"Repellent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be myself—silent and sullen as my barbarous host. If any malignant purpose was taking form in his mind, let it, and let him do his worst; for when failure first stares a man in the face, it has so dark and repellent a look that not anything that can be added can make him more miserable; nor has he any apprehension. For weeks I had been searching with eager, feverish eyes in every village, in every rocky crevice, in every noisy mountain ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... Force, and its association with the universe at large, there was seen at once the necessity of another Force, of an opposite character, which would form the companion and complementary force to Attraction; a repulsive, repellent force, one tending or repelling from a centre, so as to counterbalance the influence of the Centripetal Force which ever tends ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... of associating any want of refinement and good breeding with such a charming creature never entered his mind. The disenchantment to him was already so complete that he was even disagreeably affected by the tone of her voice: it was almost as repellent to him as the exhibition of unrestrained bad temper which she ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... had only given me news of yourself without sending me anything else, how rich and how grateful you would have made me; instead of that the pullets are eaten, and the best thing I can do is to forget all about them; let us say no more."[25] Rude and repellent as this may seem, and as it is, there is a rough kind of playfulness about it, when compared with the truculence which he was not slow to exhibit to men. If a friend presumed to thank him for any service, he was peremptorily rebuked for his ignorance ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... there was something masterful about the red-capped stranger, at the same time, repellent. The crowd of aliens moreover, he noticed, fell away respectfully. The newcomer was evidently a personage ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... The repellent look was still on John's face as he replied more ungraciously than before: "Nay, I can think o' nowt. I can tell thee, though, that the maister's told me to have the carriage ready to catch the train that goes east at nine" (he turned ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... square built; his skin was tanned to a deep mahogany colour; his hair and bushy beard were jet black, as also were his piercing, restless eyes; and though rather a handsome man, his features wore a fierce and repellent expression, which, however, passed away as soon ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... stiff formality in the man's tone. How could any woman see past that glacial front and glimpse the big, aching heart beyond? Austin was harsh and repellent when the least bit self-conscious, and now he was striving deliberately to heighten ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... children of pure reason, but of temperament, environment, necessity, and interest. Most of us take sides in life and forget the one we reject. But our conscience tells us it is there, and we can on occasion state it with a fairness and fulness which proves that it is not wholly repellent to our reason. During the crisis I write of, the attitude of Cargill and Vennard was not that of roysterers out for irresponsible mischief. They were eminently reasonable and wonderfully logical, and in private conversation they gave their opponents a very bad time. Cargill, who had hitherto ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... their hatred and affections and their various strongholds in the more eminently desirable parts of residential London, affect one like portions of some monstrous stone-fronted edifice, impressive but repellent. I have some curiosity to see, with Mr. GALSWORTHY'S help, how the Forsyte castle stands the disintegration ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... can improve. I'll tell you what I mean. My wife is a modest, intelligent woman, of good manners, and she is always neat, and tastefully dressed. Now, if she goes to take the cars, she is not permitted to go into a clean car with decent people, but is ordered into one that is repellent, and is forced into company that any refined woman would shrink from. But along comes a flauntingly dressed woman, of known disreputable character, whom my wife would be disgraced to know, and she takes any place that money will buy. It is this sort ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... two or three weeks Charnock occupied himself with his duties and everything went smoothly at the store and hotel. He was popular in the neighborhood, since his weaknesses were rather attractive than repellent to people who did not suffer from them. Men who drove long distances from their lonely farms liked a cheerful talk and to hear the latest joke; others enjoyed a game of cards in the back office when Mrs. Charnock was not about. Besides, it was known that Keller's was straight; one got ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... had to acknowledge that his manner had undergone a radical change. He no longer alarmed her by aggressive pursuit, nor sought to lead the conversation to those personal topics which she had found so repellent. Furthermore, he never alluded to the threat he had made to her that day at the hunt, nor even mentioned his rejected suit. And yet she felt apprehensively that he had not given up ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... as utilitarian. Its halls, bare and cheerless, echoed to the tread and were repellent as those of a barracks. The visitor felt chilled, disappointed, as if he had been met by the insolent servant of an indifferent hostess. It seemed the home of the mathematical, the mechanical, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... benefited. He was by no means successful as an instructor of the higher mathematics. Although the theories of light and motion were doubtless a branch of learning which the cadets particularly detested, his methods of teaching made it even more repellent. A thorough master of his subject, he lacked altogether the power of aiding others to master it. No flashes of humour relieved the tedium of his long and closely-reasoned demonstrations. He never descended ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... child, herself has seen it and felt it, but never, in her blameless innocence and purity, suspecting the cause, 'There is,' she said to me last night, confidentially, 'something strangely antagonistic and repellent in our natures, some undefined and nameless barrier between our ever understanding each other.' You comprehend, Mr. Hathaway, she does full justice to your intentions and your unquestioned abilities. 'I am not blind,' she said, 'to Mr. Hathaway's gifts, and ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... shown an aptitude at his lessons that had created in his guardian's mind some ambition for him, and she held him down to his books with rigid assiduity. He was naturally studious, but the feeling that he was being driven made his tasks repellent, although he performed them without outward sign of rebellion, while ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... call. It was cool but Carol huddled on the porch, rocking, meditating, rocking. The house was lonely and repellent, and though she sighed, "I ought to go in and read—so many things to read—ought to go in," she remained. Suddenly Erik was coming, turning in, swinging open the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... sitting on the porch, leaning against a pillar, her hands clasped about her knees, her head drooping a little, he could scarcely believe in the rigidity which met him at every turn. Was there something repellent in him? Was it, ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... in its sleep. Fillmore had chosen an unfortunate expression. To the novice in finance the word gold-mine had repellent associations. If there was one thing in which Sally had proposed not to invest her legacy, it was a gold-mine; what she had had in view, as a matter of fact, had been one of those little fancy shops which are called Ye Blue Bird or Ye Corner Shoppe, or something ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... from the reserved Cecil, who had lately been so conspicuously repellent? He thought the change too good so be believed, and, without another asking, accompanied her to the arbour; but she insisted on the ostensible motive of their going there being ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... into a number of rooms all well and comfortably furnished, but although my imagination may have been responsible for the idea, they all seemed to possess a chilly and repellent atmosphere. I felt that to essay sleep in any one of them would be the merest farce, that the place to all intents and purposes was uninhabitable, that something incalculably evil presided over ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... which go with midnight, solitude, and a candle. It is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... the only representatives of the lordly sex to whom the idea of women's equality was repellent. Anti-slavery brethren, too, were flinging themselves into all postures of self-defence against the dangerous innovation, which the sisters Grimke were letting into the social establishment, by itinerating "in the character of public lecturers and teachers." Amos A. Phelps was quite as ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... Malay military policemen are always on guard, and two scornful-looking Bengalis in white trousers, white short robes, with sashes of crimson silk striped with gold, and crimson-and-gold flat hats above their handsome but repellent faces, make up the visible part of the establishment. One of these Bengalis has been twice to Mecca, at an expense of 40 pounds on each visit, and on Friday appears in a rich Hadji suit, in which he goes through the town, and those Mussulmen who are not Hadji ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... delicate appreciation of color and fragrance, let the blossom alone, since it secretes no nectar; and one would naturally infer either that it can fertilize itself without insect aid—a theory which closer study of its organs goes far to disprove—or that the carrion-scent, so repellent to us, is in itself an attraction to certain insects needful for cross-pollination. Which are they? Beetles have been observed crawling over the flower, but without effecting any methodical result. One inclines ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... the stealthy opening and closing of the drawers in his wardrobe. Presently the footsteps drew near to his bed. For a moment he was obliged to set his teeth. A little waft of peculiar, unanalysable perfume, half-fascinating, half-repellent, came to him with a sense of disturbing familiarity. She paused by his bedside. He felt her hand steal under the pillow, which his head scarcely touched; search the pockets of his dressing gown, search even the bed. He listened to her soft breathing. The consciousness ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... have just been insisting, you sustain the interest by ignoring all the parts which will not bear a steady gaze. Whatever fascinates the eye, or agitates the heart by mimicry of life is selected and emphasized, and what is felt to be intractable or repellent is authoritatively set aside. The poet has an unlimited discretion. But on a theme so great as man he has no discretion at all. This resource is denied. You can give the truth only by giving the whole truth. In treating a common ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... know that planets and moons are held in their orbits by this attraction. But gravitation is a very simple affair compared to the force, or rather forces, of crystallization. For here the ultimate particles of matter, inconceivably small as they are, show themselves possessed of attractive and repellent poles, by the mutual action of which the shape and structure of the crystal are determined. In the solid condition the attracting poles are rigidly locked together; but if sufficient heat be applied the bond of union is dissolved, and in the state of fusion the poles are pushed so far asunder ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... balze form an appropriate preface to the gloomy and repellent isolation of Canossa. The rock towers from a narrow platform to the height of rather more than 160 feet from its base. The top is fairly level, forming an irregular triangle, of which the greatest length ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... his shoulder, Frank saw the dark, excited face of a youth of twenty or twenty-one. That face was almost wickedly handsome, although there was something decidedly repellent about it. The eyes were black as midnight, while the lips were ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... known that the emission of heat from a polished metallic surface is very slight, but from a surface of porcelain, paper, or charcoal, heat is discharged profusely. Even many of the best non-conductors are powerful radiators, and throw off heat with a repellent energy difficult ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... of such rare and positive beauty, had now shut down into a hard, repellent little mask of hate. Mr. Bristol looked at her for a moment in silence, and then at Sylvia, sobbing, her arm crooked over her face, hiding everything but her shining curls. "And what has this little girl to do with ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... lust and cruelty. But Shakespeare prudently showed scant respect for their handling of the narrative. By diverting the course of the plot at a critical point he not merely proved his artistic ingenuity, but gave dramatic dignity and moral elevation to a degraded and repellent theme. In the old versions Isabella yields her virtue as the price of her brother's life. The central fact of Shakespeare's play is Isabella's inflexible and unconditional chastity. Other of Shakespeare's ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... least fatigued, but she was too well brought up to remonstrate in any way. The maid was hovering in the background; an elderly woman with a capable face and slightly repellent manner. It was plain to Kate that her relatives would not receive her till they had learned more of the details of her banishment from home from her father, and had made up their minds how to treat her. She felt that even the serving woman regarded her somewhat in the light ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... shudder to my spine. I gazed at the room inquiringly, and of course I found no answer. It was one of those rooms whose spacious and consistent ugliness grows old into a sort of beauty, formidable and repellent, but impressive; an early Victorian room, large and stately and symmetrical, full—but not too full—of twisted and tortured mahogany, green rep, lustres, valances, fringes, gilt tassels. The green and gold drapery of the two high windows, and here and there a fine curve in a piece ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... the repellent, truculent countenance of the Captain-General Urquiza, who was the Dictator's right-hand man, a ferocious cut-throat if ever there was one, who had upheld his authority for many years in the rebellious upper provinces, but who had just ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... life, as it existed a quarter of a century or more ago, was extremely severe and indeed to our mind quite repellent. In those days—and no doubt they are so even yet in many places—the conditions were too often forbidding and deterrent. Otherwise how can we explain the very general tendency among the younger people to move from the ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... that only the unpleasant, the gloomy, and repellent could be right or religious. There is a type of conscience that determines action by the rule that if a thing is pleasant or beautiful it must be sinful and wrong. To such souls it is a sin to be sunny in disposition, to delight in the Father's fair world, with ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... Pedler, glancing up at me through his narrowed eyelids, and chuckling. "A paradise you might call it—ah! a paradise or a—garden of Eden, wi' Eve and the serpent and all!" and he broke out into a cackling laugh. And, in the look and the laugh, indeed about his whole figure, there was something so repellent, so evil, that I was minded to kick and trample him down into the ditch, yet the leering triumph ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... woman, at once servile, despotic, and obsequious, had placed his cup on the table, he buried his nose in a book, and by his repellent attitude compelled her ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... temperamental difference in this mere setting things to rights. It can be done so that every chair has a stiffly repellent look, and the conspicuous absence of dust makes one painfully conscious that it has not always been thus, while the fingers inadvertently stray over one's attire, plucking a shred here and a thread there. Even flowers ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... a repellent spectacle, but Rolfe, who had seen unpleasant sights of various kinds in his career, bent over the body with keen interest, noting these details, with all his professional instincts aroused. For though Rolfe had not yet risen very ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... statesman of the eighteenth century. Certainly in this respect he compares favourably with his awe-inspiring father. Not that Pitt possessed the charm of affability. On most persons his austere self-concentration produced a repellent effect; and it must be confessed that the Grenville strain in his nature dowered him with a fund of more than ordinary English coldness. Such was the opinion not only of the French emigres, whom he designedly kept at arm's length, but even of his followers, to ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... churches are more than chilling. In the simplest English village church one receives some impression of the friendliness of religion; but in Holland—of course I speak as a stranger and a foreigner—religion seems to be a cold if not a repellent thing. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... a man must worship a God, love a woman, or find a real friendship, to make life endurable. God was too dim, too nebulous, for Hollister's need. Friendship was almost unattainable. How could a man with a face so mutilated that it was grotesque, repellent, cultivate the delicate flower of friendship? Doris loved him because she could not see him. When she could see, she would cease to love. And there would be nothing left for him—nothing. He would live ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the most amusing questions concerning the short story is why a form which is singly so attractive that every one likes to read a short story when he finds it alone is collectively so repellent as it is said to be. Before now I have imagined the case to be somewhat the same as that of a number of pleasant people who are most acceptable as separate householders, but who lose caste and cease to be desirable acquaintances when gathered ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... a guilty feeling through Lorraine, until she remembered that a slow horse might save her from this man who was all bad,—except, perhaps, just on the surface which was not altogether repellent. She looked around at the tiny basin set like a saucer among the pines. Already the dusk was painting deep shadows in the woods across the opening, and turning the sky a darker blue. Skinner rolled over twice, ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... the otherwise delightful romantic atmosphere. For a single illustration, the description of the House of Alma in Book II, Canto Nine, is a tediously literal medieval allegory of the Soul and Body; and occasional realistic details here and there in the poem at large are merely repellent ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the roof anything to do with your divination?" asked Vendale, holding his light towards a gloomy ragged growth of dark fungus, pendent from the arches with a very disagreeable and repellent effect. "We are famous for this growth in this ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... Unity is to be no roseate fiction, no gainful pretense, but a living reality. The United States of the future will be no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellent commonwealths, but a true exemplification of 'many in one'—many stars blended in one common flag—many States combined in one homogeneous Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls. The merchant of Boston or New-York will visit Richmond ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Talbot's eyes, that an observer might discern anything but the most careless gayety. To Talbot, however, there was something beneath all this, which was very plainly visible; and to her, with her profound insight into Brooke's deeper nature, all this nonsense offered nothing that was repellent; on the contrary, she found it most touching and most sad. It seemed to her like the effort of a strong man to rid himself of an overmastering feeling—a feeling deep within him that struggled forever upward and would not be repressed. It rose up constantly, seeking to break ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... interesting of the night-travellers, but by far the most curious and wonderful animals in the world. They are hideously ugly, reminding one more of a miniature, closed-up umbrella than an animal! They are coarse, awkward, when not in flight, and repellent; yet they have such highly developed senses that they have no rivals in the animal world. They excel most birds in flight, are able to make long nightly journeys, in which they use their wings not only for flight, but as air-bags in which they catch all kinds ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... may easily come to its own, based and reinforced as it is by the larger poetical structure. The isolated magazine lyric, on the other hand, is like one swallow trying to make a summer. Even the lyrics collected in anthologies are often "mutually repellent particles," requiring through their very brevity and lack of relation with one another, a perpetual re-focussing of the attention, a constant re-creation of lyric atmosphere. These conditions have been emphasized, during the last decade, by that ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Church school which was chiefly elaborated and which chiefly flourished under the Stuarts, has produced a great part of the most learned theology of Christendom, and had in its early days little or no tendency to Rome. It was exclusive and repellent on the side of Nonconformity, and it placed Church authority very high; but the immense majority of its members were intensely loyal to the Anglican Church, and lived and died contentedly within its pale. There were, however, ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... swirl about their graceful figures. Sparkling glances here and there eclipsed the lights and the blaze of the diamonds, and fanned the flame of hearts already burning too brightly. I detected also significant nods of the head for lovers and repellent attitudes for husbands. The exclamation of the card-players at every unexpected coup, the jingle of gold, mingled with music and the murmur of conversation; and to put the finishing touch to the vertigo of that multitude, intoxicated by all the seductions the world can ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... was evidently much struck with me. He asked me to dance with him twice—he is a charming dancer, by-the- by, and so am I: you can't think how well I did—I was astonished at myself. My lord was very complimentary too—rather too much so in fact—and I thought proper to be a little haughty and repellent; but I had the pleasure of seeing his nasty, cross wife ready to perish with ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... look up, and it struck me from Eliza's face that she might be going to cry. I therefore made a point of saying that the butter was better than we had been having lately, and that it looked like being a fine day after all. Anything like weakness is repellent to me, but still, when one sees that one's words have gone home, one is justified in ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... impression of being one of those men whose ears are always on the stretch, who take everything in and give little out. There was a curious air of watchfulness and of secrecy about him in private matters which was as repellent—to Ransford's thinking—as it was hard to explain. Anyway, in private affairs, he did not like his assistant, and he liked him less than ever as he glanced at him on ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... idealizations of him, have their root in a common fallacy. Both spring from taking stages of a growth or movement as something cut off and fixed. The first fails to see the promise contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by themselves, are uncompromising and repellent; the second fails to see that even the most pleasing and beautiful exhibitions are but signs, and that they begin to spoil and rot the moment ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... There is something repellent in counting our advantages under the shadow of so great a tragedy but we must try to be as practical as those who are fond of accusing us of materialism. Does any one think that the steam-roller of admirably ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in the society of women. That there were men too who were wholly men, and that these perforce could find neither pleasure nor interest away from their own sex. He had always felt himself to be wholly male, and this was why the present age, so essentially the age of women, was repellent to him. ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... surprise came into Annie's face. To this young woman, whose one idea of matrimony was steadfast loyalty to the man whose life she shared and whose name she bore, there was something repellent and nauseating in a woman permitting herself to be talked about in ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... Carnock could not make any headway in English political life. It is worth our while to reflect that the intelligence of such men is lost to us in our home government. They have no taste for the platform, the very spirit of the political game is repellent to them, and they recoil from the self-assertion which appears to be necessary to political advancement in the House of Commons. No doubt the intelligence of men like Mr. J.H. Thomas or Mr. William Brace, certainly of Mr. Clynes, is sufficient for the crudest of our home needs, ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... to undertake her defence," Thorn went on, "for she bestows as little of her fair countenance upon me as she can well help. But try as she will, she cannot be so repellent as she ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... and the United States, and had done, was doing, and would continue to do, all in his power to promote it; but that while the Americans were cordially meeting Germany half way, the British were cold, suspicious, and repellent. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... cast-iron sculptures Major Amberson had set up in opening the Addition years before. Minerva was intact, but a blackish streak descended unpleasantly from her forehead to the point of her straight nose, and a few other streaks were sketched in a repellent dinge upon ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... some sort of a change in her. She could not go on exactly as she had gone on before. The nature of this anticipated change concerned me very much,—too much, I assured myself. Would she be more rigid and repellent than she had been before the advent of the wasp? But this would be impossible. On the other hand, would she be more like other people? Would she relax a little, and work like common secretaries? Or,—and I whistled as I thought of it,—having once ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... by aiding in the ruin of one whom he knew and Spain knew to be her determined foe, did all he could through his ambassador to frustrate their efforts and bring on a catastrophe. The States-General and Maurice were now on as confidential terms with Carleton as they were cold and repellent to Boississe ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the next two hours.' 'But it will be dark then,' objected the caller. 'Well, my good {106} sir,' was the retort, 'we can walk in the dark, I suppose'—which Blake would naturally much prefer. Edward Blake's outward bearing was cold and unsympathetic. He was often repellent to those desiring to be his friends. Intimates he appeared to have none: he would not allow people to be intimate with him. He would hardly even, when leader of the Opposition, accept the co-operation of his supporters ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... unpopular that their political careers ended with their terms. Protect him I must, though the task would be neither easy nor pleasant. It involved a collision with my clients,—a square test of strength between us. What was to me far more repellent, it involved my personally taking a hand in that part of my political work which I had hitherto left to Woodruff and ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... such terms as freedom and slavery, or "anti-slavery" and "pro-slavery," with reference to the principles and purposes of contending parties or rival sections, has had immense influence in misleading the opinions and sympathies of the world. The idea of freedom is captivating, that of slavery repellent to the moral sense of mankind in general. It is easy, therefore, to understand the effect of applying the one set of terms to one party, the other to another, in a contest which had no just application whatever to the essential ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... and cared for had become hateful to her, and her unjust hatred and anger had resulted in that cruel outrage. Now she understood the reason of that change in Mary, when she grew silent and stern and repellent before that fatal morning when she went away to carry out her heartless scheme of revenge. But revenge for what? —and Fan could only moan again and again, "What had I done? what had I done?" What had she ever done that she should not be loved and allowed to live ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... recasting into modern form and in literary English of the old Irish legends, preserving the atmosphere of the original tales as much as possible, but clearing them from repetitions, redundant expressions, idioms interesting in Irish but repellent in English, and, above all, from absurdities, such as the sensational fancy of the later editors and bards added to the ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... disgustedly. It was hard to communicate with the district leader by means of a headband. There was a repellent characteristic about the man's mental emanations, and he seemed to fail to comprehend nuances of meaning. Similes, he ignored completely. Thoughts had to be completely and clearly detailed, then phrased into ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... the girl ironically; and she added, with the kind of repellent lure with which women know how to leave men the responsibility of any reciprocal approach, "I don't know whether it won't need ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... depository for his hat and stick and opened the door of the sitting-room. She had barely smiled. Indeed she had not smiled. She had not mentioned the weather. On the other hand, she had not been prim or repellent. She had revealed nothing of herself. Her one feat had been to stimulate mightily his curiosity and his imagination concerning her—rampant enough even before he ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... stranger so tall, commanding, and dignified, in spite of his rough hunting-dress, his eyes keen and flashing, and his well-cut features seeming noble by comparison with Gunson's, whose care-lined and disfigured face, joined with his harsh, abrupt way, made him quite repellent. ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... Spain or Mexico, and its discovery would throw needed light on the location of Tusayan and the course Cardenas followed.*** The distance of this whole region from a convenient base of supplies, and its repellent character, prevented further operations at this period, and when these explorers traced their disappointed way homeward, the Colorado was not seen again by white men for over half a century; and it was more than two hundred years ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... She has given a faint indication of intending to speak. "Mr. Rouncewell, our views of duty, and our views of station, and our views of education, and our views of—in short, ALL our views—are so diametrically opposed, that to prolong this discussion must be repellent to your feelings and repellent to my own. This young woman is honoured with my Lady's notice and favour. If she wishes to withdraw herself from that notice and favour or if she chooses to place herself under the influence of any one who may in his peculiar opinions—you ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... upon me with something of the fabled fascination of a serpent's. I knew instinctively that he would have the power, and use it, of probing every wound he might suspect in me to the quick. Yet he interested me; and there was something not entirely repellent to me about him. Above all for Olivia's sake, should we find her still living, I was anxious to study his character. It might happen, as it does sometimes, that my honor and straight-forwardness might prove a match for ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... the bank of Spirit Lake, or Lake Calhoun, Iowa, lived Cloudy Sky, a medicine-man, who had been made repellent by age and accident, but who was feared because of his magic power. At eighty years of age he looked for a third wife, and chose the daughter of a warrior, his presents of blankets and calicoes to the parents winning their consent. The girl, Harpstenah (a common name for a third daughter ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... state of the nerves. There was a satirical mischievous cast in the mould of the face, though individually the features were not amiss except for their thinness, and in fact the unpleasantness of the expression had insensibly been softened during this last month, and there was nothing repellent, though much that was quaint, in the slight figure, with the indescribably one-sided air, and stature more befitting ten than fourteen years. What would the visitor think of him? The Doctor called to him, "Come, Peregrine, your uncle, Sir Peregrine Oakshott, has been good enough to come over ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Before the end of 1863, a hundred thousand coloured men were already serving, as combatants or as labourers, on military work in about equal number. They were needed, for volunteering was getting slack, and the work of guarding and repairing railway lines was specially repellent to Northern volunteers. The coloured regiments fought well; they behaved well in every way. Atrocious threats of vengeance on them and their white officers were officially uttered by Jefferson Davis, but, ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... already were in town and were "tanking up." Harley found this to be true, and the red men failed to arouse in him either respect or admiration. If they had ever had any nobility of the wilderness, it was gone now, and they seemed to him a sodden, depressed, and repellent race. A half-dozen or so, in various stages of drunkenness, through whiskey surreptitiously obtained, increased the ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... projected his unshaven chin, cunningly interrogative. The intervening months had altered him, not pleasantly. The tramp of the Dear Me had been unattractive; this man was repellent. ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... upon the center table and more books upon a low tier of shelves on either side of the fireplace. The girl tried to amuse herself by reading, but she found her thoughts continually reverting to the unhappy situation of the king, and her eyes momentarily wandered to the cold and repellent face ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... this kind of life, he began to want some more fierce excitement. He had tried making downright love to Elsie, with no great success as yet, in his own opinion. The girl was capricious in her treatment of him, sometimes scowling and repellent, sometimes familiar, very often, as she used to be of old, teasing and malicious. All this, perhaps, made her more interesting to a young man who was tired of easy conquests. There was a strange fascination in her eyes, too, which at times was quite irresistible, so that he would feel himself drawn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... come upon a fact that seems to us startling and incongruous, we do well to pause upon that fact, and to endeavour to understand it. For if this doctrine contained nothing more than is seen in it by its assailants inside and outside the churches, if it were in its true meaning as repellent to the conscience and the intellect as it is found to be by many thoughtful Christians, then it could not possibly have exercised over the minds and hearts of men a compelling fascination, nor could it have been the root of heroic self-surrenders, of touching and pathetic examples of self-sacrifice ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... had begun, and he turned towards his house. But he couldn't sleep; the house was repellent, and he waited among the thorn-bushes and ferns. Of what use to lie in one's bed when sleep is far and will not be beckoned? and his brain being clear as day he went away to the woods and watersides, saying: 'Life ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... in some respects, exceedingly unattractive. Indeed, it may truly be said to be in many respects repulsive. There are usually odours in such a camp which are repellent to the nose, dishes that are disgusting to the taste, sights that are disagreeable to the eyes, sounds that are abhorrent to the ear, and habits that are ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... supervened, and the sufferer became stone dead to everything except the more superficial aspects of those material objects with which he came most in contact. The expression on the faces of these people was repellent; they did not, however, seem particularly unhappy, for they none of them had the faintest idea that they were in reality more dead than alive. No cure for this disgusting fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease has ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... courage to attack the lamb—and he found reason to regret it. Afterwards came fowls stuffed with raisins, parsley, and crumbled bread, and the banquet ended with pastry of weird forms and repellent aspect. ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... and morally repellent was the very recent statement by Major-General von Disfurth, in an article contributed by him to the Hamburger Nachrichten, which so completely illustrates Bernhardiism in its last extreme of avowed brutality that ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... knowledge, it was another affair. Mrs. Ellison trembled at her triumph, and began to think that failure would have been easier to bear. Were they in the least suited to each other? Would she like to see poor Kitty chained for life to that impassive egotist, whose very merits were repellent, and whose modesty even seemed to convict and snub you? Mrs. Ellison was not able to put the matter to herself with moderation, either way; doubtless she did Mr. Arbuton injustice now. "Did you accept him?" ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... in explaining why. In trying to account to myself for my own sensations, I could only put it that one felt in the man a complete absence of the sympathetic faculty. There was nothing outwardly repellent about him. He was not ill-mannered, or vicious, or dull—indeed, he could be remarkably interesting. But I received the impression that there could be no human creature whom he would not sacrifice in the pursuit of his schemes, in his task of imposing himself and his will ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... the products of the interior upland and the coastal lowland is mainly induced by the difference of climate, those grasses and herbs growing on the tableland, while repellent in appearance and colour, compared to the richer herbage of the coast, possess qualities that render them invaluable as fodder plants. Once let the grasses of the coast lose their moisture from drought, and they become ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... and neutralizes the power of gravitation, is but one of those powers that awaits the growing genius of man to utilize. The magnetic force is the attractive or centripetal power; the electric force is the repellent or centrifugal power. A machine will be invented, in the near future, that will combine these into a single electro-magnetic force, and with this force the power of gravitation will be neutralized. Then the world's traffic will be as readily carried in the air as now it is upon the ground. The forces ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... wound up the clock and placed it on the mantelpiece, and, with a few deft touches, had made the room a trifle less repellent, she saw her landlady come into the room with three bottles and two glasses (one of these latter had recently held stout) tucked ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... it until I saw the girl today. She certainly seems to be a very superior person; she will find the Cove very lonely, I am sure. It is not probable she will stay there long. I must see what I can do for her, but her manner seemed rather repellent, don't you think?" ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... for a man is to be God's slave. The harsh, repellent features of that wicked institution assume an altogether different character when they become the features of my relation to Him. Absolute submission, unconditional obedience, on the slave's part; and on the part of the Master complete ownership, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... mad. Let us rather consider what such an appearance can portend, and who the man is who is thus presented. I cannot explain to you why this appearance inspires me with so great a revulsion. I can only say that in its presence I seem to be brought face to face with some abysmal and repellent wickedness. It is not that the form he wears is hideous. Last night I saw him exactly as I saw him at Oxford—his face waxen pale, with a sneering mouth, the same lofty forehead, and hair brushed straight up so as almost to appear standing on end. He wore the same long coat of green cloth ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... part and parcel of the mechanism of human thought on the one hand, and of practical civilization on the other. Such a phrase as "fundamental principles" may seem at first thought a hard saying, but the idea it implies is less repellent than the phrase itself, for the fundamental principles in question are so closely linked with the present interests of every one of us that they lie within the grasp of every average man and woman—nay, of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... holding out his hand in token of amity; but he quickly withdrew his hand and retreated out of sight, for a cold, repellent look from Kahle's eyes had met his. From some short distance in the rear, out of the reach of those severe eyes, he attentively viewed his prostrate foe; then he turned on his heels and made off through the woods, towards ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... harder light than had accompanied the significant reference to the patriotic impulse which she had nipped in the bud. It was probably only the old, old look of the lioness whose whelp is threatened, but it was something new to me in Catherine Evers, something half-repellent and ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... the negative is more readily dissipated than the positive. But, so far as we at present know, this question enters into the discussion scarcely, if at all. Our knowledge seems rather to point to the substances upon which the charges are collected. The self-repellent nature of electricity compels it to manifest itself at the more prominent parts of the surface, the level being forsaken for the point. The tension of the charge, or its tendency to fly off, is proportionately ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... That repellent horror which is thought of when we speak of death was absent from the room. In the numbness of everything, in the mother's attitude, in the indifference on the doctor's face there was something that attracted and touched the heart, that subtle, almost ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Vanney's. For himself, he unaffectedly disliked and despised publicity; for the interests which he represented, he delegated it to others. He would rarely be interviewed; his attitude toward the newspapers was consistently repellent. Consequently his infrequent utterances were treasured as pearls, and given a prominence far above those of the too eager and over-friendly Mr. Vanney, who, incidentally, was his associate on the directorate of the Law Enforcement Society. The newspapers did not like Willis Enderby ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... her chair a little and looked at him. She was astonished at the change in his appearance. His hideous obesity seemed no longer repellent, for his eyes wore a new expression; they were incredibly tender now, and they were moist with tears. His mouth was tortured by a passionate distress. Margaret had never seen so much unhappiness on a man's face, and an overwhelming ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... Newton and his successors up to our own day, to try to conceive the world dynamically within the limits of their spectator-consciousness and thus to form a dynamic interpretation of the universe based on its heliocentric aspect. This was just as repellent to Goethe as ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... the Western mind to give the Kashmiri credit for any virtues, his failings being so conspicuous and repellent; for not only is he an outrageous coward, but he feels no shame in admitting his cowardice. He is a most accomplished thief, and the truth is not in him. He and his are much fouler than Neapolitan lazzaroni, and his morals—well, let us give the Kashmiri his due, and turn to his virtues. ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... Bowen's relenting was not continuous, however. There were times that seemed to be times of question and of struggle with her, when she vacillated between the old cordiality and the later alienation; when she went beyond the former, or lapsed into moods colder and more repellent than the latter. It would have been difficult to mark the moment when these struggles ceased altogether, and an evening passed in unbroken kindness between them. But afterwards Colville could remember an emotion of grateful surprise at a subtle word or action of hers in which she ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... his mouth flew open, his tongue swelled, his whole countenance became convulsed with the most unparalleled, and for that reason indescribable, expression of agony, whilst the yellowness of his complexion deepened to a livid, lurid black, that was so inconceivably repellent and hellish that I sprang away from the bed—appalled. There was then a gasping, rasping noise, and a voice that, despite its unnatural hollowness, I identified as that of Ralph, broke forth: 'I have been wanting to speak to you for ages, but something, I cannot explain, has always ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... war of the Austrian Succession, and earned by his courage and his abilities an honorable name. He was destined to make that name famous by the part he was to play in the events that were taking place in Canada. The red-haired, unattractive soldier, whose cold and almost repellent manner concealed some of the highest qualities, was fated to do as much for the glory of the English Empire in one part of the world as Clive in another. But there could hardly be two men more different than Clive and Wolfe. The one was always an adventurer—a gentleman adventurer, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... and Holgrave is no more than a spectator, mechanically necessary to the action and useful in other ways, but he does not affect us as a character. There remains Judge Pyncheon, on whom Hawthorne evidently exhausted his skill in the effort to make him repellent. He is studied after the gentleman who was most active in the removal of Hawthorne from the Custom House, and was intended to be a recognizable portrait of him in the community. Perhaps the knowledge of this fact interferes with the proper ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... and around him seemed confused, senseless, and repellent. Yet in this very repugnance to all his circumstances Pierre found a kind ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... was his real name—was far from being unamiable or repellent. That he was cowardly, untruthful, selfish, and lazy, was undoubtedly the fact; perhaps it was his peculiar misfortune that, just then, courage, frankness, generosity, and activity were the dominant factors in the life of Redwood Camp. His submissive gentleness, ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... about and 'poke their noses where they're not wanted.' They are more like merchants with books to sell." The only person who failed to see the attraction in them was Ed Brann, who was popularly supposed to be engaged to Maud. He grew daily more sullen and repellent, toward Albert ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... natural relief, but it is none the less fatal. There might even be method in the colonel's manner, and Loring curbed, with long-practiced hand, both tongue and temper. It would have been warrantable to say that the manner of both the General and his chief-of-staff had been too repellent to to invite calls, but he knew that, whatever the merits of the case, superior officers, like inferior papers, always have the last word. He might be only inviting reprimand. Without a word, therefore, he faced about, went straight ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... intimately conscious of a soilure, a moral stain, as the result of her recent contacts with the man of business in her husband. Why had she not been able to keep femininely aloof from those puzzling and repellent matters, ignorant of them, innocent of them? And Ethel, too! Twelve days of the office had culminated for Ethel in a slight illness, which Doctor Hawley described as lack of tone. Her father had ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... of them, long of limb, broad-chested, with faces tanned by sun and wind. And all five displayed, planted on an enormous neck and shoulders, the same small head with the low forehead, thin lips, beaked nose and hard and repellent cast of countenance. They were feared and disliked by all around them. They were a money-grubbing, crafty family; and their word was not to ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... long have barred that voracious and implacably relentless enemy, but against that lethal green emanation even that ravening Jovian jungle could not prevail, but fell back, impotent. Writhing and crawling, loathesomely palpitant with an unspeakable exuberance of foul and repellent vigor, possible only to such meteorological conditions as obtained there, it threw its most hideously prolific growths against that ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... comfortable and happy. He is not felt as a thing foreign and incongruous, but as homogeneous. To break up the usual order, and to bend all to meet his personal prejudices and peculiarities, is only to so disturb the family sphere as to make it actually repellent. He is then felt as an unassimilated foreign body, and all secretly ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... the diffusion of these things among children involves serious dangers alike to their morals and to their health. Speaking generally, upon adults pornographic objects have rather a repellent than a sexually exciting effect. In the case of children in whom no sexual sensibility has as yet developed, they exercise no sexual stimulation, but may later give rise to ill effects. But it is to ripening children and young persons, who do not ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... beyond all control. But we find the river very sinuous, and the momentum of current consequently lessened. For example, striking in an arm of the river, by the inertia of the moving volume, the water is thrown, and with less velocity, upon the opposite bank, which it pursues until it meets another repellent obstacle, from which it refracts, taking direction again for the other side. Above the Missouri, the river is principally directed by the natural trough of the valley. Below this, however, the channel is purely the work of the river itself, shaped according to the necessities ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that be so, what a change passes on the aspect of law, when we take Christ as being our living embodiment of it! Everything that was hard, repellent, far-off, cold, vanishes. We have no longer 'tables of stone,' but 'fleshy tables of the heart'; and the Law stands before us, a Being to be loved, to be clung to, to be trusted, and whom it is blessedness to know and perfection to resemble. The rails upon ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... change in the soldier's voice; it had grown harsh and repellent. "Monsieur, I proceed from Rouen to Rochelle; are you ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... had never come within ten leagues of gentility, and who, one and all, were absorbedly and unabashedly bent on the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored spot—the pushing of their individual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be, perhaps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and repellent miscellany. ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... all the young people of to-day. The study now is how to make our houses more comfortable, and to furnish them most luxuriously. Then, perhaps, there was but one sofa in the house, and that was repellent rather than attractive. Easy-chairs were few and far between. Lounging of any kind was out of the question. In the drawing-room, the furniture was of the same uncomfortable description, and there were none of the modern appliances which ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... with small lilac-blue flowers that yield an aromatic oil. Aromatic plant (Hedeoma pulegioides) of eastern North America, having purple-blue flowers that yields an oil used as an insect repellent ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Gertrude, so quickly followed by a strange appearance of friendship. Wendot knew his countrymen and his nation's characteristics, and knew that fierce acts of treachery were often truly charged upon them. What if — But the thought was too repellent to be seriously pursued, and shaking it off by an effort, he raised his voice and called his ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green |
