"Repellent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rhymes where they are peculiar are often repellent, and so far from adding charm to the verse that they appear as obstacles. This must not blind one from recognizing that Gerard Hopkins, where he is simple and straightforward in his rhyme is a master ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... such a mood, so sweet, so tranquil, so unwonted, have been the harbinger of good? Alas, no good came of it! I Presently the rude Real burst coarsely in—all evil grovelling and repellent ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... wife, was evidently much struck with me. He asked me to dance with him twice—he is a charming dancer, by-the- by, and so am I: you can't think how well I did—I was astonished at myself. My lord was very complimentary too—rather too much so in fact—and I thought proper to be a little haughty and repellent; but I had the pleasure of seeing his nasty, cross wife ready to perish with ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... influence he exercises on those about him, the distrustful look of the nurse as she brings baby Paul into his presence, the shrinking form of little Florence as the frightened child cowers with folded hands behind her repellent father's chair, are finely depicted in the etching of The Dombey Family. In Mrs. Dombey at Home, the proud, haughty beauty chafing under the consciousness that she has been sacrificed to the wealth of the heartless merchant, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... a weird stretch of the repellent cactus, whose great gnarled branches locked and intertwined themselves in a verdureless mass of thorns and spikes which well might have daunted even an Indian. The hedge was many feet in width and higher than Ninian's shoulder, still green ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... luck was not good. There was already talk of a white rising to drive the heathen from the field, and Done found his mates entirely in sympathy with the common sentiment; to him; also the Celestials became exceedingly repellent as he grew more familiar with their habits and manners, although he was opposed to making differences of race ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... had assembled in your apartments the aristocracy of the French literary world—George Sand was of course one of the company. On the way home Chopin said to me "What a repellent [antipathische] woman the Sand is! But is she really a woman? I am inclined to ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... stain his name with a deed that would brand him throughout Europe. Weber, however, had spoken of a morganatic marriage, and fearful pressure might be brought to bear. A country so energetic and advanced as Germany had clung, nevertheless, to many repellent principles of medievalism. A nation listened with calm acceptance and complacency, while its Kaiser claimed a partnership, and not altogether a junior partnership either, with the Almighty. Much could be forgiven to an Auersperg, ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... passed with friendly greeting, had wreathed their hats with the living flame. The tiny shifting lamps were everywhere; pale yellow, purely white, or green as the underside of a northern wave. By day but an ugly, repellent worm; but darkness comes, and lo, a star alight. Nature is full for us of seeming inconsistencies and glad surprises. The world's asleep, say you; on your ear falls the nightingale's song and the stir of living creatures in bush and brake. The ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... discern anything but the most careless gayety. To Talbot, however, there was something beneath all this, which was very plainly visible; and to her, with her profound insight into Brooke's deeper nature, all this nonsense offered nothing that was repellent; on the contrary, she found it most touching and most sad. It seemed to her like the effort of a strong man to rid himself of an overmastering feeling—a feeling deep within him that struggled forever upward and would not be repressed. It rose up constantly, seeking ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... Mrs. Mumpson came tearing in, quite oblivious of the fact that she had left a goodly part of her calico skirt on a nail of the fence. She was rushing toward Holcroft, when he said sternly, and with a repellent gesture, "Stop and listen to me. If there's any more of this quarreling like cats and dogs in my house, I'll send for the constable and have you all arrested. If you are not all utterly demented and hopeless fools, you ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... as if to offer her his arm, and checked himself. Firmly persuaded as he was that her mind was deranged—readily as he admitted that she claimed, in virtue of her affliction, every indulgence that he could extend to her—there was something repellent to him at that moment in the bare idea of touching her. The image of the beautiful creature who was the object of her monstrous accusation—the image of Mercy as she lay helpless for a moment in his arms—was vivid in ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... point of departure for a vigorous denunciation of the bigotry that had driven him from place to place and denied him peace among the living. The poem foresees a time when streams of blood shall flow for the honor of calling him son. There is no effort at portraiture, and no suggestion of any repellent or pitiable traits.[35] We get not Byron's "self-torturing sophist", but a martyred sage who suffered and died at the hands of Christians,—'he who makes out of Christians human beings'. Toward the end he is apostrophized as the 'Great Endurer, and bidden to leap joyously into Charon's ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... have dwelt on the repellent view of Negro funeral custom, I must in justice to them cite their better view. There is a custom that I missed much on going south of Calabar, for it is a pretty one. Outside the villages in the Calabar districts, by the sides ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... 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 is orientated like a temple; there are in every existence days when life streams down ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... done in the beater, the size is thoroughly incorporated with the fibers as these revolve or flow around the engine. This sizing renders the paper more nearly impervious to moisture. The difference between a paper that is sized and that has a repellent surface which prevents the ink from settling into it when it is written upon, and an ordinary blotting-paper with its absorbent surface, is due entirely to the fact that the former is most carefully treated with sizing ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... found deeply rooted, positive, unquestioning. The belief is implanted in man by the wish; it answers one of the most imperative, unsilenceable longings of human nature. For, in proportion as life is pleasant and precious, death is hideous and repellent. The idea of utter destruction, of ceasing to be, is intolerable to the mind; indeed, the senses revolt against it, the mind refuses to grasp and admit it. Yet death is very real, and it is inevitable; and all ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... the reading of those pages was to be a repellent task to him; it was a task to which he could not bring himself at the moment; to-night, in the privacy of his own chamber, he would sift Mr. Taggett's baleful fancies. Thus temporizing, Mr. Slocum dropped the volume into his pocket, locked ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and of Mrs. Twemlow, who saw eye to eye with him in these matters, things were done properly at the castle, with the correct solemnity. To Mr. Beach and Mrs. Twemlow the suggestion that they and their peers should gather together in the same room in which they were to dine would have been as repellent as an announcement from Lady Ann Warblington, the chatelaine, that the house party would ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... woman, and possessed of considerable means; but she was vain to a degree, and cared for nothing but money. Pride and greed had gradually imprinted on her features an expression of harshness so striking that, with all her beauty, her looks were repellent. She was violently opposed to religion, and was thus without any restraint on her conduct. By every means in her power she sought to make the lives of her husband's parents miserable. If she knew ...
— The Basket of Flowers • Christoph von Schmid
... run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... go with midnight, solitude, and a candle. It is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only the sick in mind crave cleverness, as ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... for a period, the paths of the two composers were parallel. Tschaikovsky did not admire Moussorgsky, spoke slightingly of his abilities, though he conceded that with all his roughness he had power of a repellent order. Turgenieff did not understand him. The opera La Khovanchtchina, notwithstanding the preponderance of the chorus—in Russia choral singing is the foundation of musical culture—I found more "operatic" than ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... were but a merry-go-round with him. "If that's a specimen of the bridegroom cometh," said he to himself, "I've got no more use for matrimony than I have for the catechism." And doubtless to this gay and nonchalant spirit the deeply religious temperament of the Parson seemed a sombre and repellent thing,—a thing to be lamented, yet indulged as something too solemn ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... usually lasts from five to seven days). There is more sexual desire during pregnancy, especially toward the end, than at any other time. She never refused normal intercourse to her husband, but any abnormal or perverted method of sexual gratification is repellent. She was awakened one night about the third month of pregnancy by her husband inserting his penis in ore; the child was born with palate defect and she is herself inclined to believe that this incident ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... lives' last thread in some obscure cell or dim closet, where pride of authorship, as we may feel and enjoy it, there was none, when beyond the walls of a convent or those of a native town their names were unknown, their personality unrecognised. Except to the theologian or ritualist how repellent and illegible this mass of printed and manuscript matter must ever seem! How deficient in human sympathy and pertinence! These treatises, so erudite, so prolix, and so multifarious, were composed by men (Universal, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... however, she had to acknowledge that his manner had undergone a radical change. He no longer alarmed her by aggressive pursuit, nor sought to lead the conversation to those personal topics which she had found so repellent. Furthermore, he never alluded to the threat he had made to her that day at the hunt, nor even mentioned his rejected suit. And yet she felt apprehensively that he had not given up his ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... for people who indulged their fancy. In Harry and Lucy, for instance, Lucy, who is the only human figure in the book, is perpetually being snubbed by the terrible hard-headed Harry, with his desperate interest in machinery, by the repellent father who delights to explain the laws of gravity and the parabola described by the stone which Harry throws. What was undervalued in those old, dry, high-principled books was the charm of vivid apprehension, of fanciful ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... prompts him to be sober and temperate, then his phantasm resembles a man; but on the other hand, if he has given way to his carnal and bestial cravings, then his phantasm is earthbound, in the guise of some terrifying and repellent animal—maybe a wolf, bear, dog, or cat—all of which shapes are far from uncommon ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... this young woman's face with her hand as she said it. This young woman was seated on the floor, pondering in the foreground of the afflicted. There was nothing repellent either in her face or head. Many, apparently worse, varieties of epilepsy and hysteria were about her, but she was said to be the worst here. When I had spoken to her a little, she still sat with her face turned ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... be her determined foe, did all he could through his ambassador to frustrate their efforts and bring on a catastrophe. The States-General and Maurice were now on as confidential terms with Carleton as they were cold and repellent to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... integrated into every phase of community life, Congressman Chet Holifield told the Secretary of Defense, and he passed on a warning from his California constituents that "any attempt to forestall this ambition by treating them as a group apart is extremely repellent to them and gives rise to demoralization and hostility."[15-4] If the Department of Defense considered racial information essential, Holifield continued, why not make the determination in a less objectionable manner? He suggested a ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... and was the first representative of many important tenor roles, among which may be mentioned those of "Benvenuto Cellini," "Les Martyrs," "La Favorita," "Dom Sebastien," "Otello," and "Lucia." Duprez was insignificant, even repellent in his appearance, but, in spite of these defects, his tragic passion and the splendid intelligence displayed in his vocal art gave him a deserved prominence. Duprez composed many songs and romances, chamber-music, two masses, and eight operas, and was ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... syllable. Indeed, it might just as well be "inuberance." It does not long to make an impression or, in vulgar phrase, to "get a rise"; but tends to be self-contained. It is not boisterousness. It is generous and infectious, while boisterousness is inclined to be selfish and repellent. Most of us would rather spend a week among a crowd of mummies than in a gang of boisterous young blades. For boisterousness is only a degenerate exuberance, drunk and on the rampage. The royal old musician and poet was not filled with ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... miles from a county town. Yet what of that? Five miles of irregular upland, during the long, inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who "conceive and meditate of ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... lady mother and his two young lady sisters, haughty and repellent women that they were, had objected to entertaining his dependents, but the young gentleman was resolved that they should enjoy themselves. ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... unequivocal enough in his declarations, his determinations, and his promises. The Diva had shown herself a Diva at every point. She had wept, she had smiled, she had been scornful, she had been suppliant, she had been repellent, she had been loving! And in every mood she had seemed to the fascinated eyes of the Marchese more lovely than in that which preceded it. Finally, she had conquered. Instead of coming away from her, never to see her again, ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the hall as she indicated the depository for his hat and stick and opened the door of the sitting-room. She had barely smiled. Indeed she had not smiled. She had not mentioned the weather. On the other hand, she had not been prim or repellent. She had revealed nothing of herself. Her one feat had been to stimulate mightily his curiosity and his imagination concerning her—rampant enough even before he entered ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... hard, and despises everything but work. I think she suffers from her husband's shiftlessness. She always speaks of me as "This" or "that woman." The family consists of a grown-up son, a shiftless, melancholy-looking youth, who possibly pines for a wider life; a girl of sixteen, a sour, repellent-looking creature, with as much manners as a pig; and three hard, un-child-like younger children. By the whole family all courtesy and gentleness of act or speech seem regarded as "works of the flesh," if not of "the devil." They knock over all one's things without apologizing or picking them ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... and a young man of about his own age entered. Without being in the least ill-looking, there was something repellent about the new comer. His eyes were shifty and too close together to be trustworthy. Otherwise no fault could be ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... regards himself as a Grand Seigneur with a paramount "Jus Primis Noctis." True, the majority of men are abashed in the presence of innocence and deal gently with it,—but others follow in a repellent way their instinct of possession. Any neurologist of experience has cases where sexual frigidity and neurasthenia in a woman can be traced back to the shock of ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... tweeds, the folding crease strongly marked down the front of the trousers and the coat sleeves rather too long. His face bore a strong impress of vulgarity, but at the same time had a certain ingenuousness, a self-absorbed energy and simplicity, which saved it from being wholly repellent; the brow was narrow, the eyes small and bright, and the coarse lips half hid themselves under a struggling reddish growth. In these lineaments lurked a family resemblance to Godwin Peak, sufficient ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... contemptuously called it, likening it, in point of texture, digestibility and nutritive properties, to the product of picked oakum, which it in many respects strongly resembled. The pork, though it lost less in the cooking, was rancid, putrid stuff, repellent in odour and colour-particulars in which it found close competitors in the butter and cheese, which had often to be thrown overboard because they "stunk the ship." [Footnote: To disinfect a ship after she had been fouled by putrid rations or disease, ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... them to the point at which they must turn aside to reach either entrance. Before them rose the old boarded-up, dismal doorway, weather-beaten, stained, repellent as bitterness. There was another fateful pause. Cynthia felt the quiver that ran through the frames of the old men as for the first time in long years they stood side by side before the doorway about which as children they had played, ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... and very striking, and it merits particular comment, as its ideal was so radically different from those adopted by Story and Gould in their statues of the Egyptian Queen.... The effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellent. Apart from all questions of taste, however, the striking qualities of the work are undeniable, and it could only have been produced by a sculptor of very genuine endowments."—Great ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... 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 ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... thousand obliging questions; a flash of lightning made her squeeze their hands; a peal of thunder would drive her to embrace them, but with the return of the calm, the Princess resumed her stiffness, her reserve, and her repellent air, and passed all by without taking the slightest notice of any one, until a fresh storm restored to her at once her dread and her affability. [Which reminds one of the elder (and puritanic) Cato who said that he "embraced" his wife only when it ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... Haynes-Cooper's, had proved her faithful slave, and she had not abused his devotion. Indeed, she hardly considered it that. The sex side of her was being repressed with the artist side. Most men found her curt, brisk, businesslike manner a little repellent, though interesting. They never made love to her, in spite of her undeniable attractiveness. Fascinating Facts drove her about in his smart little roadster and one night he established himself in her memory forever as the first man who had ever asked her to marry him. He did ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... ignoring all the parts which will not bear a steady gaze. Whatever fascinates the eye, or agitates the heart by mimicry of life is selected and emphasized, and what is felt to be intractable or repellent is authoritatively set aside. The poet has an unlimited discretion. But on a theme so great as man he has no discretion at all. This resource is denied. You can give the truth only by giving the whole truth. In treating a common didactic ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... common fallacy. Both spring from taking stages of a growth or movement as something cut off and fixed. The first fails to see the promise contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by themselves, are uncompromising and repellent; the second fails to see that even the most pleasing and beautiful exhibitions are but signs, and that they begin to spoil and rot the moment they ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... a sparse vegetation of scrub and tufts of coarse grass and weeds, and the poor horses were hard put to get enough, even though they grazed all night. The country, which was more broken and seamed with gullies and rivers of sand, Sha Ho, had taken on a hard, sunbaked, repellent look, brightened only by splendid crimson and blue thistles. The wells were farther apart, and sometimes they were dry, and there were anxious hours when we were not sure of water for ourselves, still less for the horses. One well near a salt lake was rather brackish. This ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... Historical romance had fascinations for me, but Alphonse Daudet attracted both of us to the artistic possibilities that lay in selecting the romance of real life for treatment in fiction as against the crude and repellent naturalism of Zola and his school. This fact is not a little significant in view of the turn toward historical romance which exercised all the activities of Robert Neilson Stephens after the production of his play, "An Enemy to ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... mint (Mentha pulegium) 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
... at her keenly; a deep frown settled between his eyes at sight of her enthusiasm. His face suddenly looked older, and seemed more dour, more repellent ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... any longer; it was not the air that pushed the fog; the floating bubbles, the infinitesimally small ones as well as those that were quite perceptible, simply displaced the lighter atmosphere. I wondered what kept these bubbles apart. Some repellent force with which they were charged? Something, at any rate, must be preventing them from coalescing into rain. Maybe it was merely the perfect evenness of their flow, for they gathered thickly enough on the twigs and the ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... knew them to be bride and bridegroom. The man was tall and broad, with dark hair and eyes, and a sensual and cruel face. He seemed, however, to be quite enslaved by the woman by his side, whom I hardly even now like to think of, there was something to me so repellent in her presence. ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... out from the castle of De Stutevill, Father Claude dismounted from his sleek donkey within the ballium of Torn. The austere stronghold, notwithstanding its repellent exterior and unsavory reputation, always extended a warm welcome to the kindly, genial priest; not alone because of the deep friendship which the master of Torn felt for the good father, but through the personal charm, and lovableness of the holy ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... associated the idea of him with embarrassing recollections. But now, on the very day when his brother's marriage to another woman had consummated his brother's treason towards her, there was something vaguely repellent in the prospect of seeing him. The old nurse (who remembered them both in their cradles) observed her hesitation; and sympathising of course with the man, put in a timely word for Henry. 'He says, he's going away, my dear; and he only wants to shake hands, and say good-bye.' This plain ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... lay in ruins. Her theories were scattered like the autumn leaves that were scuddering over the fields. His voice, the very roughened bitterness of it; his eyes, with their peremptory challenge, their sore accusingness; the very contradictions of the man's personality, now delightful, now repellent, and, breathing through them all, the passion she must needs divine—of these various impressions, small and great, she was the struggling ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... congregation by appearing with a dark veil over his face. The veil itself is a familiar object; on a woman or a bonnet it would pass unnoticed; but on the minister it becomes a portentous thing, at once fascinating and repellent. Yesterday they knew the man as a familiar friend; to-day he is a stranger, and they fear him with a vague, nameless fear. Forty years he wears the mysterious thing, dies and is buried with it, and in all that time ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... being sure that it was his duty to be. There was about the young man's mental condition a sort of infantile unsophistication. The New England mind often seems to inherit from bygone Puritanism a certain repellent quality through which it takes long for anything savoring of worldliness or worldly wisdom to penetrate. When once this covering is broken, it may be added, the result is much the same as in the case of ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... mounted and came to him for final instructions Buck forced himself to be almost repellent in order to be capable of coherent speech. Hopalong glanced sharply at him and then understood, Red was all attention and eagerness and remarked nothing ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... restricted, many acts were forbidden which were not in themselves laborious. The Sabbath was hedged in by a formidable array of enactments. To an outside critic it is not wonderful that the Jewish Sabbath has a repellent look. But to the insider things wear another aspect. The Sabbath was and is a day of delight. On it the Jew had a foretaste of the happiness of the world to come. The reader who wishes to have a spirited, and absolutely true, picture of the Jewish Sabbath cannot do better than ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... was the master's most important task on this occasion to portray was then but twenty-four years of age, and youth served not indeed to hide, but in a slight measure to attenuate, some of his most characteristic physical defects. His unattractive person even then, however, showed some of the most repellent peculiarities of his father and his race. He had the supreme distinction of Charles but not his majesty, more than his haughty reserve, even less than his power of enlisting sympathy. In this most difficult of tasks—the portrayal that should be at one and the same time true in its ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... after analyzing the book, it may be claimed for this "Francesca da Rimini," that it reflects the age in which the tragedy occurred. Much artistic construction is shown in the contrast of the Polenta and Malatesta families, and, repellent as he is at times, D'Annunzio has moments of great poetic fervour; his fire swings forth in many of Francesca's speeches, that alternate with the ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... excitement, of nights without sleep, much smoke, and, perhaps, much wine, in his eyes. What a woman feels who has to hand over her spotless child, the most dear and pure thing upon earth, to a man fresh from those indulgences and dissipations which never seem harmless, and always are repellent to a woman, is not to be described. Fortunately the bride herself, in invincible ignorance and unconsciousness, seldom feels in that way. To Elinor her lover looked tired about the eyes, which was very well explained by his night journey, and by the agitation of the moment. ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... nature something that revolted instinctively from the singular person who stood at his shoulder. Their organisations and appetites were different, I suppose, and repellent. Cold and glittering was the 'gelidus anguis in herba'—the churchyard grass—who had lifted his baleful crest close to ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... correspondence with Scott and the rest of that brilliant school. Who ever thinks of George Ellis? But Ellis was the most learned of antiquaries, and devoid of the pedantry which so often makes antiquarian discourses repellent. His polished expositions have the charm that comes from a gentle soul and an exquisite intellect, while his criticism is so luminous and just that even Mr. Ruskin could hardly improve upon it. Then there were Mr. Skene, Joanna Baillie—alas, poor forgotten Joanna!—Erskine, the Shepherd, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... might some day lead him to her own unhallowed height of questionable illumination. To be sure d'Ardeche reviled her as a bad old woman, being himself in that state of enthusiastic exaltation which sometimes accompanies a boyish fancy for occultism; but in spite of his distant and repellent attitude, Mlle. Blaye de Tartas made him her sole heir, to the violent wrath of a questionable old party known to infamy as the Sar Torrevieja, the "King of the Sorcerers." This malevolent old portent, whose gray and crafty face was often seen in the Rue M. ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... of the pork and ham shop and other riches in her arms, entered a repellent doorway in a spirit of great good cheer and Dart followed her. Past a room where a drunken woman lay sleeping with her head on a table, a child pulling at her dress and crying, up a stairway with broken balusters and breaking steps, through a landing, upstairs ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... graceful figures. Sparkling glances here and there eclipsed the lights and the blaze of the diamonds, and fanned the flame of hearts already burning too brightly. I detected also significant nods of the head for lovers and repellent attitudes for husbands. The exclamation of the card-players at every unexpected coup, the jingle of gold, mingled with music and the murmur of conversation; and to put the finishing touch to the vertigo ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... must certainly be some sort of a change in her. She could not go on exactly as she had gone on before. The nature of this anticipated change concerned me very much,—too much, I assured myself. Would she be more rigid and repellent than she had been before the advent of the wasp? But this would be impossible. On the other hand, would she be more like other people? Would she relax a little, and work like common secretaries? Or,—and I whistled as I thought of it,—having ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... be no roseate fiction, no gainful pretense, but a living reality. The United States of the future will be no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellent commonwealths, but a true exemplification of 'many in one'—many stars blended in one common flag—many States combined in one homogeneous Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... books upon the center table and more books upon a low tier of shelves on either side of the fireplace. The girl tried to amuse herself by reading, but she found her thoughts continually reverting to the unhappy situation of the king, and her eyes momentarily wandered to the cold and repellent face of ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... thin figure, vaguely repellent, upon realizing that I was set on departure, and conducted me out by way of the front door. ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... to be all brain; one whose pleasures lay manifestly on the intellectual side. One thing Gifford quickly noted, as he looked at the man with a painful curiosity, was that the face before him lacked much of the suggestion of evil which in the brother he had found so repellent. This man could surely be hard enough on occasion, the strong jaw and a certain hardness in the eyes told that, but except perhaps for an uncomfortable excess of sharpness, there was none of his brother's rather brutally scoffing cast ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... a strange bluish drab colour, and a conservative, round Panama hat without the cock-a-loop indentations and cants with which Northern fanciers disfigure the tropic head-gear. Moreover, he was the homeliest man I have ever seen. His ugliness was less repellent than startling—arising from a sort of Lincolnian ruggedness and irregularity of feature that spellbound you with wonder and dismay. So may have looked afrites or the shapes metamorphosed from the vapour of the fisherman's vase. As he ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... Liszt has been to me. I must enter a little more deeply into the character of this friendship, which to many has seemed paradoxical; indeed, I have been compelled to appear repellent and hostile on so many sides, that I almost feel the want of disclosing all that relates to this ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... embrace of sorrow. All savage wildness was repulsive to him. In music, in literature, in the conduct of life, all that approached the melodramatic was painful to him The frantic and despairing aspects of exaggerated romanticism were repellent to him, he could not endure the struggling for wonderful effects, for delicious excesses. "He loved Shakspeare only under many conditions. He thought his characters were drawn too closely to the life, and spoke ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... the change in the soldier's voice; it had grown harsh and repellent. "Monsieur, I proceed from Rouen to Rochelle; are you ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... There was but one way for him to cross the river, and that was to swim. And the best time to swim was when the tide brimmed over the current and trembled at its turn, a broad and limpid expanse of water, cold, dangerous, repellent to the chilled plunging body; but safer and more easily paddled through than when the current, angular as a skeleton, sought the bay at its ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... power in the presentation of old Paris streets and tumble-down houses, Lalanne has achieved several remarkable plates of this order. One is his well-known Rue des Marmousets. This street is almost as repellent-looking as Rue Mouffetard at its worst period. Ancient and sinister, its reputation was not enticing. In it once dwelt a pastry cook who, taking his crony the barber into his confidence, literally made mince-meat of a stranger and sold the pies to ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Wordsworth, of course, is still one of the poets' poets, and the Spectator, that Mrs. Micawber of literature, will, of course, never desert him; but I doubt very much whether he has yet reached the harbour of Ultimately. His repellent personality has blinded a good many of us to his exquisite qualities; on the Greek Kalends of criticism, however, may I be there to see. I shall certainly vote for him if I am one of the examiners—or ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... the night Baree heard the savage dirge of the wolves. Once it was a wild paean of triumph as the hunters pulled down their kill less than half a mile away in the deep forest. But the voice no longer called to him. It was repellent—a voice of hatred and of treachery. Each time that he heard it he stopped in his tracks and snarled, while his ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... the impression of being one of those men whose ears are always on the stretch, who take everything in and give little out. There was a curious air of watchfulness and of secrecy about him in private matters which was as repellent—to Ransford's thinking—as it was hard to explain. Anyway, in private affairs, he did not like his assistant, and he liked him less than ever as he glanced at him on ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... circles of Paris recall the glowing descriptions of the fret and fever of existence in the Austrian capital during the historic Vienna Congress a hundred years ago. Dancing became epidemic and shameless. In some salons the forms it took were repellent. One of my friends, the Marquis X., invited to a dance at the house of a plutocrat, was so shocked by what he saw there that he left almost at once in disgust. Madame Machin, the favorite teacher of the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... with a repellent gesture, but Elsie seized it, and clasping both her palms over the cold fingers, said, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... was who saw, in a faint stream of moonlight, a female arm uplifted towards her, from under a table, with a threatening motion. It was bare to the elbow, and draped above. It showed first a clenched fist, and next an open hand, palm outwards, making a repellent gesture. Then the back of the hand was turned, and it motioned her away, as if she had been an importunate beggar. But at this moment, one of the doors opened, and a dark figure passed through the room towards the opposite door. Everything that could be called ghostly, ceased instantaneously. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... point of exasperation: 'I should like to stick red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his handwriting.' By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic reader finds repellent in George Eliot's later work might perhaps never have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigour a censorship of the press and the post-office which kept every disagreeable whisper ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... ago, with all her independence, Rachel would not have been so ready to repel one whose advances, however unwarrantable in themselves, were yet marked by so many evidences of sympathy and consideration. She had not always been suspicious and repellent; and she sighed to think how sadly she must have changed, even before the nightmare ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... Gospels did their best to fill the gap by inventing or developing stories, pretty, silly, or repellent, which only show how little they understood the original Gospels ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... repellent in counting our advantages under the shadow of so great a tragedy but we must try to be as practical as those who are fond of accusing us of materialism. Does any one think that the steam-roller of admirably organized and Government-fostered ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... can believe she sees and hears from the world of the disembodied what she feels she does, one can not but realize that she is a great woman and has a wonderful theory of how human souls return to earth. But I tell her that it seems to me repellent that we have to come back here through Dame Nature's processes, after a period of such great freedom in the occult world, and again go through with teething, mumps, measles, and similar inflictions. The truth is, I can ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... his brain. He opened the damper of his stove, and set it roaring again; then he pulled down the upper sash of his window and looked out on a world whose elements of wood and snow and stone he tried to co- ordinate. There was nothing else in that world but these things, so repellent of one another. He suffered from the incongruity of the wooden bulk of the hotel, with the white drifts deep about it, and with the granite cliffs of Lion's Head before it, where the gray crags darkened under the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... strife engendered by Christian dogma in those times. No sooner had the Franciscans and the Dominicans arrived in Japan than a fierce quarrel broke out between them and the Jesuits—a quarrel which even community of suffering could not compose. "Not less repellent was an attempt on the part of the Spaniards to dictate to Ieyasu the expulsion of all Hollanders from Japan, and an attempt on the part of the Jesuits to dictate the expulsion of the Spaniards. The former proposal, couched almost in the form of a demand, was twice formulated, and accompanied ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... binding; so confident in his own greatness that he knew nothing of envy or of hatred, courteously acknowledged other men's merits, and compassionately forgave other men's faults; an excellent officer and a refined diplomatist without the repellent special impress of either calling, uniting Hellenic culture with the fullest national feeling of a Roman, an accomplished speaker and of graceful manners—Publius Scipio won the hearts of soldiers and of women, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... observant Madge seemed most marked at first, however, was her perfect ease. Her slightest movement was grace itself. Her entire self-possession was indicated by the manner in which she greeted the men who sought her attention, and many there were. She could be perfectly polite, yet as repellent as ice, or she could smile with a fascination that even Madge felt would be hard to resist. This girl, who was such an immense contrast to herself, wholly fixed her attention as she stood for a few moments, like a queen, surrounded ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... into Annie's face. To this young woman, whose one idea of matrimony was steadfast loyalty to the man whose life she shared and whose name she bore, there was something repellent and nauseating in a woman permitting herself to be talked about ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... white-wood. The bark is very thick and cork-like, exhaling an odor peculiarly pungent and agreeable; the buds and tender twigs in the spring have a taste entirely individual and unique, very pleasant to some persons, but quite repellent to others. Gray squirrels and the young of the fox-squirrel eat the buds and flowers as well as the cone-shaped fruit. Humming-birds and bumble-bees in the blossoming-time make a dreamy booming among the shadowy sprays. A saccharine, sticky substance, not unlike honey-dew, may often be found ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... this continued I can only surmise. All my ideas were confused. It seemed an age before any rational sense was felt. During these terrible hours there was frequent recurrence of those harsh, grating accents and repellent looks from sinister faces. Of these experiences I can give no clearer account. The brain-pressure caused by the temple blow produced queer sensations ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... become repellent; and Charles was groping around for an excuse when a letter came from Professor Henslow, saying, among other things, that the Government was about to send a ship around the world on a scientific surveying tour, especially to map the coast of Patagonia and other parts of South America and Australia. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... thought of it all, there was present the happy conviction that she had been more sinned against than sinning. She had forgiven, whereas she might have exacted forgiveness. She had been gracious, whereas she might have followed her mother's advice and have been repellent till she had brought him to her feet. As it was, her strong desire to have him once again had softened her, and now she had the double reward. She had what she wanted, and was able to congratulate herself at the same time on her virtue. ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... Natalya's sentence, after she was dressed in her own little jacket and hat again and just ready to go, one of the most repellent women of the street said to her, "I am staying in here and you're going out. Give me a kiss for good-by." Natalya said that this woman was a horror to her. "But I thought it was not very nice to refuse this; so I kissed her a good-by kiss and ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... follow that such study, to be scientific, shall be made repellent by the use of technical terms the significance of which the reader is left to guess at, but finds unexplained. I fear such treatment of vocal physiology has brought it into disrepute. The aim of the writer will be to give a clear scientific treatment of the subject, ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... were going to spring upon the audience, a long, skinny finger would be shaken before their faces, or pointed as if to drive his words into their hearts. His speech was a torrent of epigram, sarcasm, invective. He was bitter; if you knew nothing about the man or his cause, you would find this repellent and shocking. You had to know what his life had been—an unceasing conflict with oppression; he had got his Socialist education in jail, where he had been sent for trying to organize the wage-slaves of a gigantic corporation. His rage was the rage of a tender-hearted poet, ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... was devoted to books of travel, my father asked me to parse Kane's "Arctic Voyages." I found the volumes cold and repellent. They gave me a rooted prejudice against the North Pole which even the adventure of Doctor Cook has never enabled me ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... to get into the car, but Rick stopped him. "Let's go to the drugstore. I want to get a spray can of insect repellent." ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... which operates in causing men to move generally presents one of two aspects, viz., attractive and repellent. "Men are either drawn or driven to break the ties which bind them to their native locality." Again, the causes of migration are classified as positive advantages and satisfactions, and negative discomforts and compulsions. The ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... she noticed it in the impatient tone of his voice, and then she suddenly lost courage. Oh, if he looked at her like that, so coldly, and if his voice sounded so repellent, how difficult it was to find the right word. But it must be done, he looked so pale and was so thin, his round face had positively become long. What had struck her before struck her with double force now, and she got a great fright. "Wolfgang," ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... the outset let me say in all frankness that I would never, from personal choice, write upon a subject of this character. Its sensationalism is personally repellent to me. On the other hand, no matter how carefully the public prosecutor may preserve the legal viewpoint and the legal temperament, his work may lead him into situations where he feels that he cannot, ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... encouragement, I gradually acquired a taste for alcohol. And suddenly, one evening, like a flash it came upon me that I had shaken off the cursed yoke that held me down: that I never wanted to see the inside of a drugstore again. Cocktails, at first repellent, have at last become palatable to me. I drink highballs for breakfast. I ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... lashed his horse. The mere fact of being in a swiftly moving carriage which wayfarers had to avoid nimbly, maintained their spirits. They had a near glimpse of the cathedral. The cab halted with a bump, in a small square, in front of a repellent building which bore the sign, 'Hotel de Vezelay.' The horse was bleeding. Gerald instructed Sophia to remain where she was, and he and Chirac went up four stone steps into the hotel. Sophia, stared at by loose crowds that were promenading, gazed about her, and saw ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... given a faint indication of intending to speak. "Mr. Rouncewell, our views of duty, and our views of station, and our views of education, and our views of—in short, ALL our views—are so diametrically opposed, that to prolong this discussion must be repellent to your feelings and repellent to my own. This young woman is honoured with my Lady's notice and favour. If she wishes to withdraw herself from that notice and favour or if she chooses to place herself under the influence of any one who may in his peculiar ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... through the Imagination, and that lack of Imagination is at the bottom of all pessimism in philosophy, religion, and personal experience. A fact taken by itself and detached from the whole of which it is part is always hard, bare, repellent; it must be seen in its relations if one would perceive its finer and inner beauty; and it is the Imagination alone which sees things as a whole. The theologians who have stuck to what they call logic have spread a veil of sadness over the world which the poets must dissipate. "I ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... furnished by the doctor. The idea had long been forgotten, only to reappear as a compulsion. The natural desire for a child was strong in her, but was repressed as unholy in an unmarried woman. The associated childish idea of drug-taking was not repellent to her moral sense and was used as a substitute for the real ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... slight sketch placed before us in Captain Wybrow is elaborated into minute completeness, and at the same time freed from all that made Wybrow even superficially repellent. Handsome, accomplished, and gentlemanly; loving and lovable; finding his keenest enjoyment in the enjoyment of others; irreproachable in life, and free from everything bearing the semblance of vice,—what more could the most exacting fictionist desire to make up his ideal hero? Yet, ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... led the way was cold, drab, repellent to the general gay sense of the summer morning. Spargo shivered involuntarily as he entered it and took a first glance around. But the young barrister showed no sign of feeling or concern; he looked quickly about him and stepped alertly to ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... love was too strong for me, I must dwell among mine own people. There, at least, was the bond of custom, there was the affection which grows out of habit; but in the world what hope had I to win love from strangers, with my repellent looks, awkward movements, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... hospital looked bare and grim, the smell of iodoform was more repellent than ever, after the sweet scents of the country. Claire knew her way by this time, and ascended by lift to the women's ward, where Sophie lay. Beside almost every bed one or two visitors were seated, but Sophie was alone. Down the length of the ward Claire caught a glimpse of a recumbent form, and ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... fantastic oddities of his expression there was such a marvellous power of description that I am unable to give even so much as a faint indication of it. Antonia inherited all her mother's amiability and all her mother's charms, but not the repellent reverse of the medal. There was no chronic moral ulcer, which might break out from time to time. Antonia's betrothed put in an appearance, whilst Antonia herself, fathoming with happy instinct the deeper-lying character of her wonderful father, sang one of old Padre Martini's[9] motets, which, she ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... a gay and civil wisdom, and fly from all sourness and austerity of manners, all repellent, mien being suspected ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Rachel's cold, repellent manner was in full force, and she went towards the poor little man, whose girlish face was ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at Halford Castle? Ought she not to feel flattered in having a noble lord for a lover? The thought did not stir her blood. Why was she averse to receiving his attentions? What was there about him that made the thought repellent? Was he not a gentleman? Was he not polite? Did he not show proper respect not only to herself but to everybody? Why not make an effort to overcome her repugnance to him? Would any other girl in Boston or anywhere else ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... parsons were not lacking in Pentonville) was not so insidiously repellent as the blue-cheeked, blue-chinned Passy priest; but he was by no means to me a picturesque or sympathetic apparition, with his weddedness, his whiskers, his black trousers, his frock-coat, his tall hat, his little white tie, his consciousness of ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... watching the waging of a droll little farmyard warfare. Just now her life was running very smoothly, and the shadows of memory were steadily receding. She had almost forgotten the few unpleasant moments when she had first beheld the repellent ugliness of Devil's Hill nearly a week ago. Since then nothing had occurred to raise fresh alarm, and memory, with that pleasant knack inspired of perfect physical health, had gently mellowed and lost something ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... antique occiput (of which a goodly number, more or less mutilated, are constantly brought to light by the peasants) upon Lollianus' vacant shoulders. Anything more comical and at the same time more repellent than this hybrid statue it would be impossible to imagine, yet Lollianus of the unknown head remains a favourite with the people of Pozzuoli. Leaving the Largo del Municipio, with its weird senator and its dusty palms, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... was quite as utilitarian. Its halls, bare and cheerless, echoed to the tread and were repellent as those of a barracks. The visitor felt chilled, disappointed, as if he had been met by the insolent servant of an indifferent hostess. It seemed the home of the mathematical, the mechanical, the material; but this was a ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... towards which I was steering. While this remained stationary in the centre all was well. When it moved along any one of the lines, the vessel was obviously deviating from her course in the opposite direction; and, to recover the right course, the repellent force must be caused to drive her in the direction in which the image had moved. To accomplish this, a helm was attached to the lower division of the main conductor, by which the latter could be made to move at will in any direction within the limit of its rotation. Controlling ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... Philosophy would, in my opinion, be more readily and widely appreciated than it is at present, if the translators of philosophical works had been somewhat more concerned to throw their versions into a form less strange and repellent to the western reader than literal renderings from technical Sanskrit must needs be in many passages. I am not unaware of the peculiar dangers of the plan now advocated—among which the most obvious is the temptation it offers to the translator ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... charm or expressive potentiality hitherto felt to be lacking. Is that true? Has a rock of offense been removed? Has a mephitic odor been changed to a sweet savor by the subtle alchemy of the musical composer? Has a drama abhorrent, bestial, repellent, and loathsome been changed into a thing of delectability by the potent agency of music? It used to be said that things too silly to be spoken might be sung; is it also true that things too vile, too foul, too nauseating for contemplation may be seen, so they be insidiously and wickedly glorified ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... metallic surface is very slight, but from a surface of porcelain, paper, or charcoal, heat is discharged profusely. Even many of the best non-conductors are powerful radiators, and throw off heat with a repellent energy difficult ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... Juke, is part of the make-up of very nearly every human being; it has to be fought down, like the notorious ape and tiger. But he thought that Gideon and Katherine Varick had less of it than any one else he knew; the mediocre was repellent to them; cant and sentiment made them sick; they made a fetish of hard truth, and so much despised most of their neighbours that they would not experience the temptation to grab at popularity. In fact, they would dislike it ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... within ten leagues of gentility, and who, one and all, were absorbedly and unabashedly bent on the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored spot—the pushing of their individual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be, perhaps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and repellent miscellany. ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... him wildly; then a light of recognition kindled in his black eyes. It changed to that baleful gleam of hatred. His hair lay low upon his forehead and through it he glared. His face was covered with a smut of beard which made him even more repellent. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... spite of the repellent aspect of the place, and our driver went to the foot of the line, where he fed his own horse. Cousin Egbert, already at one of the open-air tables, was rapping smartly ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... of this paper to show that Socialism is not a scheme for the betterment of humanity to be accomplished by a sufficiently zealous and intelligent propaganda, but that it is, on the contrary, a consistent, (though to many repellent) monistic philosophy of the cosmos; that it is from its Alpha to its Omega so closely and inextricably interlocked that its component parts cannot be disassociated, save by an act of intellectual ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... Chinese original partly cloaked: for by transferring Eastern thoughts into Western moulds, things that are like nails in the hands of soft sensitive Oriental beings are made to appear to the steel-clad West as cold-blooded, evolutionary necessities which may be repellent but which are never cruel. The more the matter is studied the more convinced must the political student be that in this affair of the 18th January we have an international coup destined to become classic in the new text-books of political science. All the way through the twenty-one articles ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... tablet over dead ashes, had its functions superseded by an air-tight drum in the corner, warmed at second-hand from the dining-room below, and offered no attractive seclusion; the sofa against the wall was immovable and formally repellent. He was obliged to draw a chair beside the table, whose every curve seemed to facilitate his wife's easy withdrawal from ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... door of the hotel, and left for Mink Run by the back streets. He did not return to town for a week, and when he made his next appearance there, upon strictly a business visit, did not go near the Treadwells', and wore such a repellent look that no one ventured to speak to him about his encounter with Fetters and McRae. He was humiliated and ashamed, and angry with himself and all the world. He had lost Graciella already; any possibility ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... affection and kindliness as a ripe pear, and the voice that proceeded from her ever-smiling lips was a hoarse and dove-like coo of love. Ellen at first started a little aghast at this gigantic fleshliness, this general slough and slump of outline, this insistency of repellent curves, and then the old woman spoke and thrust out a great, soft hand, and the heart of the child overleaped her artistic sense and her reason, and she thought old Mrs. Mitchell beautiful. Mrs. Mitchell never ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Ago.—Rural life, as it existed a quarter of a century or more ago, was extremely severe and indeed to our mind quite repellent. In those days—and no doubt they are so even yet in many places—the conditions were too often forbidding and deterrent. Otherwise how can we explain the very general tendency among the younger people to move from the country ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy |
