one of the open-air tables, was rapping smartly ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... large nature fought hard to find excuses for her. He strove to convince himself that this strange coldness, this evasion, this half-repellent attitude, was but a form of maiden coyness. It was her natural fear of so great a change. It was the result, perhaps, of some last lingering look back to the scene of her artistic triumphs. It did not even occur to him ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... scattered like the autumn leaves that were scuddering over the fields. His voice, the very roughened bitterness of it; his eyes, with their peremptory challenge, their sore accusingness; the very contradictions of the man's personality, now delightful, now repellent, and, breathing through them all, the passion she must needs divine—of these various impressions, small and great, she was the struggling captive. Serenity, peace ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of reverent pleasure with which Caroline listened—so sincere, so quiet, yet so evident—stirred the elder lady's faculties to gentle animation. Rarely, probably, had she, with her chill, repellent outside, her diffident mien, and incommunicative habits, known what it was to excite in one whom she herself could love feelings of earnest affection and admiring esteem. Delightful, doubtless, was the ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... air of victory, in the kind of thrilling joy with which he pounced upon the carefully guarded little secret and dragged it out into the light, made him all at once loathsome in Varney's eyes, a creature unspeakably repellent. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... worlds are his, as is the case with all true idealists. The modern reversion to paganism is founded on the fundamental error that Christianity is alien to Nature, setting up against her freedom the repellent ideal of asceticism, and frowning upon her beauty with the scowl of the harsh moralist. For Mr. Chesterton the bleakness is all on the side of the pagans, and the beauty with the idealists. They do not look askance at the green earth at all. They gaze upon it with steady eyes, until they ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... woman, of good manners, and she is always neat, and tastefully dressed. Now, if she goes to take the cars, she is not permitted to go into a clean car with decent people, but is ordered into one that is repellent, and is forced into company that any refined woman would shrink from. But along comes a flauntingly dressed woman, of known disreputable character, whom my wife would be disgraced to know, and she takes any place that money will buy. It is this sort ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... another voice, gruff, harsh, and repellent. "I could see plainly, though the night was dark; I had been watching the approach of the boat, and had been lying so long concealed in the darkest part of the ruins that my eyes had grown thoroughly accustomed to the gloom, so that when I followed this one and the other to the road, it seemed ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... tempestuous. The Marchese had been eloquent; and now driven to bay, had been unequivocal enough in his declarations, his determinations, and his promises. The Diva had shown herself a Diva at every point. She had wept, she had smiled, she had been scornful, she had been suppliant, she had been repellent, she had been loving! And in every mood she had seemed to the fascinated eyes of the Marchese more lovely than in that which preceded it. Finally, she had conquered. Instead of coming away from her, ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... of the way, men became demons of cruelty and aggression, ruthlessly thrusting aside and trampling down the weaker ones who thwarted their progress. Of pity, humanity, love, there was none, only the gold-lust, triumphant and repellent. It was the survival of the fittest, the most tenacious, the most brutal. Yet there was something grandly terrible about it all. It was a barbaric invasion, an army, each man fighting for his own hand under the banner of gold. It was conquest. Every day, as I watched that human ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... she leaned forward to meet his challenging gaze. "Just in from camp?" she inquired, in a voice hoarse, repellent, conciliatory, and with a mechanical grimace which he identified as a smile. He stopped at the invitation in her tones, and nodded. "And looking for a good time," he further informed ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... two daughters of one father existed that sort of haunting family resemblance often seen between two closely related persons, despite one being attractive and the other in some way repellent. The observer traces the same lines in each face, the same intensification of 'the family look' in the smile, and yet knows that the slight disparity in age fails to account for a difference wide ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... But when Novalis, in his Todessehnsucht, exclaims, "Death is the romance of life," the sentiment has an alien sound. There was something mutually repellent between the more typical phases of English and German romanticism. Tieck and the Schlegels, we know, cared little for Scott. We are told that Scott read the Zeitung fuer Einsiedler, but we are ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Part of it was the love of adventure, and a desire to see the world; for though I was a steady-going carpenter chap, I had many dreams as I worked with hammer and saw, and one of them was that I would travel far and see how people lived in other countries. The thought of war had always been repellent to me, and many an argument I had had with the German baker in whose house I roomed, on the subject of compulsory military training for boys. He often pointed out a stoop-shouldered, hollow-chested ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... meaning," he was saying rather loudly: "this is the difference in our outlook on life. If you say 'she dresses well,' you intend a compliment, but to me it is just the reverse. The idea is repellent to me that a woman wastes time, thought, money on her ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... feeling in which the lyrical mood may easily come to its own, based and reinforced as it is by the larger poetical structure. The isolated magazine lyric, on the other hand, is like one swallow trying to make a summer. Even the lyrics collected in anthologies are often "mutually repellent particles," requiring through their very brevity and lack of relation with one another, a perpetual re-focussing of the attention, a constant re-creation of lyric atmosphere. These conditions have been emphasized, during the last decade, by that very variety ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... century, even to the ox-carts, the wheels of which were made of a single block of wood. A few peons, in striped shirts and velvet jackets, were sunning themselves against a wall, and near them hung a half-drained pellejo, or goatskin water-bag. The air of absolute shiftlessness must have been repellent to Mrs. Saltillo's orderly precision, and for a moment I pitied her. But it was equally inconsistent with Enriquez's enthusiastic ideas of American progress, and the extravagant designs he had often imparted to me of the improvements he would make when he had a fortune. I was feeling uneasy ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... heaped in the aisles. It was a cold, drizzling day of closing autumn, and the capital looked sodden and gloomy. Cameron, the Secretary of War, came to see them off and to make the customary prediction concerning their valor and victory to come. But he was a cold man, and he was repellent to Dick, used to more warmth ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... black rood of Waltham!" he roared, "if any knave among you lays a finger-end upon the edge of my gown, I will crush his skull like a filbert!" With his thick knotted arms, his thundering voice, and his bristle of red hair, there was something so repellent in the man that the three brothers flew back at the very glare of him; and the two rows of white monks strained away from him like poplars in a tempest. The Abbot only sprang forward with shining eyes; but the chancellor ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... straight, light brown hair. She looked what she felt— a very stiff and unformed specimen of girlhood. There was a great lump in her throat, brought there by mingled nervousness and home-sickness, but that very fact only made her manner icy and repellent. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... she said, throwing out her hand with a repellent gesture. "I have gone through much, and I am not strong. If you have any mercy, any kindness, leave me to myself. It is not proper, perhaps, that I should ask any favor of you, but I do. I beg you not to speak or write to ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... misfortune which has been a source of great distress to him ever since his birth—is but another one of those physical troubles which his pride makes him anxious to conceal, this only adding to his stilted and repellent attitude. In spite of all these drawbacks, the emperor fences exceedingly well, rides with pluck, and even skill, managing to hold his reins with his poor withered left hand when in uniform, in order ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... of the city, which had, even before this, been so strange and repellent to me, now disgusted me to such a degree, that all the pleasures of a life of luxury, which had hitherto appeared to me as pleasures, become tortures to me. And try as I would, to discover in my own soul any justification whatever for our life, I could not, ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... one look as cold as all arctics and says, 'It's repellent'—that's all, just 'repellent.' I see I was up against it. No good talking. Sometimes it comes over me like a flash when not to talk. It does to some women. So I affected a light manner and pretended to laugh it off, just as if I didn't see scandal ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... disappointment; and they had met thenceforth as cousins and friends. Never before had she associated the idea of him with embarrassing recollections. But now, on the very day when his brother's marriage to another woman had consummated his brother's treason towards her, there was something vaguely repellent in the prospect of seeing him. The old nurse (who remembered them both in their cradles) observed her hesitation; and sympathising of course with the man, put in a timely word for Henry. 'He says, he's going away, my dear; and he ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... repel house flies fill a certain need in connection with the house-fly problem. No very satisfactory repellent substances for this insect have been found which are at the same time adaptable to general use about the home, or places where foods are handled. Extracts of pyrethrum flowers are now generally available commercially, and these give fairly ...
— The House Fly and How to Suppress It - U. S. Department of Agriculture Farmers' Bulletin No. 1408 • L. O. Howard and F. C. Bishopp
... which this belief in immortality is not found deeply rooted, positive, unquestioning. The belief is implanted in man by the wish; it answers one of the most imperative, unsilenceable longings of human nature. For, in proportion as life is pleasant and precious, death is hideous and repellent. The idea of utter destruction, of ceasing to be, is intolerable to the mind; indeed, the senses revolt against it, the mind refuses to grasp and admit it. Yet death is very real, and it is inevitable; and all human beings that come into the ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... be rude and repellent, yet to you I owe it that I am kept from greater sin; you, against whom my whole nature rebels ... how I ought ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.
... a mound a little distance away in the park, Rachael Unthank was standing. In her rusty black clothes, unrelieved by any trace of colour, her white cheeks and strange eyes, even in the morning light she was a repellent figure. Dominey strolled ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to thank me,' he said, in quite a repellent tone. 'I am glad you obeyed orders and stopped at home; I was afraid you might be contumacious, as usual,'—which was rather ungracious of him, after the promise he had extracted ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in the same direction. Indian Philosophy would, in my opinion, be more readily and widely appreciated than it is at present, if the translators of philosophical works had been somewhat more concerned to throw their versions into a form less strange and repellent to the western reader than literal renderings from technical Sanskrit must needs be in many passages. I am not unaware of the peculiar dangers of the plan now advocated—among which the most obvious ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... order to put it right, to atone for my sin, Katusha," and he was going to say that he would marry her, but, meeting her eyes, he read in them something so dreadful, so coarse, so repellent, that he could not ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... consciousness of the Sheridan Building. From the street, anywhere, it was almost always in sight, like some monstrous geometrical shadow, murk-colored and rising limitlessly into the swimming heights of the smoke-mist. It was gaunt and grimy and repellent; it had nothing but strength and size—but in that consciousness of Mary's the great structure may have partaken of beauty. Sheridan had made some of the things he said emphatic enough to remain with her. She went over and over them—and they began to seem true: "Only ONE ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... huge magnet, its north pole attracts all the north-seeking poles of the molecules, and its south poles the south-seeking poles. (The north-seeking pole of a magnet is marked N., though it is in reality the south pole; for unlike poles are mutually attractive, and like poles repellent.) ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... routine, that it will be hard to keep him from longing for his customary work and habits. Suppose I prescribe outdoor work, riding, walking, cricket or football, according to the season; I shall be giving him repellent tasks to do. I can't make him a little fellow eager and longing to begin these things which he sees his bigger school-fellows enjoying. He would be disgusted with games directly, because others would laugh at him and ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... are, these balze form an appropriate preface to the gloomy and repellent isolation of Canossa. The rock towers from a narrow platform to the height of rather more than 160 feet from its base. The top is fairly level, forming an irregular triangle, of which the greatest length is about 260 feet, and the width about 100 feet. Scarcely a vestige ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... enticing, magnetic, prepossessing, personable, winning, mesmeric, taking, seductive, bewitching. Antonyms: unattractive, repellent, repulsive, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... removed her muddy boots, and smoothed out her straight, light brown hair. She looked what she felt— a very stiff and unformed specimen of girlhood. There was a great lump in her throat, brought there by mingled nervousness and home-sickness, but that very fact only made her manner icy and repellent. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... seemed to have laid its cheerless pall upon the whole exceedingly ugly landscape. The hedges, blackened with smuts from the colliery on the other side of the slope, were dripping also with raindrops. The road, flinty and light grey in colour, was greasy with repellent-looking mud—there were puddles even in the asphalt-covered pathway which he trod. On either side of him stretched the shrunken, unpastoral-looking fields of an industrial neighbourhood. The town-village which stretched up the hillside before him presented scarcely a single redeeming feature. ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... especially gruesome or repellent about the corpse. It was the body of a man of about fifty years of age, with a pronounced brick-red complexion, and a lofty brow, the height of which was increased by premature baldness. Long, fair moustaches drooped from the upper lip almost to the top of the chest. The unfortunate creature ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... black flea-beetles riddle the leaves with holes and cause the foliage to die. Bordeaux mixture as applied for potato blight protects the plants by making them repellent to the beetles. ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... advocated as one of its chief aims the recasting into modern form and in literary English of the old Irish legends, preserving the atmosphere of the original tales as much as possible, but clearing them from repetitions, redundant expressions, idioms interesting in Irish but repellent in English, and, above all, from absurdities, such as the sensational fancy of the later editors and bards added to the simplicities ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... that I put myself in the hands of God, and hoped the experiment would succeed. Mother Mary Hilda, who is very persistent, asked me what I meant by conquering myself, and I answered, a subjugation of that part of me which was repellent to God. At these words the Prioress's face lit up, and she said, 'Well, Mother Hilda, I suppose you are satisfied?' Mother Hilda did not answer, but I could see that she was not satisfied; and I am not satisfied either, for I feel that I ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... long, skinny finger would be shaken before their faces, or pointed as if to drive his words into their hearts. His speech was a torrent of epigram, sarcasm, invective. He was bitter; if you knew nothing about the man or his cause, you would find this repellent and shocking. You had to know what his life had been—an unceasing conflict with oppression; he had got his Socialist education in jail, where he had been sent for trying to organize the wage-slaves of a gigantic corporation. His rage was the rage of a tender-hearted poet, a lover of children ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... and chaperons! But it must be said that the very word has a repellent schoolteacherish sound. One pictures instinctively a humorless tyrant whose "correct" manner plainly reveals her true purpose, which is to take the joy out of life. That she can be—and often is—a perfectly human and sympathetic person, ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... displeasing, glum, ill-humored, repelling, austere, dreary, grim, ill-natured, repulsive, crabbed, forbidding, harsh, offensive, unkind, disagreeable, gloomy, hateful, repellent, unpleasant. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Tasmanian evergreen tree, Dacrydium franklinii, Hook, N.O. Coniferae. The timber is prized in cabinet-work, being repellent to insects, durable, and fairly easy to work; certain pieces are beautifully marked, and resemble bird's-eye maple. The Huon is a river in the south of Tasmania, called after a French ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... features. Belated visitors passed near the entrance of the shrine, peered within as at some outlandish and sinister freak of nature, and moved on with jocular words. Nobody ventured to overstep the threshold, whether from religious fear or because of something repellent, something almost putrescent, which radiated from his person. A contingent of Little White Cows, a kind of bodyguard, stood at a respectful distance beyond, intent upon his every movement. The Master ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... of avoidance, arise four other passions, hope and despair about the former, fear and daring about the latter. Hope goes out towards a difficult good: despair flies from it, the difficulty here being more repellent than the good is attractive. Fear flies from a threatening evil: while daring goes up to the same, drawn by the likelihood of vanquishing it. Desire and abhorrence, delight and pain, hope and despair, fear and daring, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... patted his cheeks, pulled his nose, and poked their fingers in his eyes, without reprimand. He had a face that defied artistic skill to soften or idealize. It was capable of few expressions, but those were extremely striking. When in repose, his face was dull, heavy, and repellent. It brightened like a lit lantern when animated. His dull eyes would fairly sparkle with fun, or express as kindly a look as I ever saw, when moved by some ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... chose to cross the Atlantic. He would not have it, and took discreet steps to prevent any accident of the sort. He wrote to America occasionally himself, and knowing well how to make himself civilly repellent, so subtly chilled his parents-in-law as to discourage in them more than once their half-formed plan of paying a visit to their child in her new home. He opened, read and reclosed all epistles to and from New York, and while Mrs. Vanderpoel was much hurt to find ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the aisles. It was a cold, drizzling day of closing autumn, and the capital looked sodden and gloomy. Cameron, the Secretary of War, came to see them off and to make the customary prediction concerning their valor and victory to come. But he was a cold man, and he was repellent to Dick, used to more ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... on the bank of Spirit Lake, or Lake Calhoun, Iowa, lived Cloudy Sky, a medicine-man, who had been made repellent by age and accident, but who was feared because of his magic power. At eighty years of age he looked for a third wife, and chose the daughter of a warrior, his presents of blankets and calicoes to the parents winning their consent. ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... built woman, in late middle life, tightly hooked up in black silk as to her body, and as to her soul by the prescribed boundaries of her position in life. Anderson, returning rather earlier than usual, found her with his mother, and retreated with actual rudeness, the woman became all at once so repellent to him. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... very difficult for the Western mind to give the Kashmiri credit for any virtues, his failings being so conspicuous and repellent; for not only is he an outrageous coward, but he feels no shame in admitting his cowardice. He is a most accomplished thief, and the truth is not in him. He and his are much fouler than Neapolitan lazzaroni, and his morals—well, let us give ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... to those who have made the phenomena of Spiritualism the subject of prolonged and careful inquiry, in the spirit of exact and unimpassioned scientific research, that beneath a repellent mass of imposture and delusion there remain certain inexplicable and startling facts which science can neither explain away nor deny."—"Automatic, or Spirit, Writing," p. ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... myself again in the room of the golden joss. The red curtain had been removed from before the shattered window, but otherwise the place looked exactly as it had looked before. The atmosphere was much less stale, however, but there was something repellent about the great gilded idol smiling eternally from ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... set up in opening the Addition years before. Minerva was intact, but a blackish streak descended unpleasantly from her forehead to the point of her straight nose, and a few other streaks were sketched in a repellent dinge upon the ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... voice that proceeded from her ever-smiling lips was a hoarse and dove-like coo of love. Ellen at first started a little aghast at this gigantic fleshliness, this general slough and slump of outline, this insistency of repellent curves, and then the old woman spoke and thrust out a great, soft hand, and the heart of the child overleaped her artistic sense and her reason, and she thought old Mrs. Mitchell beautiful. Mrs. Mitchell never failed to ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in that smile or the recollections it awakened that was particularly displeasing to her, for she suddenly assumed again that proud, chilly look that had so unspeakably roused my aversion at church—a look of repellent scorn, so easily assumed, and so entirely without the least distortion of a single feature, that, while there, it seemed like the natural expression of the face, and was the more provoking to me, because I could not ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... replied Crevel. "Valerie is a masterpiece in her way. My good mother, twenty-five years of virtue are always repellent, like a badly treated disease. And your virtue has grown very mouldy, my dear child. But you shall see how much I love you. I will manage to get you ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... were not slow to add that he had no other worship than his "creator." This was a gibe made rather for the antithesis than its accuracy, for even Boone's enemies owned that he was a good neighbor, and, where his prejudices were not in question, a man with few distinctly repellent traits. He delighted in showing his affluence—not always in good taste. He filled his fine house with bizarre crowds, and made no stint to his friends who needed his purse or his influence. He had in the early days when ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... manuscripts, note-books, paper-knives, pipes, matches, photographs, tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the writing-table, the furniture is back where it used to be in the long-ago. The housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there & tidied it up & scoured it clean & made it repellent & awful. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to compensate the world by presenting a concept of beauty in place of a general notion of repellent ugliness. Instead of being regarded as a "Hottentot with clicking palate, whom the meanest of the rest look down upon for all his glimmering language and spirituality," he wished the world to find in him fitness for survival, ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... possible to secure from them, which was small in amount and unsatisfactory in quality. Two or three times she had passed Old Swallowtail on the street, but he had not seemed to notice her. Always the old man stared straight ahead, walking stiffly and with a certain repellent dignity that forbade his neighbors to address him. He seemed to see no one. He lived in a world known only to himself and neither demanded nor ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... purchases a new stick. Somehow it seems to me that a gentleman of natural high honor will always present his average self to the one woman. That he should be attentive is natural, that he should be affected is repellent to my notions. Perhaps it was for this reason that without preparation I closed my desk and walked up to meet Julianna, as I would have walked home ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... beautiful face of the young girl who was talking in this repellent fashion. Then he took her gently by the hand and said in a ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... near night, by which time all danger would be gone. But neither proposed the course nor made mention of it. It is natural for youth to be rash, and there was a semblance of timidity in such a shrinking back that was repellent to American and Irish lad alike. And so you will understand how it was that each showed an eagerness to enter into the contest ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... losing in the race; maddened by the difficulties and obstacles of the way, men became demons of cruelty and aggression, ruthlessly thrusting aside and trampling down the weaker ones who thwarted their progress. Of pity, humanity, love, there was none, only the gold-lust, triumphant and repellent. It was the survival of the fittest, the most tenacious, the most brutal. Yet there was something grandly terrible about it all. It was a barbaric invasion, an army, each man fighting for his own hand under the banner of gold. It was conquest. Every day, as I watched ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... today. She certainly seems to be a very superior person; she will find the Cove very lonely, I am sure. It is not probable she will stay there long. I must see what I can do for her, but her manner seemed rather repellent, don't ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... bank and hedge; even two charcoal-burners, who passed with friendly greeting, had wreathed their hats with the living flame. The tiny shifting lamps were everywhere; pale yellow, purely white, or green as the underside of a northern wave. By day but an ugly, repellent worm; but darkness comes, and lo, a star alight. Nature is full for us of seeming inconsistencies and glad surprises. The world's asleep, say you; on your ear falls the nightingale's song and the stir of living creatures ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... how the frank sensuousness of the Pagan gave body and fulness to the floating wraiths of an ascetic faith—remains a miracle for those who, like our master Lionardo, love to scrutinise the secrets of twin natures and of double graces. There are not a few for whom the mystery is repellent, who shrink from it as from Hermaphroditus. These will always find something to pain them in the art of ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... slowly; but, after analyzing the book, it may be claimed for this "Francesca da Rimini," that it reflects the age in which the tragedy occurred. Much artistic construction is shown in the contrast of the Polenta and Malatesta families, and, repellent as he is at times, D'Annunzio has moments of great poetic fervour; his fire swings forth in many of Francesca's speeches, that alternate with the languor of ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... trampling on the stairs that awakened them. The door was quickly unlocked, it was thrown open, and the hairy face of O'Sullivan Og, who held it wide, looked in. Behind him were two of the boys with pikes—frowsy, savage, repellent figures, with drugget coats tied by ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... of both these latter schools is indistinct; and he appears reluctant to mention the names of their teachers. Nor can we easily determine how much is to be assigned to the Cynics, how much to the Megarians, or whether the 'repellent Materialists' (Theaet.) are Cynics or Atomists, or represent some unknown phase of opinion at Athens. To the Cynics and Antisthenes is commonly attributed, on the authority of Aristotle, the denial of predication, while the Megarians are said to have been Nominalists, ...
— Sophist • Plato
... sympathies, of things only to be enjoyed through sympathy, from which they detached themselves, in intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere theory that would take nothing for granted, and assent to no approximate or hypothetical truths. In their unfriendly, repellent attitude towards the Greek religion, and the old Greek morality, surely, they had been but faulty economists. The Greek religion was then alive: then, still more than in its later day of dissolution, the higher view of it was possible, even for the philosopher. Its story made little or ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... her mother, and spoke pleasantly of his own and his wife's acquaintance with Mrs. Madison at Bar Harbor. Betty wondered afterward why she had thought his face repellent. His eyes defied investigation, but his mouth relaxed into a smile that was very kind, and his voice had almost a caress in it. But at the moment she was too eager to hear him express himself to receive a strong personal impression, and while she was casting ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... the century. There was a genial charm in Browning, emphasized, in this earlier time, with a bewildering vivacity and an affluence of courtesy. In his mature phase he was still courteous and agreeable when he chose to be so, but was also occasionally supercilious and repellent, and assiduously cultivated smart society. I once asked him, in 1879, why he made his poetry so often obscure, and he replied, frankly, that he did so because he couldn't help it; the inability to put his thoughts in clear ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... for very large and pretentious residences of formal character and arrangement. In small buildings, and unless handled with skill and discretion in larger work, its psychological effect upon the mind is that of uncompromising and somewhat repellent austerity; it suggests the prison-like palace rather than the domestic atmosphere of a true home,—an atmosphere to be had in stone only by preserving the greater spontaneity of irregular shapes and rock faces characteristic of Germantown ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... arrived there and had entered by the wooden gate, the semicircular carriage-drive, lit by two solitary lamps, and the front of the house itself, half-hidden among the black trees, seemed somewhat sombre and repellent at this silent hour of the morning; but they found a more cheerful radiance streaming out from the hall-door, which had been left open for them; and when they went into the large dining-room, where the ladies had already ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... be a great colourist unless he is a great deal more. A great colourist is no better than a great wordist unless the colour is well applied to a subject which at any rate is not repellent. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... that the gruesome, the disgusting, the repellent are not fit subjects for cabinet pictures. The "sacred subjects" to which he objects probably refer to the Crucifixion—the nails through the hands and feet, and the crown of thorns. But to jump from that fact to the assertion ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... nor embarrassment. Her manner was haughty and repellent, as though designed to rebuke impertinence. Next morning, when informed of the peculiar circumstances attending Gen'l Darrington's death, I felt it incumbent upon me to communicate to the magistrate the facts which ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... his gratitude in an aggressive way, which at first was repulsed violently, and then submitted to with a sudden and still more repellent indifference, Lieut. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... world, their spirit will live for ever, but their formulae and organization wax old like a garment. Their moral austerity—that touch of contempt for the unsubstantial aesthetic, which has always distinguished Protestantism—is naturally repellent to the irresponsible rich and to artistic people of the weaker type, and the face of Protestantism has ever been firm even to hardness against the self-indulgent, the idler, and the prolific, useless poor. The rich as a class and the people of the Abyss, so far as they ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... me, for one moment!" She has given a faint indication of intending to speak. "Mr. Rouncewell, our views of duty, and our views of station, and our views of education, and our views of—in short, ALL our views—are so diametrically opposed, that to prolong this discussion must be repellent to your feelings and repellent to my own. This young woman is honoured with my Lady's notice and favour. If she wishes to withdraw herself from that notice and favour or if she chooses to place herself under ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... KILL LOVE.—Any improper liberties which are permitted by young ladies, whether engaged or not, will change love into sensuality, and her affections will become obnoxious, if not repellent. Men by nature love virtue, and for a life companion naturally shun an amorous woman. Young folks, as you love moral purity and virtue, never reciprocate love until you have required the right of betrothal. Remember that those who are thoroughly in ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... would play a part at once repellent and depressing. It would stimulate these sick desires, and weaken me at the same time, would give me over to nervous emotions without ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... Martian was indeed so threatening and repellent that we paused at the height of fifty feet above the ground, hesitating to approach nearer. A grin of rage and hate overspread his face. If he had been a man I should say he shook his fist at us. What he did was to express in even more telling pantomime his hatred and defiance, and his ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... children, and the average woman's uneventful, if happy, fate could never be hers. Her very beauty was of the type almost repellent to the strictly normal and ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... dislike singers any more than I naturally dislike coal-men. I don't classify people by their occupations. Doubtless I should find some coal-men repulsive, and you may find some singers so. But I have reason to believe that, at least, I'm one of the less repellent." ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... which Stepfather Time had heard the voice but never seen the face. Each of three attempts to investigate with a view to negotiations had been frustrated by a crabbed and violent-looking man with a repellent club. Nevertheless, the voice alone had ensnared the connoisseur; it was, by the test of the pipe which he carried on all his quests, D in alt, and would thus complete the major chord of a chime which he ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of course, repellent and odious as it was, had occurred to Elizabeth, so she instantly ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... personal worth, she is consequently free from that haughty exclusiveness which is to be found wherever real excellences are wanting. The women of the so-called better classes among us at home treat their less fortunate sisters with such repellent arrogance simply because they cannot get rid of the instinctive feeling that these poorer sisters would have very well occupied their own places, and vice versa, had their husbands been changed. And even when ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... the embodiment of evil is naturally repellent, a study of the Devil's personality, as represented in theology, romance, and popular tradition, reveals much that is interesting. In the role of a medical pretender, however, he deserves no more ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... Father and Di would have avoided like a pestilence if they had met them travelling on the Continent. They were twin sisters, exactly alike in figure and face. Their name was Splatchley; their looks were as repellent as their name; and their natures were angelic. They were tall and thin and sprawling, with corrugated iron foreheads, and grizzled hair which they crimped over it in little bunches. They had wistful, wondering ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... any useful or kindly act, however hard or repellent it may be. The worth of acts is measured by the spirit in which ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... and not to his person. Cold, reserved and formal, he possessed none of the physical or intellectual graces of Francis I. and Henry VIII. He excelled in (p. 101) no sport, was unpleasant in features and repellent in manners. No gleam of magnanimity or chivalry lightened his character, no deeds in war or statecraft yet sounded his fame. He was none the less heir of the Austrian House, which for generations had worn the ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... trousers, sending me a sidelong glance from his blue eyes, which were brightly confident and inquiring, like a boy's. At the same time it struck me that whatever the nature of the singularity investing him it partook of nothing repellent, but, on the contrary, measurably enhanced his attractiveness; making him "different" and lending him a distinction which, without it, he might have lacked. And yet, patent as this singularity must have been to the dullest, it was something quite ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... hour, when from the stormy North, This modern Cyclops marched repellent forth, To slake his thirst for blood and plundered wealth, Not as the soldier, but by fraud and stealth; To waft the gales of death with horror rife On helpless age, and wage with women strife: To leave at Baltimore and New Orleans The drunkard's name, or worse, the gibbet's ...
— The American Cyclops, the Hero of New Orleans, and Spoiler of Silver Spoons • James Fairfax McLaughlin
... in such a few simple words,—"full of grace and truth." Not grace without truth. That would be a sort of weakly, sickly sentimentalism. And not truth without grace. That would be a cold stern repellent insistence on certain high standards. But grace and ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... and Geraldine had reached home, hatbox and all, and were in the dismantled shop answering Charlotte's questions when they heard an automobile stop before the door and a cheery whistle sounded. The repellent shades were still ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... at that moment anything warmer or brighter would have been unreal and utterly repellent to me. I hardly took in the meaning of his words, but it was as if a hand had been stretched out to me, struggling in the deep mire, by one who himself felt solid ground beneath him. Where he stood I also might some day stand, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... utterance. The jawbone is hard and heavy; the cheekbone emergent: between the two the flesh is hollowed, not so much with the emaciation of monastic vigils as with the athletic exercise of wrestlings in the throes of prophecy. The face, on the whole, is ugly, but not repellent; and, in spite of its great strength, it shows signs of feminine sensibility. Like the faces of Cicero and Demosthenes, it seems the fit machine for oratory. But the furnaces hidden away behind that skull, beneath that cowl, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... near the Baptistery. The enormous and repellent tomb on the same wall as the Titian altar-piece is that of a later Pesaro, Giovanni, an unimportant Doge of Venice for less than a year, 1658-1659. It has grotesque details, including a camel, giant negroes and skeletons, and it was designed ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... his unshaven chin, cunningly interrogative. The intervening months had altered him, not pleasantly. The tramp of the Dear Me had been unattractive; this man was repellent. ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... Bert was, as a natural consequence, entirely free from those strange misconceptions of the true character of religion which keep so many of the young out of the kingdom. He saw nothing gloomy or repellent in religion. That he should love and serve God seemed as natural to him as that he should love and serve his parents. Of their love and care he had a thousand tokens daily. Of the Divine love and care he learned from them, and that they should believe in ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... these words that should have melted a heart of stone. At last over the burning plain was seen the ruined hovel to which the scoundrel was dragging his fair burden. It was but the work of a moment to dismount and bear her half-fainting form within the den. There he faced her, repellent with evil intentions. ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... replied Barbara with repellent harshness. "I never gave you a right to speak to me of love; but, above all, I shall not seek the sharer of a game of question and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... dancer, by-the- by, and so am I: you can't think how well I did—I was astonished at myself. My lord was very complimentary too—rather too much so in fact—and I thought proper to be a little haughty and repellent; but I had the pleasure of seeing his nasty, cross wife ready to perish with ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... I thought, although she had been the inventor and constructor of the family alliance of which he was the hero. I did not venture to cultivate her; and Miss Brandon had been, from the first, specially cold and repellent to Captain Lake. There was nothing very genial or promising, therefore, in the relations of our little party, and I did not expect ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... thrilled," she acknowledged. "That was the pleasurable part of it I have been so, used to looking on at shows that bored me, listening to conversations that wearied me, attempting sensations which were repellent, that I just welcomed feeling, when it came—feeling of any sort. I was excited. I forgot everything else. I was so fascinated that I could not look away. But if you ask me whether I liked it, and I have to answer truthfully, I hated it! I felt nothing of the sort at the time, but ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he learns that she is a princess!" said she, her voice so cold and repellent that his eyes closed, involuntarily, as if an unexpected horror had come before them. "You must not tell me that you ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... with a curious conviction that there was a cat in the room, and then all in a moment she met the cool, repellent stare of the black-browed doctor whom Burke ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... accompanied them, sometimes Herbert Bayliss made one of the party. Frances' behavior to the young doctor was tantalizingly contradictory. At times she was very cordial and kind, at others almost cold and repellent. She kept the young fellow in a state of uncertainty most of the time. She treated Heathcroft much the same, but there was this difference between them—Heathcroft didn't seem to mind; her whims appeared to amuse rather than to annoy him. Bayliss, ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... automobiles and trucks bearing a red cross. A war hospital was going to be established in the castle. The doctors were dressed in grayish green and armed the same as the officers; they also imitated their freezing hauteur and repellent unapproachableness. There came out of the drays hundreds of folding cots, which were placed in rows in the different rooms. The furniture that still remained was thrown out in a heap under the trees. Squads of soldiers were obeying with mechanical promptitude the brief and ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... one couple particularly, and I knew them to be bride and bridegroom. The man was tall and broad, with dark hair and eyes, and a sensual and cruel face. He seemed, however, to be quite enslaved by the woman by his side, whom I hardly even now like to think of, there was something to me so repellent in her presence. ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... had to do was keep the air in here purified. That is a simple chemical operation. By using this attractive and repellent force she allowed the earth's gravity and the repelling power of the sun and Mercury to drive ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... the achievement which they found they had accomplished was tempered by the reflections inspired by the sublime desolation of that stern and silent coast and the menace of its unbroken solitude. Beyond to the eastward was the interminable defiance of the unexplored coast—black, cold, and repellent. Below them lay the Arctic Ocean, buried beneath frozen chaos. No words can describe the confusion of this sea of ice—the hopeless asperity of it, the weariness of its torn and tortured surface. Only at the remote horizon did distance and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... service of machinery? How shall the man who, by the effect of his labor, has become a slave,—that is, a chattel, a thing,— again become a person by the same labor, or in continuing the same exercise? Why is it not seen that these ideas are mutually repellent, and that, if, by some impossibility, the proletaire could reach a certain degree of intelligence, he would make use of it in the first place to revolutionize society and change all civil and industrial relations? And what I say is no vain exaggeration. The working class, in Paris and the large ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... desire that there shall be no mistake as to who wins the battle? The answer may very easily be so given as to make what is really a token of His love become an unlovely and repellent trait in His character. It is not eagerness for praise that moves Him, but longing that men may have the blessedness of recognising His hand fighting for them. It is for Israel's sake that He is so solicitous to deliver them from the delusion of their having won the victory. It is because ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... stretch of the repellent cactus, whose great gnarled branches locked and intertwined themselves in a verdureless mass of thorns and spikes which well might have daunted even an Indian. The hedge was many feet in width and higher than Ninian's shoulder, still green on top, but too unlovely ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... if you'll let me," said Susan. Mrs. Wylie's suspicion, so plain in those repellent eyes, took all the courage out of her. The great adventure seemed rapidly to be losing its charms. She could not think of herself as content or anything but sad and depressed in such surroundings as these. How much better ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... I'll tell you what I mean. My wife is a modest, intelligent woman, of good manners, and she is always neat, and tastefully dressed. Now, if she goes to take the cars, she is not permitted to go into a clean car with decent people, but is ordered into one that is repellent, and is forced into company that any refined woman would shrink from. But along comes a flauntingly dressed woman, of known disreputable character, whom my wife would be disgraced to know, and she takes any place that money will buy. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... aid of the moon and his torch. Figures, in high relief, everywhere—animal, human and divine; a riot of impossible forms, impossibly intertwined; ghoulish in any aspect, and in moonlight hideously so:—bewildering, repellent, frankly obscene. But even while his cultured eye rejected it all, some infinitesimal fragment of himself knew there was symbolic meaning in that orgy of sculpture, could one ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... a few years atrophy of the opinions invariably supervened, and the sufferer became stone dead to everything except the more superficial aspects of those material objects with which he came most in contact. The expression on the faces of these people was repellent; they did not, however, seem particularly unhappy, for they none of them had the faintest idea that they were in reality more dead than alive. No cure for this disgusting fear-of-giving-themselves-away ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... has connected you one with the other. Desert the woman who loves you, if that woman is a link between you and him. Hide yourself from him under an assumed name. Put the mountains and the seas between you; be ungrateful, be unforgiving; be all that is most repellent to your own gentler nature, rather than live under the same roof, and breathe the same air, with that man. Never let the two Allan Armadales meet in this world: never, ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... potent influence in our social and our business lives. It is a gift of the gods, and most conspicuous successes, in whatever line, are due to it. Now and then comes an individual who is cold, even repellent, and yet who rises to full accomplishment by reason of pure intellectual force or strength of character; but nine times out of ten the man who gets ahead, be he merchant, banker, promoter, or crook, does so by reason of this ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... yearned with all a father's fondness governed his conduct, certain it is, that, from the hour of the disclosure made by his son, Colonel de Haldimar became an altered man. Without losing any thing of that dignity of manner, which had hitherto been confounded with the most repellent haughtiness of bearing, his demeanour towards his officers became more courteous; and although, as heretofore, he kept himself entirely aloof, except when occasions of duty brought them together, still, when ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... he had already sadly mutilated several brave officers and students, who had had the bad luck to stand up against him. He himself was anything but pleasant to look upon, his natural plainness having been rendering repellent by a life of low debauchery. He cherished a secret grudge against the bridegroom and bitter feelings toward the bride, because the latter had so plainly shown her aversion for him when he had ventured ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... tragedies of earth, Of each new horror which each hour gives birth, Of sins that scar and cruelties that blight Life's little season, meant for man's delight, Methought those monstrous and repellent crimes Which hate engenders in war-heated times, To God's great heart bring not so much despair As other sins which flourish everywhere And in all times—bold sins, bare-faced and proud, Unchecked by college, and by Church allowed, Lifting their lusty heads like ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Montesquieu the man, it is perhaps sufficient to say that he seems to have been a very good type of the French gentleman of quality. An interesting story told by Sainte-Beuve reveals, if true, a side at once attractive and repellent of his personal character. Montesquieu at Marseilles employed a young boatman, whose manner and speech indicated more cultivation than was to have been looked for in one plying his vocation. The philosopher learned his history. The youth's father was at the time a captive in ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... test, but it is in effect the test and the only true one. The man who does not believe he is to be blotted out when his body ceases to breathe, who holds all history for his heritage and the wide present for his battle-ground, believes also the future is no repellent void but a widening and alluring world. If in his travel he is scrupulous in detail, it is in the spirit of the mariner who will neither court a ship-wreck nor be denied his adventure. He cannot deny to others the right to hesitate and halt by the way, but his ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... with an air about them as if they had thrust their hard hands into their wealthy pockets forever, with a character of arctic reserve, and portly dignity, and a well-dressed, full-fed, self-satisfied, opulent, stony, repellent aspect to each, which says plainly, "I belong to a rich family, ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... the way mostly in silence. When they returned to the camp, Elizabeth was watching for them, but the glance Olga gave her was so repellent that she shrank away, and went off alone to the Lookout. Later Laura tried to interest Elizabeth in the making of a headband of beadwork, but though she evidently liked to handle the bright-coloured beads, she would not try to do ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... not much affection between this ill-matched couple. For long years I saw in my grandfather only a coarse, violent old man, niggardly and censorious. And to him there was doubtless something unwholesome and repellent in the most innocent of my tastes; I could not even sin roundly, like other boys, by pilfering or truantry, but must display an exotic passion for reading forbidden books, an abhorred dexterity at caricature. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... person, moreover, who will doubtless be glad to relinquish her so-called rights for a sum of money. Can that, I ask you, be called a marriage? Can we suppose an all-wise God to have joined two natures so ill-adapted, so mutually exclusive, so repellent to each other after that first glamour is past. Really, such a supposition is not only puerile but irreverent. It is the conventional supposition, I grant, and theoretically, the unvarying supposition ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... me drowsily. "The arbutus," he explained, with a lingering touch of his finger upon the blossoms. "Smell them, monsieur. I found them in Connecticut last spring. Are they not well suited to be the first flowers of this wild land? Repellent without,—see how rough the leaves are to your finger,—but fragrant and beautiful under its harsh coating. Life in the Colonies grew to seem ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... sew and run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... apparently never been seen in modern times. It is probably in the archives of Spain or Mexico, and its discovery would throw needed light on the location of Tusayan and the course Cardenas followed.*** The distance of this whole region from a convenient base of supplies, and its repellent character, prevented further operations at this period, and when these explorers traced their disappointed way homeward, the Colorado was not seen again by white men for over half a century; and it was more than two hundred years before ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... lack for self-esteem. Perhaps it was this very self-esteem that blinded him here to the appalling truth. Yet in the end understanding came to him. When the precise significance of the fond leer of that painted harridan's repellent coquetry was borne in upon him he felt the skin of his body creep and roughen But he dissembled craftily. He was a venal scamp, after all, and in the court of Hanover he saw opportunities to employ his gifts and his knowledge of the great world in such a way as to win to eminence. He saw that the ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... when Novalis, in his Todessehnsucht, exclaims, "Death is the romance of life," the sentiment has an alien sound. There was something mutually repellent between the more typical phases of English and German romanticism. Tieck and the Schlegels, we know, cared little for Scott. We are told that Scott read the Zeitung fuer Einsiedler, but we are not told what he thought of it. Perhaps romanticism, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... fascinated terror—a fear of him—of the passion that dominated him, a passion like the devils that made men gash themselves and leap from precipices into the sea. To unaccustomed eyes the first sight of passion is always terrifying and is usually repellent. One must learn to adventure the big wave, the great hissing, towering billow that conceals behind its menace the wild rapture of infinite ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... when she likes," replied his wife; "but she has a curious temper; and there is something very repellent about her when she does not like people. Strange, is it not, that she should not ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... a southern window that looks out on a wide-spreading and ancient elm, my glory and pride. Not one bird had I seen on it that cold, repellent middle of March. But Mrs. Miller looked up, and said: "Your robins have come!" Sure enough I ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... and he turned towards his house. But he couldn't sleep; the house was repellent, and he waited among the thorn-bushes and ferns. Of what use to lie in one's bed when sleep is far and will not be beckoned? and his brain being clear as day he went away to the woods and watersides, saying: 'Life is orientated ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... cannot repeat exactly all that he said, for I was only listening with half an ear. But the substance of it all was this: I was to pose as the friend of M. Fernand Rochez, and engage the attention of Mlle. Goldberg senior the while he paid his court to the lovely Leah. It was not a repellent task altogether, because M. Rochez's suggestion opened a vista of pleasant parties at open-air cafes, with foaming tankards of beer, on warm afternoons the while the young people sipped sirops and fed on love. My newly found friend was pleased ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... voice which calls ceaselessly to those human hearts tuned to its messages: hostile and harsh, it draws and urges; repellent, it profligately awards health and wealth; inviting, it kills. And always it keeps its own counsel; it is without peer in its lonesomeness, and without confidants; it heaps its sand over its secrets to hide them ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... and that if it showed languor he should be moved to the side of some other partner. "He had great charm," writes to me another old friend, "in a quiet winning way, but was 'dark' with rough and noisy people." So it came to pass that his manner was threefold; icy and repellent with those who set his nerves on edge; good- humoured, receptive, intermittently responsive in general and congenial company; while, at ease with friends trusted and beloved, the lines of the face became ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... Taoism, and one greatest lesson we may learn from it. Are we to judge by the impressiveness of the personality? No; the Man of Tao is not a personality at all. He makes one to use, but is not identified with it; his personality will not be great or small, or enchanting or repellent, but simply adapted to the needs.—Is it the depth and fulness of the philosophv he gives out? No; it may be wiser and also more difficult to keep silent on main points, than to proclaim them broadcast; and for this end he ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the rhymes where they are peculiar are often repellent, and so far from adding charm to the verse that they appear as obstacles. This must not blind one from recognizing that Gerard Hopkins, where he is simple and straightforward in his rhyme is a master of it—there ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... outside opinion, a determination to exact consideration before yielding it—all these are characteristics. The working man is surly to the man who is better dressed than himself, not because he is naturally a surly fellow, but because he has not yet found a less repellent fashion of asserting independence. I shall come to the consideration of the great colonial labour question by-and-by, but the attitude of the working man is curiously consonant with the monetary characteristics of the land ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... In the simplest English village church one receives some impression of the friendliness of religion; but in Holland—of course I speak as a stranger and a foreigner—religion seems to be a cold if not a repellent thing. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... soon developed its own doctrine, and whilst never until near its dissolution definitely anarchist, it was always dominated by the artistic and anti-political temperament of Morris. Politically the Fabians were closer to the Social Democrats, but their hard dogmatism was repellent, whilst Morris had perhaps the most sympathetic and attractive personality of ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... as some close relative of his mother. Alexander Suvaroff, General of Division in the Russian army, looked very much like Mikail, but there was a sharp difference between them. This Suvaroff was as kindly in aspect as the other was repellent and harsh. His eyes twinkled affectionately ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine
... she associated the idea of him with embarrassing recollections. But now, on the very day when his brother's marriage to another woman had consummated his brother's treason towards her, there was something vaguely repellent in the prospect of seeing him. The old nurse (who remembered them both in their cradles) observed her hesitation; and sympathising of course with the man, put in a timely word for Henry. 'He says, he's going away, my dear; ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... destroy or repel house flies fill a certain need in connection with the house-fly problem. No very satisfactory repellent substances for this insect have been found which are at the same time adaptable to general use about the home, or places where foods are handled. Extracts of pyrethrum flowers are now generally available commercially, and these give fairly good results in the destruction of house flies in buildings. ...
— The House Fly and How to Suppress It - U. S. Department of Agriculture Farmers' Bulletin No. 1408 • L. O. Howard and F. C. Bishopp
... why) some stage or two ahead. The image, the memorial, the record, which for me is derived from a palimpsest, as to one great fact in our human being, and which immediately I will show you, is but too repellent of laughter; or, even if laughter had been possible, it would have been such laughter as often times is thrown off from the fields of ocean[10]—laughter that hides, or that seems to evade mustering tumult; foam-bells that weave garlands of phosphoric ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
