"Pretentious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... self-gratifying interpretations. This sympathising invariably deceives itself as to its power; woman would like to believe that love can do everything—it is the superstition peculiar to her. Alas, he who knows the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and blundering even the best and deepest love is—how much more readily it ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... had met the day before in the cafe of the "Terrasse," had asked him to take dinner with him, to view the splendor of "Ciro's" and a keeper of the vestiaire in scarlet breeches and silk stockings. Afterwards they were to go to the little bon-bon play-house up by the more pretentious bon-bon Casino. He was to watch the antics of a band of actors toying with some mimic fate, flippantly, to the sound of music, when his own destiny swung trembling on the last silken thread of tortured suspense! Yet it was better than moping alone, he told himself. He hated loneliness. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... The rather pretentious but extremely civilized house that stood alone in all its glory between the sea and the sixth hole was blazing with lights as they returned to it. The color had gone out of the sky and other twinkling eyes had appeared, and the breeze, now off the sea, had a sting to it. Toad soloists ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... designed and skilfully wrought as they are, are by no means pedantically smooth in finish—nay, may sometimes be called rough as to workmanship. But, unhappily there are few of the lesser arts that have fallen so low as the plasterer's. The cast work one sees perpetually in pretentious rooms is a mere ghastly caricature of ornament, which no one is expected to look at if he can help it. It is simply meant to say, 'This house is built for a rich man.' The very material of it is all wrong, as, indeed, mostly happens with an art that has fallen sick. That richly designed, ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... restaurants, cafes, and tables d'hote within the gates, and I had also found that outside, and especially within easy reach from the northern or Fifty-seventh Street gate, were to be found a number of most cleanly and inviting little places, more or less pretentious, and under various names, but all ready, willing, and able to serve one a breakfast, dinner, or luncheon such as would tempt even chronic grumblers to smile, feast, and ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... simple implements, weapons, and ornaments. Following after the trade would be found the smelter with his tools, and, where the conditions were favorable, local manufactories would be set up. But this home industry would not prevent importation of more pretentious articles from abroad. This would account for the rich collections of shields, swords, and golden cups found in Denmark that betray ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... Thus he settled all his doubts; she wasted a lot of rice powder on her cheeks. Pshaw! When they were once married he would make her stop that easily enough; she had many wrinkles in her face, but his coat had more bare spots and patches; she was old, pretentious, and imperious, but hunger was more imperious, and still more pretentious; and then, too, he had a sweet disposition, and, who could tell?—love modifies character; she spoke Spanish very badly, but he himself did not speak it ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... were sad hearts and weeping eyes in one humble home, where the loss of two deeply loved ones was mourned; and even in the paternal hall of O'Grady, and in the pretentious mansion of Devereux, sorrow was expressed, and some tears were shed for those who had thus early been cut off in their career of glory. We will not attempt to pry into the grief which existed in Gerrard's home. It did not show itself by loud cries ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... soon discovered, was no more pretentious in appearance than the San Gorgonio. It also was a long, low frame building with some great cottonwood trees before it and a few palms with their infinite and ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... old radical workman, for example, who tore you to pieces, mentally speaking, with a shake or two of his big teeth, and calmly informed you that in his opinion you were nothing more than a very empty-headed, pretentious, ignorant young woman—perhaps even, after the plain-spoken vocabulary of hie kind, a ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... would not take long; but he would have to love the animal in order to establish that perfect partnership which was essential to his performance. And how could he love any other dog than Prepimpin? He felt that he would hate the well-meaning but pretentious hound. He went out filled with ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... English church of St. Andrew's—is well laid out and commodious, possessing an excellent reading room for members' use, as well. Of bathing establishments there are three; the large building in the Moorish style on the Plage, the less pretentious but more picturesque one in the Port Vieux, and the least pretentious and least protected one, under the "falaises" [Footnote: Blue chalk ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... days is classic Santa Lucia with its water-gate and its fountain, its vendors of medicated water and frutti di mare, those toothsome shell fish of the unsavoury beach; vanished for ever is many a landmark of old Naples, and new buildings, streets and squares, blank, dreary, pretentious and staring, have arisen in their places. This thorough sventramento di Napoli, as the citizens graphically term this drastic reconstruction of the old capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, is no doubt beneficial, not to say necessary, and we make no protest against these wholesale ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... Richard Burton shines clearly through his work; cheerful manliness and cheerful godliness. He knows more about human nature than many pretentious diagnosticians; and his gladness in living communicates itself to the reader. Occasionally, as in Spring Fantasies, there is a subtlety easy to miss on a first of careless reading. On the edge of sixty, this poet is doing his best singing ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... better now, after venting my righteous indignation on this subject. I have a good deal more respect for the thief who steals your money, or the gentlemanly swindler who plunders you of it by the polite tricks of his art, than for these pretentious knaves who lie without uttering a word, and ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... languished for want of a proper incumbent,—that is, where the feminine element was always supplicatory, never authoritative. In such a place you may find the Select Men as vulgar and unclean as are some of the more pretentious politicians of State or nation; the variety-store sands its sugar quite up to the city-standard; and the parson is as timid a timeserver as the Bishop of Babylon. No rich local tone and character are to be found in such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... had only lately married, and was not yet twenty-one years old.] absolutely obliged me to dedicate to you the first work that I myself published. [Footnote: Sganarelle had been borrowed by Neufvillenaine; The Pretentious Ladies was only printed by Molire, because the copy of the play was stolen from him; Don Garcia of Navarre was not published till after his death, in 1682.] It is not a present I make you, it is a duty I ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... to a practice of Socrates with pretentious people; "affecting ignorance and pretending to solicit information, he was in the habit of turning round upon the sciolist and confounding his presumption, both by the unlooked-for consequences he educed by his incessant questions and by the glaring ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... umbrella is no such confession; because it is not the office of the hat or bonnet to shelter the whole person from sun or rain.] But the brooch and the button must fasten, the chain suspend, the ring bear a device, or they sink into pretentious, vulgar shams. And there must be keeping between these articles and their offices. To use, for instance, a massive golden, or, worse, gilded chain to support a cheap silver watch is to reverse the order of reason and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... pretended to consider, but with scepticism, so far as courtesy permitted, in the quality of their attention. It was impossible they shouldn't, after a little, tacitly agree as to the absurdity of carrying to Maggie a token from such a stock. It would be—that was the difficulty—pretentious without being "good"; too usual, as a treasure, to have been an inspiration of the giver, and yet too primitive to be taken as tribute welcome on any terms. They had been out more than two hours and, evidently, had found nothing. It forced ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... worsted, and for its spreading fans, color-dashed with exciting pictures of bull-fights and spangled matadors. A hotel appears next, across the way, standing back from the street, with: a small, triangular park between; and then comes a pretentious bric-a-brac bazaar, and another cafe, and a confectioner's, and a tobacco-store,—each presided over by a buxom French matron, affable and vigilant, and clearly the animating spirit ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... the border of the highroad, separated from it by high iron gates, through which one sees long winding alleys with stone benches and vases with red geraniums planted in them, a sun-dial and stiff formal rows of trees—some less pretentious with merely an ordinary wooden gate, generally open, and always flowers of the simplest kind, geraniums, sunflowers, pinks, dahlias, and chrysanthemums—what we call a jardin de cure, (curate's garden)—but in great abundance. With very rare exceptions the lawns are not well kept—one ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... Woman's Bible" by that very accomplished American woman and Biblical student, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They are a great deal more satisfactory than many of the comments upon the same texts that we have read in other and more pretentious Commentaries. Mrs. Stanton's interpretative remarks are shrewd and sensible—Editorial N. ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... her, she could see that this was not the result of intellectual deficiency on her part, but merely of an ignorance of the ground on which the conversation was founded. As Cornelia stole glances at the faces, pretty or pretentious, of the young ladies, or at the mustaches, whiskers, or carefully-parted hair of the young gentlemen, it did not seem to her that she could call herself essentially the inferior of any one of them. As to what they thought of her, she could ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... thought of evil. She was exhausting her mocking verve upon a little boy of eight or ten—the son of the Marchioness de Boisfresnay—who had annoyed her extremely the night before, by parading through the ball his own pretentious little person, and by throwing himself pleasantly like a top between the legs of the gentlemen and through the dresses of the ladies. The marchioness went into ecstasies at these charming pranks. Clotilde defended ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... lean-to roofs. At the left of the village, and about an eighth of a mile distant, was an imposing red brick building with wings and a pair of octagon towers. It stood in a forest of pines and maples, and appeared to be enclosed by a high wall of masonry. It was too pretentious for an almshouse, too elegant for a prison; it was as evidently not a school-house, and it could not be an arsenal. Lynde puzzled over it a moment, and then returned for his saddle, which he slung across his back, holding it by a stirrup-strap ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the use of many a pony whose normal days were spent roaming wild upon the plains. Then there was the Polo Club House and ground, where many of the city's social functions were held. The whole thing was as pretentious as money could make it, and in due proportion it was attractive to the minds of those who believed themselves ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... company. Presiding in her own salon, she talked but little herself, but rather exerted herself to draw others out; without being learned, she exercised great judgment in her decisions when appeals were made to her as the presiding genius; she discouraged everything pedantic and pretentious; she dreaded exaggerations; she kept her company to the subject under discussion, and compelled attention; she would allow no slang; she insisted upon good-nature and amiability, which more than anything else marked society ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... Picardy villages, Ovillers was compactly built of red brick along a country road, with trees and orchards surrounding it. It had a lofty and pretentious brick church of a modern type. Below and beyond it to the east is a long and not very broad valley which lies between the eastern flank of Ovillers Hill and the next spur. It is called Mash Valley on the maps. The lines go down Ovillers ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... to the possession of wealth. The habit of being rich is one of the easiest acquired, and she found herself negotiating for a little house in Curzon Street and a more pretentious establishment in Somerset, with a sangfroid which ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... him running!" cried Barkins, as, with his tail flying, Ching ran from hut to hut, and finally stopped before the two more pretentious places, which were ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... taken two boxes, which we occupied together with Kaulbach, E. Forster, Liebig, Carriere, and others. The scenery and dresses are brilliant, but probably you would not like them particularly, and I, for my part, think them mannered and pretentious. In the orchestra the wind (especially flutes, clarinets, and bassoon) is excellent. The violins and double basses (six in number) are a little hazy, and lack the necessary energy, both in bowing, which is short and easy-going, and in rhythm. The PIANOS and CRESCENDOS ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... the course which we must follow to attain this goal, there may be various opinions. I proposed the establishment of a union of Central European States. The conservative press characterized that as "utterly pretentious."... ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... passes through many experiences. Being propelled by both wind and steam, she often veers with capricious 'trades,' making peculiar tacks, through some odd adjustment of time, air, and coal. Points not marked upon more pretentious charts receive and bill barter products. The vessel often drops anchor far from land, in channels having neither wharf ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... gold is found the dwellings of man soon follow, and the quickly erected shanties and more pretentious buildings of Sinna Ferry had grown there as evidence that the precious metals in that region were no longer visionary things of the enthusiasts, but veritable facts. The men who came to it along the water, or over the inland trails, were all in some way connected ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... eagerly at the opportunity of improving her style of living. The old Wales house was quite a pretentious edifice for those times. All the drawback to her delight was, that Grandma should have the southwest fire-room. She wanted to set up her high-posted bedstead, with its enormous feather-bed in that, and have it for her fore-room. Properly, it was the fore-room, being right across ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... native barbarism and dirt was what I anticipated; for, as I looked upon the naked rocks,—which there, as in other Greenland ports, afforded room for a few straggling huts of native fishermen and hunters, with only now and then a more pretentious white man's lodge,—I could hardly imagine that much would be found seductive to the fancy or inviting to the eye. A country where there is no soil to yield any part of man's subsistence seemed to offer such a slender chance for man ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... cabinet which stands between the windows, it has associations, no doubt, but it is sadly out of repair. Those pink tiles about the fireplace may be interesting to antiquaries; but I rather prefer the blue variety, as corresponding to the mental state in which their infinitely pretentious subjects and execrable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... after Thomas Lincoln's family settled in Indiana, they were followed by some neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Sparrow and Dennis Hanks, a child. To these the Lincolns surrendered their camp and built for themselves a cabin, which was slightly more pretentious than the first. It had an attic, and for a stairway there were pegs in the wall up which an active boy could readily climb. There was a stationary table, the legs being driven into the ground, some three-legged stools, and ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... wide roads; and the whole settlement is surrounded by stockades. At the further end of the town stands the convict prison, distinguished by its tower, and the Governor's house, which, though built of wood, is the most pretentious-looking edifice in the place. There is a nice little church close by, and ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... origin were not yet obliterated in Foedora, in spite of her cleverness. Her self-forgetfulness was a sham, her manners were not innate but painfully acquired, her politeness was rather subservient. And yet for those she singled out, her honeyed words expressed natural kindness, her pretentious exaggeration was exalted enthusiasm. I alone had scrutinized her grimacings, and stripped away the thin rind that sufficed to conceal her real nature from the world; her trickery no longer deceived me; I ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... asked and answered, the more pretentious gentleman laid a hand affectionately on the other's arm, ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... signs with gilt letters: Depot for Travelling-Bags, Plated Chains, Children's Toys, Mathematical Instruments in Glass, Bouquets for Brides and Maids of Honor, Wild Flowers a Specialty; and above was a little dusty show-case, wherein pearls, yellow with age, glass grapes and cherries surrounded the pretentious name of ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... continue to drug themselves with the opiate of optimism, or sink back upon the cushions of Christian resignation, their intellectual powers anaesthetized by cheerful platitudes. Or else, even those, who are fully cognizant of the chaos and conflict, seek an escape in those pretentious but fundamentally fallacious social philosophies which place the blame for contemporary world misery upon anybody or anything except the indomitable but uncontrolled instincts of living organisms. These ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... of Jacob's wife or wives from among her own relations in Mesopotamia who were of Sumerian stock and kindred of Abraham.[291] It is not surprising to find traces of Sumerian pride among the descendants of the evicted citizens of ancient Ur, especially when brought into association with the pretentious Hittites. ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... turned to the Holy Scriptures, but they seemed to him then very poor, compared with the stateliness of Tully, nor could his sharp wit penetrate their meaning. Those who seemed to have the greatest influence over him were the Manicheans,—a transcendental, oracular, indefinite, illogical, pretentious set of philosophers, who claimed superior wisdom, and were not unlike (at least in spirit) those modern savans in the Christian commonwealth, who make a mockery of what is most sacred in Christianity while themselves propounding ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... charlatan &c. (deceiver) 548; petit maitre &c. (fop) 854; flatterer &c. 935; coquette, prude, puritan. V. affect, act a part, put on; give oneself airs &c. (arrogance) 885; boast &c. 884; coquet; simper, mince, attitudinize, pose; flirt a fan; overact, overdo. Adj. affected, full of affectation, pretentious, pedantic, stilted, stagy, theatrical, big-sounding, ad captandum; canting, insincere. not natural, unnatural; self-conscious; maniere; artificial; overwrought, overdone, overacted; euphuist &c. 577. stiff, starch, formal, prim, smug, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... tenor; Mrs. M.B. Alverson, contralto. Several other artists with violin and cello assisted the regular choir of forty voices. They were strangers to me so I have reluctantly omitted their names. They were excellent musicians. During the eight months' service there occurred a number of pretentious musical undertakings which were meritorious ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... me," he began, after a short pause, handing the letter to his mother, but not addressing anyone in particular, "is that he is a business man, a lawyer, and his conversation is pretentious indeed, and yet he writes such ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... love. He could have wished to have his letter back again. It was an absurd letter. There were a thousand and one things, now that he came to think of it, that he might have said, things infinitely better and more moving than those stilted phrases of his, those accursed, sophisticated, pretentious, fine-spun phrases, though, luckily, the punctuation had been pretty bad and the lines shockingly crooked. He tried not to think, not to feel; but he felt and thought, and was wretched. If he had been thirty years old, he might have got drunk, but the ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... few of the company had seen domestic service in great houses before the war; they knew what was what and—more to the point—what wasn't. One gathered that this pretentious country home fell within the latter classification. Here, it was stated, anybody could buy his way into favour: the more bounding the bounder the brighter his chances ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... governing the social development. However far we may be from such a consummation, and reluctant to indulge in the magniloquent language which it suggests, I imagine that a literary history is so far satisfactory as it takes the facts into consideration and regards literature, in the perhaps too pretentious phrase, as a particular function of the whole social organism. But I gladly descend from such lofty speculations to come to a few relevant details; and especially, to notice some of the obvious limitations which have in ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... was abundant, and a saw-pit had been erected, a more pretentious one-floored cottage residence was planned to join on to the first building, which before long was entirely devoted to the servants; and we soon had a very charming little home with shingle roof, over which beautiful creepers literally rioted, and hung ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... things to eat. But there were other matters that were also dear to her. She did like music,—though it may be doubted whether she would ever play it or even listen to it alone. She did like reading, and especially the reading of poetry,—though even in this she was false and pretentious, skipping, pretending to have read, lying about books, and making up her market of literature for outside admiration at the easiest possible cost of trouble. And she had some dream of being in love, and would take delight even ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... a most pretentious affair, judged by the surrounding homes. It had a large interior court, without a roof, but the immediate dwelling had four or more rooms. The Chief walked through one room, and entered the court, where George was embarrassed to see two girls, and several boys, together with three women, all ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... Sometimes pretentious pictures representing events in public or family history, were embroidered in crewels on sampler linen. The largest and funniest one I have ever seen was the boarding-school climax of glory of Miss Hannah Otis, sister ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... You have seen the pretentious announcements of "L'Esquisse d'une Philosophie," and you have admired the work on trust; for either you have not read it, or, if you have, you are incapable of judging it. Acquaint yourselves, then, with this speculation more brilliant than ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... in Cherryvale prided itself that it was not "new-fangled." It was not nearly so pretentious in appearance as was the Presbyterian church. Missy, in her heart, preferred stained-glass windows and their glorious reflections, as an asset to religion; but at night services you were not apt to ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... handsome dark eyes fell on some sad scenes. But now, in the child's sixth year, they were still together, still appearing in public, and still, in that mysterious way known only to their type, rushing about on motor parties, buying champagne, and entertaining after a fashion in their cramped but pretentious apartment. ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... pollute them. And if on some especially eligible bluff better buildings do stand, their owners or builders show no appreciation of what the bluff or river cares for, but reproduce the lines of some pretentious edifice that has no relation, historic or otherwise, to it or to the site. The old mills, with their feet in the water, are almost the only sympathetic structures— especially so when they are ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... you think of Henley's hospital verses?[19] They were to have been dedicated to me, but Stephen wouldn't allow it—said it would be pretentious. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... always pretentious, so he set up two distinct firms. One was the "Randall's Theatrical Bureau, Charles Frohman and W. W. Randall, Managers," which was under Randall's direction and which booked attractions for theaters throughout the country on a fee basis. The other ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... feeling himself thrill with a foreign and most suave deference. It was customary in our town to raise your hat to a lady on the street; but for a merchant, and a solid citizen at that, to do this thing in his own establishment, was a thing unheard of—and a thing of pretentious and sickening foppery when it was heard of, for that matter, though this need not ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... open door. Very often Webster's "Elementary Spelling-book" was the only text-book. This was the kind of school most common in the Middle West during Mr. Lincoln's boyhood, though already in some places there were schools of a more pretentious character. Indeed, back in Kentucky, at the very time that Abraham, a child of six, was learning his letters from Zachariah Riney, a boy only a year older was attending a Catholic seminary in the very next county. It is ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... the very best little books on Carlyle yet written, far outweighing in value some more pretentious works with which ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... drew up at last before one of the most pretentious residences, a massive pile of stone and brick fronting the Lake with what seemed to him a singularly proud and chilling aspect. His hand shook as he paid the driver, and it was a very pale though very erect young man who mounted the stone steps to the bell. Despite the stiffness ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... Massenet, Joncieres in the presence of simple countrymen—or, what is worse still, of inferior artists and critics, of pretentious amateurs—and you will see by what supercilious, incredulous gestures, being incapable of argument, this satisfied ignorance will repel all ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... a precarious living fishing and hunting, and lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new Clemens home on Hill Street. It was really an old barn of a place—poor and ramshackle even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still standing. The siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which must have been very plentiful in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... serious perhaps, but frequently her face lighted up with a friendly smile. She spoke to them as equals and they could follow her reasoning. Her simple conversational manner was refreshing after the sonorous pretentious oratory of other lecturers. ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... the Gray Seal!" sounding in his ears; with the newspapers screaming their diatribes, arousing the people against him, nagging the authorities into sleepless, frenzied efforts to trap him; with a price upon his head that was large enough to make a man, not too pretentious, rich for life—but in the underworld, until then, the name of the Gray Seal had been one to conjure with, for the underworld had sworn by the unknown master criminal, and had spoken his name with a reverence that was none the less genuine ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... then he turned to look over the town which was built flush with the edge of the narrow beach, extending each way from the shore end of the pier. The galvanized-iron roofs of the taller buildings—church, convent, club, a few more pretentious dwellings,—were visible above the low foliage and between the tall acacias and firetrees which jagged the skyline. A heavily laden breeze identified unmistakably several long buildings ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... lodges, and on its old established character as an important family place in the county. The house was of stone, with a portico of Ionic columns which looked as though it hardly belonged of right to the edifice, and stretched itself out grandly, with two pretentious wings, which certainly gave it a just claim to be called a mansion. It required a great many servants to keep it in order, and the numerous servants required an experienced duenna, almost as grand in appearance as Lady Aylmer herself, to keep them in order. There ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... years 1843 and 45 in and near Dresden, at a time, when there were neither means nor taste in Germany for such scenes, as those, which excited Wagner's brain. Afterwards success has rendered Wagner bolder and more pretentious and so he endowed the person of Frau Venus with more dramatic power, and thereby threw a vivid light on the great attraction, she exercises on Tannhaeuser. The decorations are by far richer and ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... broader statesman than Walpole, no abler churchman than Warburton, no greater poet than Pope. There was a general indifference to lofty speculation. A materialistic philosophy was in fashion,—not openly atheistic, but arrogant and pretentious, whose only power was in sarcasm and mockery, like the satires of Lucian, extinguishing faith, godless and yet boastful,—an Epicureanism such as Socrates attacked and Paul rebuked. It found its greatest exponent in Voltaire, the oracle and idol of intellectual Europe. In short, it was an age when ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... were talking they were walking towards the house, which was a pretentious affair but closed up on one side. They halted near a ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... came here in 1799 for that purpose. He built his foundry on the western outskirts of George Town, just behind Georgetown College. He built also a large brick house, two stories, with dormer windows on Frederick (34th) Street, between Water (K) and Bridge (M) Streets. It was quite a pretentious house for that time, with its high ceilings, elaborately decorated cornices of minute workmanship, and mantels of carved wood. It had ample grounds, and in front stood two tall and graceful Lombardy poplars. He had also a summer ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... reputation of a gigantic work which would in truth have been the glory of her civil engineers, if it had ever existed. I do not believe that "Lake Moeris" ever did exist. The only works of the kind which the Egyptians undertook were much less pretentious. These consist of stone-built dams erected at the mouths of many of those lateral ravines, or wadys, which lead down from the mountain ranges into the valley of the Nile. One of the most important among them was pointed out, in 1885, ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... do—or, rather, what he won't do—the next day. And last, but not least, the people who ought to be despised are so numerous that contempt is an impossibility. A Parisian who happened to be so absurdly pretentious as to refuse to shake hands with such of his acquaintances as were not irreproachable characters, might walk for hours on the Boulevards without finding an occasion to take his hands ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... The working man who was only beginning to study the situation thinks the "companion" is right, and so he becomes a convinced and devoted Anarchist! What would happen, if pursuing his studies of the social question further, he had understood that the "companion" was a pretentious ignoramus, that he talked twaddle, that his "Ideal" is a delusion and a snare, that outside bourgeois politics there is, opposed to these, the political action of the proletariat, which will put an end to the very existence of capitalist society? He ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... back of the row on the bay side, and upon slightly higher ground, stands the residence of the agent, or factor as he is officially called, this building being two stories high and otherwise the most pretentious of the group. It is commonly called the "Big House," and near it is the tall flagstaff. Between the rows of buildings and the shore is a broad board walk, which leads down near the apex of the triangle ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... through very comfortably, for Bentley made it the occasion of a somewhat pretentious luncheon at Maxim's. There had been twelve of us at table, and the two young Poles were thirsty, the Gascon so fabulously entertaining, that it was near upon five o'clock when we put down our liqueur glasses for the last time, and the red, perspiring waiter, having pocketed the reward of his ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... his home from a field where he had been superintending an interesting new departure in cultivation, caught sight first of a now-familiar roadster of aristocratic lines whose appearance thereabouts had become most unwelcome, and shortly thereafter of a less pretentious vehicle, being rapidly drawn by a still more familiar black horse, and occupied by two people whom it gave Stuart no acute pleasure ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... buildings high enough to interfere, and visitors could get a bird's-eye view of the entire city and the Palisades. The neighbourhood at that time is well illustrated in the old New York print showing the Reservoir and the Crystal Palace, 1855. There were no pretentious houses north of Forty-second Street. It was interesting to see the drovers—tall men, with staffs in their hands, herding eight, ten, or twenty cattle—driving the cattle to market, generally on Sunday, as ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... produced from the basket in which she carried her music a most pretentious box of sweets ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... came to the monastery we left the automobile and dipped into the labyrinth of narrow alleyways until at last we were before the greatest temple of Urga with the Tibetan walls and windows and its pretentious Chinese roof. A single lantern burned at the entrance. The heavy gate with the bronze and iron trimmings was shut. When the General struck the big brass gong hanging by the gate, frightened monks began running up from all directions and, seeing the "General Baron," fell to the earth in fear ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but none the less they express the little-changing mind and emotions of the great body of the common people who had been singing and repeating ballads for so many thousand years. Really essentially 'popular,' too, in spirit are the more pretentious poems of the wandering professional minstrels, which have been handed down along with the others, just as the minstrels were accustomed to recite both sorts indiscriminately. Such minstrel ballads are the famous ones on the battle of Chevy Chase, or ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... This William Martin had learnt his art in the foundry of Baskerville; and such is the irony of fate, that less than twenty years after the death of that eminent founder, his work, scorned by the booksellers of London in his own day, was imitated in what was certainly one of the most pretentious books that had ever come from the English press. The printer selected for the work was William Bulmer, a native of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he was apprenticed to Mr. Thomson, the printer, of Burnt House Entry, St. Nicholas Churchyard. At that time he formed a friendship with Thomas Bewick, ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... pretentious and curious displays of coquetry are not uncommon in handsome slave-girls when newly bought; and it is a kind of pundonor to humour them. They may also refuse their favours and a master who took possession ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... to popularise among us a flaccid latitudinarianism, which thinks itself a benign tolerance for the opinions of others. It is in truth only a pretentious form of being without settled opinions of our own, and without any desire to settle them. No one can complain of the want of speculative activity at the present time in a certain way. The air, at a certain social elevation, is as full as it has ever been of ideas, ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... consult traveling doctors. Physicians of real merit have plenty of business at home. They are not obliged to go abroad in order to secure practice. Persons who resort to this course are, without exception, pretentious quacks. Consult only some well-known and reliable physician in whom you have confidence. If your physician treats the matter lightly, and advises marriage as a means of cure, you will not judge him harshly if you decide that although he may be thoroughly competent to treat ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... furiously on the seat of the chair; "I hate 'em—nasty, showy, pretentious, ill-bred creatures; regular shrieking hypocrites, ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... the bank, about four-thirty, he walked soberly up town to the Coign Hotel and ascended to his room. It was a nice room for the teller of a town bank to occupy, boasting a wicker chair, a leather couch and a brass bed. A couple of rather pretentious pictures hung on the walls, otherwise decorated with pennants. The pennants were all Alfred knew about colleges. A desk filled one corner of the room, and there was the atmosphere of an office over all. The wonder is that Alf didn't ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... Brunger, Private Detective and Confidential Inquiry Agent, appeared on the books of the Bolt Buildings management as lessee of one of these single rooms. The appearance of his quarters as presented to the visitor had, however, a more pretentious aspect. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... grand things to be seen, and the pulse of the great city itself is like the throb of the ocean; but in Paris, owing either to my jaded senses or to some other cause, I saw nothing that was grand, but enough that was beautiful and pleasing. The more pretentious and elaborate specimens of architecture, like the Palace of the Tuileries or the Palais Royal, are truly superb, but they as truly do not touch that deeper chord whose awakening we call the emotion ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... been to public schools and to the university, and they naturally live their lives on a more elevated level. As a rule, they are good, practical, straightforward, worthy men, though there are, of course, some who are rather amusing in their little pretentious ways—as there are in all large communities. Many of these, finding themselves well off, begin to discover they had ancestors. They name their houses after places where their grandfathers lived or should have lived. They put crests upon their carriages; they embellish their stationery ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... by these wishes, but by other factors in the situation, the wishes of other individuals, for example. The desire for recognition is a permanent and universal trait of human nature, but in the case of an egocentric personality, this wish may take the form of an excessive humility or a pretentious boasting. The wish is the same but the attitudes in which it finds expression ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of the mill, Mr. Robert Belcher—himself an exceptional product of the village—had built his residence—a large, white, pretentious dwelling, surrounded and embellished by all the appointments of wealth. The house was a huge cube, ornamented at its corners and cornices with all possible flowers of a rude architecture, reminding one of an elephant, that, in a fit of incontinent playfulness, had indulged in antics ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... The more pretentious permanent cellars are provided with air spaces to furnish insulation; are provided with large ventilation shafts through the roof and cold air intakes under the floor. Thorough drainage is obtained by placing a line ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray
... of old the daintiest intricacy of its solitude is changed into a straight, and evenly macadamised carriage drive, between new houses of extreme respectability, with good attached gardens and offices—most of these tenements being larger—all more pretentious, and many, I imagine, held at greatly higher rent than my father's, tenanted for twenty years at Herne Hill. And it became matter of curious meditation to me what must here become of children resembling my poor little dreamy quondam ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... though I be a bit older than you, Mr Gomez, and not quite so pretentious a gentleman, I can like a pretty wench as well's yerself. I've took a fancy to the one wi' the tortoise-shell hair, an' an't goin' to gi'e her up in the slack way you ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... Mexico, with no more weapon than a pen-knife, on the trails of raiding Apaches (where "scientific expeditions" ten years later, when the Apache was eliminated, needed armed convoys and pack-trains enough for a punitive expedition, and wrote pretentious books about what every scholar has known for three hundred years) I deeply wonder at the dual quality of his intellect. Among them all, I have never known such student and such explorer lodged ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... be said that the superiority of the line, mass, and color composition of Japanese prints and kakemonos to that exhibited in the vastly more pretentious easel pictures of modern Occidental artists—a superiority now generally acknowledged by connoisseurs—is largely due to the conscious following, on the part of the Japanese, of this ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... received a more stately adornment than ever before, the street-faades individually were too often bare and uninteresting in their correct formality. In the interiors of churches and large halls there appears a struggle between a cold and dignified simplicity and a growing tendency toward pretentious sham. But these pernicious tendencies did not fully mature till the latter part of the century, and the half-century after 1540 or 1550 was prolific of notable works in both ecclesiastical and secular ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... conversation as this the time was passed, while the cab crossed the river and made its way rapidly and easily along Kennington Road and Clapham Road to Clapham Common. At length it turned into the drive of one of those solid abodes of pretentious respectability which front the Common, and pulled up before a ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... numerous miscellaneous sermons and magazine articles. He was an earnest worker for bettering the condition of the working classes, and this object was the basis of most of his writings. As a lyric poet he has gained a high place. The "Saint's Tragedy" and "Andromeda" are the most pretentious of his poems, and "Alton Locke" and "Hypatia" are ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... "pretentious and empty language," "puerile and superannuated personifications." Mr. Darwin has many and hot opponents on this side of the Channel and in Germany, but we do not recollect to have found precisely these sins in the long catalogue of those hitherto laid to his charge. ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... silk hangings glistening with gold, transparent blinds threaded with beads looking like drops of water, fans nailed to the wall to drape the hangings on, screens, swords, masks, cranes made of real feathers, and a myriad trifles in china, wood, paper, ivory, mother of pearl, and bronze, had the pretentious and extravagant aspect which unpracticed hands and uneducated eyes inevitably stamp on things which need the utmost tact, taste, and artistic education. Nevertheless it was the most admired; only Pierre made some observations with rather bitter irony which ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... Kanturk was by no means so pretentious an establishment as that kept by his brother in South Main Street, Cork, but it was on the whole much less nasty. It was a drinking-shop and a public car office, and such places in Ireland are seldom very nice; but there was no attempt at hotel grandeur, and the little room ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... herself clever and successful, to hold her head high amongst her schoolmates. Whereas now, if she tried to talk of art or books, she was hotly aware that everything she said was, in John's eyes, pretentious or absurd. He was comparing her with others all the time, with men and women—women especially—in whose presence he felt himself as diffident as she did in his. He was thinking of ladies in velvet dresses and diamonds, who could talk wittily of pictures and theatres and books, who could amuse him ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pink dress that was extremely becoming, and her cheeks were flushed when she realized that these people had seen or heard of their more pretentious undertakings and might be expecting something ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... agent. He was polite to every one, spoke to the sailors, and gave four reals— I dare say the last he had in his pocket— to the steward, who waited upon him. I could not but feel a pity for him, especially when I saw him by the side of his fellow-passenger and townsman, a fat, coarse, vulgar, pretentious fellow of a Yankee trader, who had made money in San Diego, and was eating out the vitals of the Bandinis, fattening upon their extravagance, grinding them in their poverty; having mortgages on their lands, forestalling their cattle, and already making ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... an argument against the claims of Modern Spiritualism, first, that it shunned the light and clave to 'dark' circles; secondly, that it was over-sensitive on the subject of 'sceptics.' Surely, we are all sceptics in the sense of investigators. The most pretentious disciple of Spiritualism does not claim to have exhausted the subject. On the contrary, they all tell us we are now only learning the alphabet of the craft. Perhaps the recognised Spirit-faces may have landed us in words of one syllable, but scarcely more. However, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... of human events (he began) it becomes necessary for men holding our lofty and responsible position to stoop to the chastisement of pretentious ignorance and imbecility, we shall not be found to shrink from the task. The writer of the above letter is Mr. Henry Benson, a young man of property, and a Federal Whig. He insinuates that we are very stupid. It's ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... some of the amenities of civilisation in a place of whose military importance they had heard so much. At the western end was an ancient fort, now in ruins from a bombardment by our monitors, one or two more pretentious houses with plaster fronts, and the mosque whose white minaret, though not of any great height, we had seen through a gap in the sand hills from many miles to westward. But most of the buildings were single-roomed, flat-roofed huts, ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... not a single reputable lady. No Athenian gentlewoman dreams of frequenting the Agora. Even a poor man's wife prefers to let her spouse do the family marketing. As for the "men folk," the average gentleman will go daily indeed to the Agora, but if he is really pretentious, it will be merely to gossip and to meet his friends; a trusted servant will attend to the regular purchasing. Only when an important dinner party is on hand will the master take pains to order for himself. If he does purchase in person, he will never ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... his mother. Every morning at nine o'clock she turned the key of the pretentious mansion where James Stonehouse had set up practice for the twentieth time in his career, and called out, "Hallo, Robert!" in her clear, cool voice, and Robert, standing at the top of the stairs in his night-shirt, called back, ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... St. Patrick's Purgatory in Lough Derg were obliged to return without satisfying their pious desires because the island was so crowded that there was no room for them to land. Chapels were opened in some of the less pretentious streets in Dublin; communities of religious orders took up fixed residences in the capital; and the Jesuits summoned home some of their ablest teachers to man a Catholic University which they opened in Back Lane (1627). ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... at a large depot which was far more pretentious than any which she had yet seen, and Randy wondered why nearly everyone left the car. When she noticed that many of the passengers had left their parcels in their seats, she was amazed at what seemed to be gross carelessness. That they went forth in search of lunch never ...
— Randy and Her Friends • Amy Brooks
... in the seventh book of his autobiography, tells the story of his visit to Gottsched. He enters by mistake an inner room at the moment when a frightened servant brings the discrowned potentate a periwig large enough to reach to the elbows. That awful emblem of pretentious sham seems to be the best type of the literature then predominant. We always fancy it set upon a pole, like Gessler's hat, with nothing in it that was not wooden, for all men to bow down before. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... road leading from Deutscherkirche to Lagerhaus may be seen the ruins of a little cottage. It never was a very pretentious pile, but it has a history. About the middle of the last century it was occupied by one Heinrich Schneider, who was a small farmer—so small a farmer his clothes wouldn't fit him without a good deal of taking-in. ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... modes of publication and rendered the annual report almost an anachronism so far as it pretends to be what it at one time was—a pretty complete report of the scientific and other work of the department. The attempts which I have made through the proper authorities to get Congress to order more pretentious monographic works in quarto volume similar to those issued by other departments of the government have not met with encouragement, and in this direction many of the stations will, let us hope, be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... had his own rules printed in 1861 for the information of applicants and the guidance of those who were employed as his overseers.[2] His estate was one of the greatest in Louisiana, his residence one of the most pretentious,[3] and his rules the most sharply phrased. They read in part: "Order and system must be the aim of everyone on this estate, and the maxim strictly pursued of a time for everything and everything done in its time, ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... UP.—It should be observed that each structure, however small, is usually built from the base up. Just the same as the more pretentious buildings are erected: First, the sill, then the floor supports, then the posts and top plates, with their connecting ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... of a broad street towards a wooded glen, down which a river wound brawling to join the waters of the Firth. Cottages and little shops alternated, and half-way up the street a rather more pretentious hotel of quarried stone rose above the level of the roofs. Hills formed a background to the whole, with clumps of dark fir clinging to their steep slopes, and in the far distance snow-capped mountains stood like pale opals against the blue ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... and Homes of Manuscripts is the title of this book. To have called it the survival and transmission of ancient literature would have been pretentious, but not wholly untruthful. Manuscripts, we all know, are the chief means by which the records and imaginings of twenty centuries have been preserved. It is my purpose to tell where manuscripts were made, and how and in what centres they have been collected, and, incidentally, ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... And you see, in this matter we need not grudge a few poorish buildings standing, because we can always build elsewhere; nor need we be anxious as to the breeding of pleasant work in such matters, for there is always room for more and more work in a new building, even without making it pretentious. For instance, elbow-room within doors is to me so delightful that if I were driven to it I would most sacrifice outdoor space to it. Then, of course, there is the ornament, which, as we must all allow, may easily be overdone in mere living houses, but ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... beginning of 1809, leaving her with two young children and a number of debts. She sold all her property excepting the farm of Toucques and the farm of Geffosses, the income of which barely amounted to 5,000 francs; then she left her house in Saint-Melaine, and moved into a less pretentious one which had belonged to her ancestors and stood back of the market-place. This house, with its slate-covered roof, was built between a passage-way and a narrow street that led to the river. The interior was so unevenly graded that it caused people to stumble. A ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... promise, the old bear-hunter separates from the less pretentious votary of the chase; as he does so giving the latter a squeeze of the hand, which tells him he may go back in confidence to the negro quarter, and sit, or sleep, by the side of ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... the latter place was kept by a humble and honest, decrepit old woman. I do not know that I have ever spent a more miserable evening anywhere. I do not mind roughing it in the roughest way possible, but I have always detested pretentious efforts at civilization of an inferior kind. Thus I sat having a meal—eggs, beans, rice—all soaked in toucinho (pork fat) which I detest and loathe. I watched black railway workmen and porters stuffing themselves with food in ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the mode, brown eyes, and a face which, without being handsome, was yet more than ordinarily engaging by virtue of its strength and frank ingenuousness. His dress was his worst feature. It was flamboyant and showy; cheap, and tawdrily pretentious. Yet he bore himself with the easy dignity of a man who counts more inferiors ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... evident that if women were generally held in as high esteem as men, it is altogether unlikely that the expression "superior to her sex" would have been employed, and the latter part of the sentence leads to the further inference that pretentious and pedantic women of the kind referred to were not altogether ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... In most pretentious gardens there is a regular mushroom house, and the growing of mushrooms is an easy matter; in others there is no such convenience, and the gardener has to trust to his own ingenuity where and how he is to grow the mushrooms. ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... majority—officers' wives; the frontier helpmates of the more prominent merchants of the town; women from the surrounding ranches, who had deserted their homes until the Indian scare ceased; a scattered few from pretentious small cities to the eastward, and, here and there, younger faces, representing ranchmen's daughters, with a school-teacher or two. Altogether they made rather a brave show, occasionally exhibiting toilets worthy of admiring glances, never lacking ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... pense," I put "Honi soit qui mal y danse" in the same shield. Hardly any one in the German audience saw the joke—nothing more than that it was a druckfehler (printer's error). The rehearsals were in my salon, and we had great amusement over them. The second ballet was more pretentious, and was danced in one of the largest theaters in Berlin. It was called the "Enchanted Castle." A parvenu buys an ancestral castle, and on his arrival there falls asleep in the great hall, filled with the portraits of ancestors and knights in ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... two months from now it shall be done, and should be published in the course of March. I propose Cassell gets it. I am going to call it A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa, I believe. I recoil from serious names; they seem so much too pretentious for a pamphlet. It will be about the size of Treasure Island, I believe. Of course, as you now know, my case of conscience cleared itself off, and I began my intervention directly to one of the parties. The other, the Chief Justice, I am to inform of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
