"Uninteresting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the hotel was in accord with Mr. Gingham's general conception of his business. No man had ever grasped the true principles of undertaking more thoroughly than Mr. Gingham. I have often heard him explain that to associate with the living, uninteresting though they appear, is the only way to secure the ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... though different acknowledgement to make, namely, for her acceptance of a character not fully developed, and quite inadequate to her extraordinary powers. She enlivened and supported many passages, which (though not perhaps wholly uninteresting in the closet) would but for her have hung heavy on the ears of a Theatrical Audience. And in speaking the Epilogue, a composition which (I fear) my hurry will hardly excuse, and which, as unworthy of her name, is here [1828, 1829, 1834] omitted, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... room lined on two sides with deal compartments bulging with dusty papers. There were two or three shelves of uninteresting-looking books, and a desk which extended into a counter. The upper panes of the window were ragged with cobwebs, and the air of the place was redolent of stale publications. A thick-set little man in spectacles sat at the desk. It was not ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... vexatious manner. Then Cowper's "Task," or "Paradise Lost," as school-books, with notes, seems arid enough to a school-boy. I remember reading ahead, in Cowper, instead of attending to the lesson and the class-work. His observations on public schools were not uninteresting, but the whole English school- work of those days was repugnant. One's English education was ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... all flirts," said Florence, as if stating an uninteresting fact. But Madeline detected a merry twinkle in her clear eyes. The cowboys heard, and the effect upon them was magical. They fell to shamed confusion and to hurried useless tasks. Madeline found it difficult to see where they had been bold, though evidently they were ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... nobleness of such a life to fill her with a certain enthusiasm, and make her feel a day blank and uninteresting if she could not make her way to ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... engineer, but he did not dodge getting a few credits from well-known "snap" courses, and he got through other required, but, to his mind, superfluous ones without doing much more work on them than necessary. He had a disconcerting habit of starting in on a course and then if he found it uninteresting or unpromising as a contributor to the special education he was interested in, of simply dropping out of the class without consultation or permission. But he did dig hard into what he thought really counted; his ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... a middle-aged person who would probably die; if she died no one lost anything, and if she lived it did not matter either. The doctors and nurses, accustomed to these things, could not be expected to be interested in so profoundly uninteresting a case; Frau von Treumann observed once at least every day that it was schrecklich, and went on with her embroidery; Fraeulein Kuhraeuber cried a little when, on her way to her bedroom, she heard the baroness raving, but ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Low took a new ship for himself, naming himself Admiral, and sporting a new black flag with a red skeleton upon it. He again cruised off the Azores, the Canaries, and the Guinea coast, but what the end was of this repulsive, uninteresting, and bloody pirate has ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... brought Mr. Tyler's body off the Toreador, we steamed out into the Pacific in search of Caprona. There were forty in the party, including the master and crew of the Toreador; and Billings the indomitable was in command. We had a long and uninteresting search for Caprona, for the old map upon which the assistant secretary had finally located it was most inaccurate. When its grim walls finally rose out of the ocean's mists before us, we were so far south that it was a question as to whether we were in the South ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... her hands at him, and that she was throwing it all away, for Von Rosen heard no more of her report than if he had been in China when she was reading it. Mrs. Snyder realised that hardly anything in nature could be so totally uninteresting to the young man as the report of a woman's club. Inasmuch as she herself was devoted to such things, she regarded him with disapproval, although with a certain admiration. Karl von Rosen always commanded admiration, although often of a grudging ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Duncombe saw nothing of Spencer. Three long days devoid of incident, hopelessly dull, aimless, and uninteresting. On the fourth the only change in the situation was scarcely a reassuring one. He became aware that he was ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had seen all the large towns in that part of the country, and thought them "very ugly and monotonously commonplace, but prosperous-looking,—like the inhabitants." The scenery she had found "far too uninteresting to repay the bother of sketching it." But she had made a few pictures of "the views most cracked up in the White Mountains,"—where she had been,—"a sort of second-hand Switzerland of a place; really nothing after the Himalayas, but made a great fuss over by the Americans." She described ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... ago I chanced to be in the seaport town where you were born, and I made quiet inquiries about your mother. I learned that she had recently died, leaving a husband and three children. I hunted up the children, and found them to be most uninteresting and ordinary. The oldest daughter I met and studied. She was plain and commonplace in appearance, and the other children were dull ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the car close, stuffy, and uninteresting. Ten years on the road had taught Emma McChesney to extract a maximum of enjoyment out of a minimum of material. Emma McChesney's favorite occupation was selling T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats, and ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... the bewitching head beside him came just about to a level with his cigar which he was smoking. He wondered if he were making a fool of himself. If so, he assured himself that there was at least one compensation. This night in Prince Albert would not be so uninteresting as it had promised to ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... being situated as it were in the very heart of the kingdom, Birmingham, in the olden days, and it is but fifty years ago, was an important converging central-point of the great mailcoach system, and a few notes in connection therewith cannot be uninteresting. Time was when even coaching was not known, for have we not read how long it took ere the tidings of Prince Rupert's attack on our town reached London. A great fear seems to have possessed the minds of the powers that were in regard to any kind of quick transmission whatever, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... improbability, too, about some of the colouring in her face, though it was far from apparent that she was painted. Her hair, at all events, was her own and was not dyed. And yet, though she possessed an abundance of it, such as many a girl might have envied, it remained utterly uninteresting and commonplace, for its faded straw-like colour was not attractive to the eye, and it grew so awkwardly and so straight as to put its possessor to much trouble in the arrangement of the youthful ringlets she thought ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... that it was a bore having the Marchesino to lunch, that he was uninteresting, frivolous, empty-headed. But directly she set eyes upon him, as he stood in the drawing-room by her mother, she felt a change in him. What had happened to him? She could not tell. But she was conscious that he seemed much more definite, much more of a personage, than he had seemed to her before. ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... the people who read smile to see the first and faintest hint of the tender passion in what they read; because a story without love is like bricks without straw; because a life without it is a life no doubt comfortable to lead, but uninteresting to hear. Love is your only democrat; Ethelinda in Fifth Avenue, glittering with the clear splendor of diamonds, and rustling like a white-birch-swamp with pale silks, gleaming through the twilight before ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... made them real? And what would Cousin Eleanor's yard have been without Honora? Whatever there was of romance and folklore in Uncle Tom's library Honora had extracted at an early age, and with astonishing ease had avoided that which was dry and uninteresting. The result was a nomenclature for Aunt Eleanor's yard, in which there was even a terra incognita wherefrom venturesome travellers never returned, but were transformed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... know, all the time I was trying to eat. Afterwards in the drawing-room he gave a lecture. I rather forget the subject, but I think it was, 'Eggs I have known.' He knew a great many. It was very instructive and uninteresting. I think he said he had patented it. How does one patent ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... himself a quiet time of thought before going to sleep. He needed to be awake and think at night this way, so that he might not lose entirely the thread of his own life, of the life he would take up again some day if he lived through it. He brushed away the thought of death. It was uninteresting. He didn't care anyway. But some day he would want to play the piano again, to write music. He must not let himself sink too deeply into the helpless mentality of the soldier. He must ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... an Epithalamium composed for a drama which his friend Williams was writing. Students of the poetic art will find it not uninteresting to compare the three versions of this Bridal Song, given by Mr. Forman. (Volume 4 page 89.) They prove that Shelley ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Muxaro; but the family died out, and I bought it. There is a story about the ghostly nun, who was only a novice, and even that unwillingly, which gives an interest to an otherwise very commonplace and uninteresting ghost." ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... like them," snapped Beatrice. "I'm not going to make a martyr of myself to please any one. My mother is very particular about my associates at Overton, and I don't intend to waste my time trying to make things pleasant for the stupid, uninteresting girls of this college. I did not come to Overton to take a course in doing settlement work. I came here to have a good time, and incidentally to ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... Babylon and such-like improbable spots, we might at least have expected better things of our modern spiritualists. Why should their apparitions content themselves with announcing the decease, at the Antipodes, of profoundly uninteresting relatives? Alas! I begin to perceive that spirits of the right kind, of the useful kind, have yet to be discovered. Our present-day ghosts are like seismographs; they chronicle the event after it has happened. Now, what we ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... to speak of them. To do so can neither hasten nor retard the event. All the more obliged to speak of them, because I have never greatly cared about money, except for what I could do with it.—As a means, of vast importance. As an end, uninteresting.—So it has been lightly come and lightly go, I am afraid. All the same I've not been culpably improvident. A portion of my income dies with me; but enough remains to secure you against any anxiety regarding ways and means, if not to make you a rich woman. I have left an annuity to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... little, the utility of speech calls forth active efforts in the learner.... In general the old method was one of repetition: it dealt immensely in committing Latin to memory.... Nothing is easier to boys than such learning, even when the thing learned is uninteresting... yet... means should be taken of making it interesting and instructive and rhythmical.... It seems to me that we want what I may call a Latin novel or romance; that is, a pleasing tale of fiction, ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... so-called "coin of account," for instance, "bank-money," as an invariable value-magnitude. Compare Jacob, Grundsaetze der National OEkonomie, II, 441 ff. Cazaux, Economie politique et privee, 1825, 16 ff., has a not uninteresting study on this subject; but he goes, throughout his argument, on the assumption that the rate of interest is the price of money! If the rate of interest in two countries I and i, the prices of the same commodity P and p, the true thing-values, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... of important acts of the legislature of 1785, he is careful to give other information in a letter to Jefferson, which is not uninteresting as written ninety-eight years ago, and written ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... story was about, Lloyd walked around to the other side of the deck, only to find another long uninteresting row of sleepy figures stretched out in steamer-chairs, and half hidden in rugs and cloaks. She turned to go back, but paused as she caught sight of a girl, about her own age, standing against the deck railing, looking over ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... when the sexes are thrown together, and as most of the poetry and philosophy of tea-drinking teem with female virtues, vanities, and whimsicalities, the inference is that, without women, tea would be nothing, and without tea, women would be stale, flat, and uninteresting. With them it is a polite, purring, soft, gentle, kind, sympathetic, ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... military attache said: 'What I admire most in this campaign is the conduct of your soldiers. Here they are trekking and fighting daily in an uninteresting country, scorched by day, cold by night, without drink, without women. Any other soldiers in Europe would ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lessons, some of the following in order to complete the course in a year. Lesson XXVIII David and Absalom; XXX The Temple; XXXVI Elisha and Jonah; XXXVIII, XXXIX The Kings of Judah; XLIV Queen Esther. These are suggested for omission not because they are unimportant or uninteresting, but in case some lessons must be omitted. In order to complete the course in one year in the New Testament lessons, the following might be omitted, if some must be. XVI The Mothers Prayer; ...
— Hurlbut's Bible Lessons - For Boys and Girls • Rev. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut
... too, have undoubtedly, as Mr. Gladstone says, a wonderful preference for a lord. Yet our aristocracy, from the action upon it of the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, and the political necessities of George the Third, is for the imagination a singularly modern and uninteresting one. Its splendor of station, its wealth, show, and luxury, is then what the other classes really admire in it; and this is not an elevating admiration. Such an admiration will never lift us out of our vulgarity and brutality, if we chance ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... is neither the chief town nor capital. It has scarcely a third of the population of Boulogne, and not much more than half the population of Arras, which is the seat of the prefecture; and though it is by no means so dreary and uninteresting a place as the casual traveller, seeing only the landing-pier, and the new station, which bears the name of the heroic Eustache de St.-Pierre, is apt to take it to be, it cannot compare, in point of beauty and interest, either with Boulogne or with Arras. But as the French head of the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... had in her time known how uninteresting and unwelcome is the celebrant of one's own misfortunes. Husbands and wives who tell of their bad luck are entertaining only so long as they are spicy and sportsmanlike. When they ask for a solution they are embarrassing, since advice is impossible for moral people. The truly good must ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... of the books which they were pretending to read. It was only twenty-four hours since they had left Calcutta, and they were still in that early stage of journeying when they looked askance at their fellows, decided that never, no, never had Fate placed them in the midst of such uninteresting companions, and determined to keep severely to themselves during the rest ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... masterly compositions of the first artists as shall sweeten the bitterest potion, and elicit a chorus of blessings on the taste and liberality of their munificent benefactors. But we fear that our pleading will be vain—Englishmen, poor, sick, and suffering, are intolerably uninteresting; not to be named on the same day with the happy possessors of woolly locks, flat noses, and copper-coloured skins; these being personal qualifications calculated to excite the intense sympathies of the many whose charity neither begins nor ends "at home." Yet, in the spirit of the little girl, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... our earth and thousands of millions of bodies quite as big all put together, they would not be nearly so great as one of these nebulae. Astronomers reckon up the various nebulae by thousands, but I must add that most of them are apparently faint and uninteresting. A nebula is sometimes liable to be mistaken for a comet. The comet is, as I have already explained, at once distinguished by the fact that it is moving and changing its appearance from hour to hour, while scores of years elapse without changes in the aspect or position of a nebula. The most powerful ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... resort with her parents, where she had received considerable attention from young men, just like the older girls with whom she associated. Here, banished to the silent woods, she saw the summer stretch out endlessly before her, intolerably dull and uninteresting. She loved fluffy clothes and despised the bloomers and middies which the girls wore. She loved dainty table service and hated to cook. Up here she would be expected to help with the meals, and all there was to cook on was an open fire and a gasoline stove! What could her father have been thinking ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... Nor was it uninteresting to the world that an experiment should be fairly and fully made, whether freedom of discussion, unaided by power, is not sufficient for the propagation and protection of truth—whether a government conducting itself in the true spirit of its constitution, with zeal ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... Douglas was attracted, and for good reason—the face of the girl, once seen, was not soon forgotten. During the time he had been in Scotland it had seemed to him that the Scotch women were hard-featured, uninteresting, and altogether unlovely; but this girl was different. There was something of the savage in her, and yet she possessed a charm which fascinated the young man. Her black hair hung in curling and tangled tresses over ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... service.—Thrice He asked Peter, as if to be perfectly sure ere He sent him forth on a shepherd's work. All the self-denial, patience, tenderness, and delicacy of love are needed, as the Lord knew well, in dealing with men, who are naturally uninteresting, or perhaps repulsive, and hence our Lord saw the necessity that there should be love. But how could there be love to them? It was impossible to expect it; and so Christ introduced Himself, saying, in effect, "Dost thou love Me? Henceforth ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... success. But it is a pity that I know so little about it all as to be unable to explain to you his many expedients. Folk call him a wizard, for he produces so much. Nevertheless, personally I find what he does uninteresting." ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... matters related therein. Like all other ancient histories, they appear to be a jumble of fable and of fact, and of probable and of improbable things, but which distance of time and place, and change of circumstances in the world, have rendered obsolete and uninteresting. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Cook, who keeps twenty-five cats. Lord, Master, think of it! What chanct would a poor mouse have? None of the rest of us are queer, leastwise, we hain't found it out if we are. But, then, we're mighty uninteresting, I'm bound to ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a fresh discussion among themselves; and, as it seemed as interminable as it was uninteresting, Reding took an opportunity to wish his host a good night, and to slip away. He never had much leaning towards the evangelical doctrine; and Freeborn and his friends, who knew what they were holding a great deal better than the run of their ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... morning and I tell them about the children that live in other countries. I tell them that a child a thousand miles away is just as much a neighbor as the one across the street. At first I feared that they would find it uninteresting. But if you know how to ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... for the Marquise de Chargeboeuf and other matters really uninteresting but about which politeness assumes that we are keenly interested, it dawned on Monsieur d'Hauteserre that the old gentleman had come to warn his young relatives against imprudence. He remarked that times were ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... dear L., with descriptions of the uniform and uninteresting scenery through which we rode,—horrid hills upon which withered aloes brandished their spears, plains apparently rained upon by a shower of stones, and rolling ground abounding only with thorns like the "wait-a-bits" of Kafir land, created to tear man's skin or clothes. Our toil was rendered doubly ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... were lamenting the passing away of something loved and dear,— the boats, the Kanakas, the hides, my old shipmates! Death, change, distance, lend them a character which makes them quite another thing from the vulgar, wearisome toil of uninteresting, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... We found the temple uninteresting, and the cemetery an abomination of desolation. Spaces once occupied by graves had been turned into potato-patches. Between were tombs leaning at all angles out of the perpendicular, tablets made illegible by scurf, empty ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... evident to Henrietta that her father would be pleased to go, and yet that he was about to refuse for her sake. She could not bear that he should be deprived of so much and such refined amusement, and be doomed to an uninteresting morning at home, merely to gratify her humour. She tried to speak, but could not at first command her voice; at length she expressed her wish that Mr. Temple should avail himself of the invitation. Lord Montfort bowed lowly, Mr. Temple ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... the expanding power of America reflect British public opinion, or did they create it? It is difficult to estimate such matters. Certainly it is not uninteresting that these books coincided in point of time with a British governmental attitude of opposition, though on peaceful lines, to the development of American power, and to the adoption to the point of faith, by British commercial ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... when you travel by rail consists mostly on getting half a glimpse, beginning to exclaim, "Oh, look there!" then plunging into the black gulf of a tunnel, and not coming out again until after the best bit has carefully disappeared behind an uninteresting, fat-bodied mountain. But travelling by motor-car! Oh, the difference! One sees, one feels; one is never, never bored, or impatient to arrive anywhere. One would enjoy being like the famous brook, and "go ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... Dominion government for the purchase of the claims of the persons who had held the lands of the island for a century. The land question was always the disturbing element in the politics of the island, whose history otherwise is singularly uninteresting to those who have not had the good fortune to be among its residents and to take a natural interest in local politics. The ablest advocate of confederation was Mr. Edward Whelan, a journalist and politician who took part in the Quebec conference, but did not live to see it carried ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... more cantabile, and which required more fulness of tone in the execution; and we can understand why even so conservative a critic as Louis Ehlert should exclaim, apropos of Chopin's "entirely new pianoforte life," "How uninteresting is the style of any previous master (excepting Beethoven) compared with his! What a litany of gone-by, dead-alive forms! What a feelingless, prosaic jingle! If anyone should, without a grimace, assure me sincerely that ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... was probably more populous than at the present moment. But its ancient fortifications have been destroyed and their place has been taken by boulevards and canals. The line may still be traced on the map, or walked round through a series of shipping suburbs; but it is uninteresting to follow, a great part of its course lying through the more squalid portions of the town. The only remaining gate is that known as the Rabot (1489), a very interesting and picturesque object situated ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... soul, Parsifal saves the soul of Amfortas? This is a fallacy that held Wagner all his life. We find it in "The Flying Dutchman"; it is avoided in "Tannhaeuser"—for, thank the gods, Tannhaeuser is not saved by that uninteresting young person Elizabeth; it plays a large part in the "Ring"; it is the culmination of the drama of "Parsifal." Had Wagner thought more of Goethe and less of the Frankfort creature who formulated his hypo-chondriacal nightmares, ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... which there are some magnificent exceptions—orators have only to cease from speaking to become uninteresting. What has been heard with enthusiasm is read with indifference or even with astonishment. You miss the noble voice, the persuasive gesture, the irresistible personality; and with the emotional faculty at rest and the reason at work you are surprised—and it may be a little ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Patty, a bit uninteresting. She tried hard to understand the queer things they read or recited, but it seemed to her a continuous repetition of sound without sense. She was willing to admit her own stupidity, and noting the rapt expressions on the faces round her, she concluded the lack was in ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... has a value. It is fairly well printed, is adequately illustrated, and is readable. Although much of the information given is not now uninteresting it will in the course of time serve as a ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... the Barnacle fowl, it may be an addendum, not uninteresting to your correspondent "W.B. MacCabe," to add to his extract from Giraldus another from Hector Boece, History of Scotland, "imprentit be Thomas Davidson, prenter to the Kyngis nobyll grace [James VI.]." He observes, that the opinion of some, that the "Claik geis growis ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... out with my troop, quite uninteresting. But what do you think? Something exploded not 100 yards away from Rinaldo. I was much farther off, dismounted. He didn't turn a hair, but only looked round and watched the smoke. Whereas, as you ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... Emerald City thought this ride the most uninteresting and dreary they had ever experienced, but the High Coco-Lorum seemed to think it was grand. He pointed out the different buildings and parks and fountains, in much the same way that the conductor of an American "sight-seeing wagon" does, and being guests they were obliged to submit ...
— The Lost Princess of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... actor, moreover, is always more effective in scenes of emotion than in scenes of cold logic and calm reason; and the dramatist, therefore, is obliged to select as his leading figures people whose acts are motivated by emotion rather than by intellect. Aristotle, for example, would make a totally uninteresting figure if he were presented faithfully upon the stage. Who could imagine Darwin as the hero of a drama? Othello, on the other hand, is not at all a reasonable being; from first to last his intellect is "perplexed in the extreme." His emotions are the motives for his acts; and in this he may be taken ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... he does not, like most other wanderers, furnish us with a journal of every day's proceedings. He was too well aware that many, perhaps most, days on a journey are monotonous or uninteresting; and that many of the details of a traveller's progress are wholly unworthy of being recorded, because they are neither amusing, elevating, nor instructive. He paints, now and then, with all the force ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... herself was not uninteresting. Her respectability incased her like armor plate, and she never laughed without putting three fingers to her lips. She told them that she had at one time been a ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... melted into very soft curves as Frances turned her letter round, examined the postmarks, looked with interest at the seal, and studied the handwriting. Her careful perusal of the outside of the letter revealed at a glance how few she got, and how such a comparatively uninteresting event in most ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... can't talk to each other? With people who live the way we do, it isn't that they've worn each other out, because they see no more of each other, hardly, than they do of the others. And it isn't that they're naturally more uninteresting to each other than the rest of the people they know. Because then, why did they marry each other in the first place, instead of any one of the others who are so easy to talk to afterward? Imagine what this table ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... they contain much that is prosy and uninteresting, may well be left till after we have read the odes, sonnets, and short descriptive poems that have made him famous. As showing a certain heroic cast of Wordsworth's mind, it is interesting to learn that the greater part of his work, including ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... uninteresting length of highway with grim satisfaction. It was the inaccessibility and general lack of popular attractions which had led him to select Nepaug as a summering place. Mosquitoes and sand-fleas abounded; but one need not say "good-morning" to mosquitoes ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... been taught to do things, to pay off their debts. Men run up bills and pay them off, and run them up again and again and pay them off; but we, while we run up bills, our ways of paying them off are so few, and so uninteresting." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the frog era. In nearly every city in the land there are from one to three persons who claim to be God, or an incarnation of Christ, or the Holy Spirit. Thousands of religious people think it is too tame and uninteresting to accept all of the plain old doctrines of the Scripture, so they want ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... practice, which generally produces a result similar to the first, is quite as unthinking. It is more often practiced; and is responsible for many of the labored and uninteresting designs which are common. If the Pattern-artist deck-out the old worn-out and common place spirals with leaves and flowers borrowed from Nature—the result is like the "voice of Jacob and the hands of Esau;" it is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... are disappearing, and ere long our American peasantry may become commonplace and uninteresting. Let us hope that they may never lose the sweet simplicity, frankness, honesty, thrift, and other pleasing ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... woman, no longer very young, to begin an entirely new life in a perfectly different milieu, and certainly more difficult for a Frenchwoman of the bourgeoisie than any other. They live in such a narrow circle, their lives are so cramped and uninteresting—they know so little of society and foreign ways and manners that they must be often uncomfortable and make mistakes. It is very different for a man. All the small questions of dress and manners, etc., ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... yesterday that he never argued with atheists or radicals, because they always came round in the end." Or he would say, in Henry Bland's flute-like tones: "Your mention of Robert Browning induces me to relate an anecdote, which I think may prove not wholly uninteresting to you." At times we used to tell long stories on our walks, stopping short in the middle of a sentence, when the other had instantly to continue the narrative. I do not mean that the wit was very choice or the ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and enjoyed a pretty view from the town, looking down on the harbour; but my impression of the island is, that, with the exception of a few cultivated spots, it is a very barren, uninteresting place. We visited, however, the plantation of the sugar-cane; and among a variety of tropical trees, such as the guava, tamarind, plantain, and custard-apple, there was a species of the monkey-bread tree, which struck us as ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... you have lately adopted of sending me a letter every fortnight. In addition to the last daily paper, send me likewise the Observer, or any other weekly depository of domestic news. You, who have passed all your days in the bustle of London, can scarcely conceive the uninteresting and insipid life I am doomed to lead in this retirement. My situation obliges me to maintain some sort of establishment, otherwise I should, from inclination, confine my intercourse to a very limited circle. I have been for some days projecting a jaunt into the interior ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... Mr G. Scott, we do not remember ever to have met with. It is entitled "Morbid Sympathy," forming two pictures. In the one the murderer is coming from the house where he has just committed the diabolical act; in the other he is visited. The man is an uninteresting villain and his visitors are fools. The object of the painter is doubtless a good one; it is to avert that morbid sympathy which has been so conspicuously and mischievously felt and affected for the worst, the most wicked ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... and teacher of worldwide reputation. With him I associated on the most cordial and affectionate terms; and often in the course of conversation I tried to bring him to discuss the subject, but without success. It was obviously unpleasant and uninteresting to him. Enough was said, however, to enable me to realize that he held the current ideas on the subject; and I would not for worlds have allowed him, to guess that I myself came under ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... have said but little of my work at the Local Government Board, because, though heavy, it was of an uninteresting nature.' [Footnote: There are, however, many entries, of which ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... three-legged mule may contrive to reach the agreed spot in advance of the others, provided a circular running space has been selected and the number of rounds be sufficiently ample." It is this otherwise uninteresting and obtrusive person's graceful duty to convey to you the agreeable intelligence that the honourable and not ill-rewarded office of Guarder of the Imperial Silkworms has been conferred upon you, and to ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... country around is one universal flat, unenclosed, uninteresting, and even tedious, but the prospect from the steeple of the fine cathedral is commanding, extending over an unbounded plain, through which the magnificent Loire bends his stately way, in sight for ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... place here to enter into the details of all that was said on both sides, but it may not be uninteresting to state that, during the discussion, both the palefaces and the red men became so intensely absorbed in contemplation of the vast region of comparatively new thought into which they were insensibly led, that they forgot for the time being the main object ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... Coblentz, or from the clear waves of this old Germanic stream gazed upon the grand creations of Nature, all upon so magnificent a scale, the appearance of the old decayed tower which forms the subject of the ensuing tradition forms no uninteresting object. It rises before him as he mounts the Rhine from the little island below Bingen, toward the left shore. He listens to the old shipmaster as he relates with earnest tone the wonderful story of the tower, and, shuddering at the description of the frightful punishment of priestly pride ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... has only just occurred to me." She looked at him closely. "You are a curious and not uninteresting object, Mr. Penway." ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... grass, spaniard, rushes, swamps, lagoons, terraces, meaningless rises and indentations of the ground, and two great brown grassy mountains on either side, are the principal and uninteresting objects in the valley through which we were riding. I despair of giving you an impression of the real thing. It is so hard for an Englishman to divest himself, not only of hedges and ditches, and cuttings ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... This is occasionally to be seen in sheltered and favoured gardens, but it is not to be relied upon in other than southern and seaside districts. The plant is of no particular interest to the cultivator, the outline being ungainly, while the pale blue flowers are both dull and uninteresting. It belongs to the Solanum family, and is only worth cultivating as a curiosity. Light, warm soil and a sunny position are necessities in the cultivation ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... appeared to win approval by my reading of the extremely uninteresting leading article, he shook his head at the sight of my handwriting, whilst he seemed to be astounded by my total ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... teach philosophy gratis. The master, too, is sensible that he is seen in this light; and how much this must lessen that affectionate regard to the learners which alone can sweeten the bitter labor of instruction, and convert the whole business into unwelcome and uninteresting task-work, many preceptors that I have conversed with on the subject are ready, with a sad heart, to acknowledge. From this inconvenience the settled salaries of the masters of this school in great measure exempt ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... singular one,—Selphar. It always savored too nearly of brimstone to please me. I used to call her Sel, "for short." She was a good, sensible, uninteresting-looking girl, with broad face, large features, and limp, tow-colored curls. They used to hang straight down about her eyes, and were never otherwise than perfectly smooth. She proved to be of good temper, which is worth quite as much as brains in a servant, as honest as the daylight, dull enough ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... tower and little adjoining edifice with an interest that attached itself to every separate, moss-grown stone; but the Warden, like most Englishmen, was at once amazed and wearied with the American's enthusiasm for this spot, which to him was uninteresting for the very reason that made it most interesting to Redclyffe, because it had stood there such a weary while. It was too common an object to excite in his mind, as it did in Redclyffe's, visions ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Those who, like Dr. Johnson, have blamed it as a drama, have admired it "as a series of lines," or as a lyric; one writer, who has found that its characters are nothing, its sentiments tedious, its story uninteresting, has nevertheless "doubted whether there will ever be any similar poem which gives so true a conception of the capacity and the dignity of the mind by which it was produced" (Bagehot's Literary Studies). Some who have praised it as an allegory see ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... her in wonder. "It's true," she said. "Everybody I meet is uninteresting—they live such dull and stupid lives. I'm shut up here in this town—I've got to spend a whole ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... on the morning of May 15, and had a sandy and uninteresting ride until noon. The only pleasant thing about it, beside good company, was an exquisite bouquet of beautiful tea-rosebuds, from our kind entertainer's garden. At noon a carriage met us, kindly sent by a foreign resident at Lihue, and the older members of the party got into ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... gipsy element had vanished. Zinaida gave a different tone to the proceedings. I sat beside her by virtue of my office as page. Among other things, she proposed that any one who had to pay a forfeit should tell his dream; but this was not successful. The dreams were either uninteresting (Byelovzorov had dreamed that he fed his mare on carp, and that she had a wooden head), or unnatural and invented. Meidanov regaled us with a regular romance; there were sepulchres in it, and angels with lyres, and talking flowers and ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... His melody, too, is dignified and expressive, but he is sensibly inferior to Gluck in what may be called dramatic instinct, and this, coupled with the fact that the libretti of his operas are almost uniformly uninteresting, whereas Gluck's are drawn from the immortal legends of the past, is perhaps enough to explain why the one has been taken and the other left. Mehul's last and greatest work, 'Joseph,' is still performed in France and Germany, though our ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Duke de Fernan Nunez, whose sedate and polished manners suited the occasion perfectly. He did not encourage any attempt at gaiety. Oh dear, no! Far from it! I felt myself gradually freezing, and our conversation was of the most uninteresting character and dry ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... but without much success, to see him as he watched the contortions of the acrobats, which apparently he enjoyed more than to her seemed reasonable. But, as with herself, it was the boy Moxy that chiefly attracted him, though the show of physical prowess was far from uninteresting to him; and although what she saw through the smoky illumination of the dip was not attractive to her, the question remains whether it was really the man himself she saw, or only an appearance made up of candle gleam and gloom, complemented ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... the little quay while my father and the crew were hoisting sail. For a moment I questioned if I should not be happier in the bow of the Curlew, than tramping half a score of miles over rough uninteresting moorland on the chance of capturing a seal; but in the end I was satisfied in keeping to the plan arranged by my companions. I waited only to see the boat bend over in the fresh breeze as she sailed outward to the ships; then, armed with my harpoon ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... would not stoop to ask for the revelation which he chose to defer; so she said, 'Dorcas and I are very good friends; but I don't know very well what to make of her. Only I don't think she's quite so dull and apathetic as I at first supposed; but still I'm puzzled. She is either absolutely uninteresting, or very interesting indeed, and I can't ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... ceilings, and carved mantelpieces. They were entered from a quiet street which showed hardly a sign of life. There were lions couchant guarding the entrances. The walls on that side showed mostly blank, uninteresting windows. With an odd pride the great houses showed only their ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... explain this startling paradox? How is it, and why is it, that the artistic and exuberant, genial and sentimental German submits to the hard rule of the commonplace, uninteresting, ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... pop. 3000. Inn: H. du Nord. Omnibus at station. Also omnibus for Valence. An uninteresting village about ten minutes from the station, situated on the sunny side of the valley of the Merdary. The vineyards here produce an excellent sparkling wine, the taste of which is natural, not given to it by the addition of prepared ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... sufficient meal in the evening. In all, certainly not less than fifty different articles are set before him during the day, for his choice as elements of nourishment. Let him scan this extended bill-of-fare, which long custom has made so common-place as to be uninteresting—perhaps even wearisome to think about —and see what he could omit from it, if necessity compelled him. After a reluctant farewell to fish, butter, eggs, milk, sugar, green and preserved fruits, etc., he thinks that perhaps under extraordinary circumstances he might be able to merely sustain ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... meetings of her father's friends at their house, the conversation was uninteresting, if not disgusting; for it was about goods and merchandise, money and speculation, occasionally interrupted by politics, which were to her of as little interest. How different was the demeanour, the address, and the conversation of the young Englishman, who had been bred in courts, ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... Campbell in mentioning this circumstance makes it appear as if Smith chose the latter subject of his own motion, in accordance with a rule of the society whereby the chairman of one meeting selected the subject for debate at the next meeting; and it would have been a not uninteresting circumstance if it were true, for it would show the line his ideas were taking at that early period of his career; but as a matter of fact the rule in question was not adopted for some time after the second meeting, and it is distinctly mentioned ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... was never brought to a glorious completion by the Madigans, even though they skipped uninteresting and difficult parts, and, like the early Elizabethans, permitted no intermission between acts. It was very often laughed to death. At times it became a saturnalia of extravagant action, and it frequently ended in a free fight, when the Rose and the Lily hinted too openly at the Recluse's incurable ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Bombay, we housed ourselves at Watson's Esplanade Hotel, a very large building. We went to see the sights of the town, and I was very much interested in all that I saw, though the populace struck me as being stupid and uninteresting, not like the Arabs at all. As I was new to India I was much struck by the cows with humps; by brown men with patches of mud on their foreheads, a stamp showing their Brahmin caste; by children, and big children too, with no garments except a string of silver bells; and by men lying ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... heard the private history of many old families, which he cherished for future use. Mrs. Cluyme apologized for the dinner, which (if the truth were told) needed an apology. All of which is significant, but sordid and uninteresting. Jacob Cluyme usually bought ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the long and uninteresting fight which followed it may be said that the most remarkable feature of the battle of the Yalu was that it took place between two nations which, had the war broken out forty years earlier, would have done their fighting with fleets of wooden junks and weapons of the past centuries. As an object ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... by side with the favourite songs of native growth. Instances of this will occur to every one familiar with our hymnology; but this can hardly happen in many cases. The translations on the principle of this volume may neither be uninteresting nor unedifying on that account, and it may be permitted to the Translator to trust that Paul Gerhardt in his present dress may be found stimulating and refreshing to many. Gerhardt was peculiarly a ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... they would have been pleasantly drowned together; but as it was, they lacked the requisite courage, and were fain to content themselves with an occasional frantic struggle to the surface, where they gasped a few words of uninteresting ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... positively disgraceful!" she exclaimed. "Mother and I have nearly finished—and our share of the post-bag is most uninteresting. Please come and sit down, tell us where you are going to shoot, and whether you've ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his side, as he looked down at her, was surprised at his own excitement. His heart was beating, his hand trembling—before this plain, ordinary, unattractive girl! Unattractive physically—but not uninteresting. One of the most interesting human beings whom he had ever met, simply because she was utterly unlike any one else. He felt shame before her, because he knew that she would believe every word that ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... all take a great interestin reading every particular relating to the lives of notorious tyrants and great sinners; we like to know what clothes they wore, and how they swore. But the lives of great and good men and women are very uninteresting; some young ladies even, when travelling by train, prefer, as I observe, French novels inspired by Cloacina to ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... the brothers after their children had left them to themselves. Together they wandered over the scenes of childhood, recalling its minutest, and, what would be to strangers, uninteresting scenes, George Armstrong listening, with a sad pleasure, to the details of his parents' lives after his own escape from the Asylum, and, also, to changes in the family of his brother since their death; while James ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... rule, first by doing nothing to increase the number of houses, second by smiting the greedy landlord on the hip, third by investigating the profiteering builders and working men. For a constructive policy deals with remote and uninteresting factors, while a greedy landlord, or a profiteering plumber is visible ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... arising especially from two sources. (1) Perhaps the experiences of Moses are most sorrowful. That he should now, after faithfully bringing this people to the very border of the land which they sought, be compelled to spend forty monotonous years in this bare and uninteresting desert must have been a disappointment very heavy to bear. During these wanderings he buried Miriam, his sister, and Aaron, his brother and helper. He was often complained of by the people he was trying to help, and because of it was ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... and rich, or going to be; I am a poor struggler. Of course, in painting London, it's atmosphere one has to try for above all. Our sky gives value, now and then, to forms which in themselves are utterly uninteresting." ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... a simple matter for the scout girls to occupy their time while awaiting the return of the messenger, even walking the stone wall, and jumping the breaks, usually a popular pastime, seemed flat and uninteresting ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... could see, the house was apparently perfectly uninteresting inside, all eighteenth-century work, the facade of the main building being, with the vestibule, the only portion of the ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... the High Street there was Chuffles, the grocer, a small, hairy, silently intent polygamist, who was given rough music by the youth of the neighbourhood because of a scandal about his wife's sister, and who was nevertheless totally uninteresting, and Tonks, the second grocer, an old man with an older, very enfeebled wife, both submerged by piety. Tonks went bankrupt, and was succeeded by a branch of the National Provision Company, with a young manager ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... a little hard and uninteresting to you, but it is as well to try to master them. It looks as if we were going to hear a great deal about Austria this winter, and it will be so much easier for us to understand the events as they happen if we have mastered the peculiar ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 55, November 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... who kept alternately groaning from fatigue and pain and uttering imprecations against the country they were in. Having cleared this wood I turned rather more inland, and we pursued our route over barren scrubby plains, and, after having travelled about fifteen miles over this uninteresting description of country, we suddenly found ourselves on the top of a low range which overlooked a most luxuriant valley of about three miles in width, its general direction appearing to be ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... that by the time I was nine or ten the whole tragic episode had gone out of my head. Meeting Mary Matheson on the street, where she came but rarely, she was precisely as mysterious and precisely as uninteresting as any other grown-up. And if I saw Joshua Blake (who, pulling himself by the bootstraps out of drink and despair, had gone into Mr. Dow's law-office and grown as hard as nails)—if I saw him, I say, my only ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Aunt,—My letters are very uninteresting. I cannot help it. There is nothing going on in society. In fact, many of the Italians have left Rome, and the colleagues are resting on their oars—those who have any to rest on. I am resting on my "Pinafore" oars. How lucky we ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... gave a highly realistic representation of pinning an enemy to the earth with a spear, and with the barong decapitating him. The first part of the dance, before the passions of the savages became aroused, was, however, monotonous and uninteresting. ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... no means approved of passing Christmas-day in the uninteresting seclusion of a country inn, with nothing more festive to look forward to than a specially ordered, but lonely dinner, and nothing to divert her thoughts but the rural spectacle afforded by the inn-yard. As to going out for a walk in such weather, she would ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... into details of uninteresting daily occurrences, I may here give a general account of such circumstances regarding the natives as have not previously been alluded to or insufficiently described. It would be difficult to state the peculiarities of this portion of the Papuan* Race (including also the inhabitants of the ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... mother and Amiel's stout and amiable parents joined their offspring in the summerhouse. One of the affable, if uninteresting, neighbors came as well and, promptly introducing a banjo as a reason for his being, lured the assembled ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... church. The great facts are stated by all the historians, and few new ones have been brought to light. Historians differ merely in the mode of presenting their subject. The ecclesiastical histories are generally deficient in art, and hence are uninteresting. The ablest and the most learned of modern historians is doubtless Neander. He is also the fullest and most satisfactory; but even he is unattractive. Mosheim is dry and dull, but learned in facts. Dr. Schaff has most ably presented primitive Christianity, and his recent ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... it, and her method was to classify her acquaintances according to their systems, to keep them in their proper bundles, and to give every one the treatment he or she was accustomed to receive. And since all things British are now changing and passing away, it may not be uninteresting to record the classification Mrs. Garstein Fellows adopted. First she set apart as most precious and desirable, and requiring the most careful treatment, the "court dowdies "—for so it was that the dignity and quiet good taste that radiated from Buckingham Palace impressed ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... satisfaction, which was fortunate, for to the greater number of the eighteen or twenty people who had been indiscriminately herded together to form it, it was (with the exception of Mrs. Alwynn) a dreary or at best an uninteresting ordeal; while to four people among the number, the four who had met last on the church steps, it was a period of slow torture, endured with varying degrees of patience by each, from the two soups in the beginning, to the peaches and grapes at the ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... general aspect of the country on this side of the valley of Mexico, suffice it to say, that there is a universal air of dreariness, vastiness, and desolation. The country is flat, but always enlivened by the surrounding mountains, like an uninteresting painting in a diamond frame; and yet it is not wholly uninteresting. It has a character peculiar to itself, great plains of maguey, with its huts with uncultivated patches, that have once been gardens, still filled with flowers and choked with weeds; the huts themselves, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... highly specialised course of study designed to enable the recipients to find their way with safety, both in sunshine and storm, over the vast water surface of the world. To describe here the subjects taught would only be wearisome and uninteresting. Sufficient to say that the course was a most comprehensive one and admirably arranged by masters of the mariner's art. If any fault can be found it is certainly not one of paucity of information, and the proof of its efficacy can be found in ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... books of travel to describe this part of the journey somewhat as follows: "Skirting the low and uninteresting shores of Africa we at length reached," etc. Low and uninteresting shores! Through the glasses we made out distant mountains far beyond nearer hills. The latter were green-covered with dense forests whence rose mysterious smokes. Along the shore we saw an occasional cocoanut ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... paused again, and then went on quickly, in a low tone: "I don't think I was exactly popular—certainly not with the men employed in the same house. I was thought cold and hard, and to me they were all utterly uninteresting. One or two of the girls I liked, and they were fond of me." Another pause. Then she pushed on again: "One evening I went out with another girl and her brother—at least she said he was her brother—to see the illuminations for the Queen's birthday. In Pall Mall we ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... interest to the reader, if, in addition to telling what was done, we give some indication of the way in which it was done. A list of tools a carpenter uses and the operations he performs during the half hour we watch him, may be dull and uninteresting; but our description may have an added value if it shows his manner of working so that the reader can determine whether the carpenter is an orderly, methodical, and rapid worker or a mere putterer who is careless, haphazard, and slow. Two persons will perform similar actions in very ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... ante-chamber, which those who delight in the imitations of art rather than of nature, in the likenesses of joint stools and the portraits of tankards, would esteem most capitally adorned: but it must be confessed, that, amongst these uninteresting performances, are dispersed a few striking Berghems and agreeable Polemburgs. In the gallery adjoining, two or three Rosa de Tivolis merit observation; and a large Teniers, representing a St. Anthony surrounded ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... that there was more fun in the little sister, but I began by wooing her with contributions that were all misfits. In an old book I find columns of notes about works projected at this time, nearly all to consist of essays on deeply uninteresting subjects; the lightest was to be a volume on the older satirists, beginning with Skelton and Tom Nash - the half of that manuscript still lies in a dusty chest - the only story was about Mary Queen of Scots, who ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... was somewhat sparse at Oldfield. There were a few Eton boys, and one or two in that delightful transition age when youth is most bashful and uninteresting,—a sort of unfledged manhood, when the smooth boyish cheek contradicts the deepened bass of the voice,—an age that has not ceased to blush, and which is full of aggravating idosyncrasies ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... places interesting from their relations to the French and Revolutionary wars. But, arriving at the middle point of his journey,—the head waters of the Mohawk,—a disenchantment begins. Thenceforward he passes through a country tame, monotonous, and with cities and villages as uninteresting in their appearance as in their names; the latter being taken, apparently without rhyme or reason, from the classical dictionary or ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... successful in his classes, very much so in studies which were to his taste, principally French composition. In this he rose above the usual level of schoolboy exercises when the subject interested him. Certain other branches that were uninteresting or distasteful to him, as for instance Latin Grammar, he neglected. I do not remember ever having seen him attend a distribution of prizes, although he was highly interested, perhaps because he was too interested. On these occasions, he would ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... Notes of your correspondents on this subject have only left the opportunity for a few stray gleanings in the field of their researches, which may, however, not prove uninteresting. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... are shadowed forth in many of the present games—some of which are not uninteresting. The barbarous custom of whipping martyrs at the stake is perpetuated by the game of whip-top. In a black-letter book in the British Museum, date ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... experienced a strong desire to do something pleasant for him—tell him about Vyesovshchikov, for instance. So, without changing her tone, she continued in the same voice in which she spoke of the needless and uninteresting things. ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... be more dreary and uninteresting than the scenery of this part of the delta. The water is clay-coloured and turbid, always cooler than the air, which again was 4 degrees or 5 degrees below that of Calcutta, with a damper atmosphere. The banks are of stratified sand and mud, hardly raised above ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Ella McCarthy sat on a green-painted chair in Kensington Gardens, staring listlessly at an uninteresting stretch of park landscape, that blossomed suddenly into tropical radiance as an expected figure appeared ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... that would be fun," Peace commented candidly, still holding the unopened volume in her hand, thinking it was another uninteresting story-book. "I don't like writing any better than I ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... record, which somewhat astonishes though it consoles Terence, as when his funny incident is related in a carefully modulated voice, and with a painful precision, it strikes even him as being hopelessly uninteresting. However, Mrs. Bohun certainly enjoys it,—or something else, perhaps: fortunately, it never occurs to Terry to ponder on the ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown |
