"Unsavoury" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... course have the full complement of two pairs, an upper and an under, possessed by them in common with all other well-conducted members of the hymenopterous family. So, too, there is a certain curious American insect, belonging to the very unsavoury tribe which supplies London lodging-houses with one of their most familiar entomological specimens; and this cleverly disguised little creature is banded and striped in every part exactly like a local hornet, for whom it evidently wishes itself to be mistaken. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... appearance flushed with the heat of the stove and the excitement of turning the muffins, and the little iron spatula she used for that purpose still in her hand; and a fresh and larger puff of the unsavoury blue smoke accompanied her entrance. She came forward however gravely and without the slightest embarrassment to receive her cousin's somewhat unceremonious "How do, Fleda?"—and keeping the spatula still in one hand shook hands with him with the other. But at the very different manner in ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... one little trick that she had developed which was purely instinctive—that is, an inherited habit. In the back end of her kennel she had a little cache of bones, and knew exactly where one or two lumps of unsavoury meat were buried within the radius of her chain, for a time of famine which never came. If anyone approached these hidden treasures she watched with anxious eyes, but made no other demonstration. If ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... take an extreme line on this matter solely because of some calculation of social harm; many, but not all and not even most. Many people think that paper money is a mistake and does much harm. But they do not shudder or snigger when they see a cheque-book. They do not whisper with unsavoury slyness that such and such a man was "seen" going into a bank. I am quite convinced that the English aristocracy is the curse of England, but I have not noticed either in myself or others any disposition to ostracise a man simply for accepting a peerage, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... silver jug over her own belated cup, and waited for the thick cream to come out in a slow and grudging gobbet with a heavy plump into the coffee. As she waited, she gently rebuked that fastidiousness in her companion that shrank from contact with the unsavoury and ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... the work, the engineer generously sent the preacher a cheque for 8L. towards defraying the necessary expenses. Whether the sum was less than Huntington expected, or from whatever cause, the S.S. contemptuously flung back the gift, as proceeding from an Arian whose religion was "unsavoury," at the same time hurling at the giver a number of texts conveying epithets of an offensive character. Bramah replied to the farrago of nonsense, which he characterised as "unmannerly, absurd, and illiterate that it must have been composed when the writer was intoxicated, ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... Infidels. This was supposed to be the general name of a people, and it has been handed down to us so that we still call the South African natives Kaffirs. I doubt whether the tribes concerned have ever used or recognised among themselves this unsavoury name. I may note, by the way, that one of the most ancient tribal names in Asia is that by which the Greeks, outside the Turkish empire, are often known—Yunani, or Ionian—which must have been in use from the days when the Greek ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Servants, being young, prodigall and expensive Youths, which he kept about him, his Treasure was their common Store, which they took without stint, having free accesse to his most retired Privacies; and his indulgence to them, and familiarity with them, opened a gap to infamous Reports, which left an unsavoury Tincture on him; for where such Leeches are, there must be putrid bloud to fill their craving Appetites. His gettings were like a Prince, with a strong hand; his expences like a Prodigall, with a weak head; and 'tis a wonder a man of his Noble, and ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... and, being a stately, red-bearded follower of the Prophet, with a general appearance of wealth and dignity, he walked slowly until he came to the doorway of Leh Shin's shop. His step caused the Chinaman to look up from the string bed where he lay, gaunt, yellow and unsavoury, his dark clothes contrasting with the flowing white garments of the venerable man who regarded him ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... wash-house stands ajar, and through it may be seen on the slop-stone a broken yellow mug; and near it a tub full of clothes, from which there dribbles a soapy little puddle on to the uneven flags, just deep enough to float an unsavoury-looking mixture of cheese-rinds and potato-parings. Altogether, the appearance of the house is gaunt, filthy, and utterly comfortless. Such is the ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... part of the mob, who bestirred themselves for the relief of the supposed lady, no sooner perceived their mistake in the appearance of the beau, who stared around him with horror and affright, than their compassion was changed into mirth, and they began to pass a great many unsavoury jokes upon his misfortune, which they now discovered no inclination to alleviate; and he found himself very uncomfortably beset, when Pickle, pitying his situation, interposed in his behalf, and prevailed upon the chairmen to carry him into the house of an apothecary in the ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... not teach them any unsavoury or Popish doctrines or infect their young wits with heresies. He shall not use in the School any language to his Scholars which be of riper years and proceedings but only the Latin, Greek or Hebrew, nor shall he willingly permit the use of the English Tongue to them which are or shall be ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... are very slow in motion and when a man comes nigh them they will stand and hiss, not endeavouring to get away. Their livers are also spotted black and yellow; and the body when opened hath a very unsavoury smell. The guano's I have observed to be very good meat, and I have often eaten of them with pleasure; but though I have eaten of snakes, crocodiles, and alligators, and many creatures that look frightfully enough, and there are but few ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... Arthur Dimmesdale would be prevailed upon to take; he rejected all suggestions of the kind, as if priestly celibacy were one of his articles of Church discipline. Doomed by his own choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his unsavoury morsel always at another's board, and endure the life-long chill which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself only at another's fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious, experienced, benevolent old physician, with his concord of paternal and reverential love ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... such a scene, reader, may seem very commonplace to you, but what tongue can tell, or pen describe, what it was to Tottie Bones? That pretty little human flower had been born in the heart of London—in one of the dirtiest and most unsavoury parts of that heart. Being the child of a dissolute man and a hard-working woman, who could not afford to go out excursioning, she had never seen a green field in her life. She had never seen the Thames, or the Parks. There are many such unfortunates in the vast city. Of flowers—with the exception ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... the roadside in the mud, gnawing at unsavoury food; men squatting by the ditches, examining their sores, washing their bleeding feet in the muddy water, replacing the ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... must be somewhat vague!" Mrs Fanshawe said disagreeably. She felt disagreeable, and she never made any effort to conceal her feelings, kindly or the reverse. It was annoying that one of her own guests should be mixed up in an unsavoury scandal with a common soldier: annoying to have people going about with long faces, when she had planned a festive week. Really this Claire Gifford was becoming more and more of an incumbrance! Mrs Fanshawe paused with her hand on the coffee-pot, ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and their needles leading Affection prisoner through their own-built cities, Pinion'd with stories and Arachnean ditties. Proceed we now with Hero's sacrifice: She odours burn'd, and from their smoke did rise Unsavoury fumes, that air with plagues inspir'd; And then the consecrated sticks she fir'd, On whose pale frame an angry spirit flew, And beat it down still as it upward grew; The virgin tapers that on th' altar stood, When she inflam'd ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... care to conceal it, was necessarily the more remarked by all the world: he changed it so seldom, that it was filled with dirt and vermin: his usual diet was bread; his drink water, which he even rendered farther unpalatable by the mixture of unsavoury herbs: he tore his back with the frequent discipline which he inflicted on it: he daily on his knees washed, in imitation of Christ, the feet of thirteen beggars, whom he afterwards dismissed with presents [e]: he gained the affections of the monks by ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... cavalcade of well-appointed sleighs dashing, with a merry clash of bells, up and down the crowded street, and sauntering amongst the groups of well-dressed women and brilliant uniforms, until darkness drove me back to our unsavoury quarters at the Metropole. My companions generally patronised the skating rink, a sign of advancing civilisation, for ten years ago there was not a pair of skates to be found throughout the length and breadth of Siberia. Thus passed our ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... well as be interesting, as I remarked in a note to the 'Star' in reference to this occurrence of the pair of Hoopoe's, to encourage these birds to breed in the Islands whenever they shewed a disposition to do so, as, though rather a foul-feeder and of unsavoury habits in its nest, and having no respect for sanitary arrangements, the Hoopoe is nevertheless one of the most useful birds ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... with scorn; "no, Japhet, look upon me, for it is the last time you will behold my youth; look upon me as a sepulchre, fair without but unsavoury and rottenness within. Let me do you a greater kindness, let me awaken your dormant energies, and plant that ambition in your soul, which may lead to all that is great and good—a better path and more worthy of a man than the one which I have partly chosen, and partly destiny ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... its smells, without the African muskiness of odour that is perceptible in the vicinity of our sable brother. The fat, slatternly, frankly dirty vrouws had not the remotest idea of sanitation; the Germans and Irish, blandly or doggedly impervious to savage smells, pursued their unsavoury way in defiance of the clamorous necessity for hygienic measures, until the majority of the pallid, untidy, scared Englishwomen, the energetic Americans, and the sturdier Africanders, after making what headway was possible against the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... thou use not unsavoury and unseemly words in thy chastising of them, as railing, miscalling, and the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... faded linen, scooping up the beetles within it, and, striding across the room, threw the whole unsavoury bundle into the heart of the fire. A great flame leapt up; there came a series of squeaky explosions, so that, almost, one might have imagined those age-old insects to have had life. Then ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... is, I think, the best of his short stories. Therese is rather a sermon on the somewhat unsavoury text of morbid appetite in the other sex, than a real story. The little Histories Vraies, which he wrote with a friend for the Moniteur in 1864, are fairly good. For the formally entitled Contes et Nouvelles and the collection headed by ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... of lying in front of his captives, and probably proposed to himself an improving game of geography over a mug of cider in the kitchen, for he had risen and unlocked the door. Serlizer stood by it with a stout handkerchief in her hand, in the middle of which was knotted a somewhat soft and unsavoury potato. As Mr. Rigby slipped out, after a glance at his shackled charges, that potato went across his month, and was fastened in its place by the handkerchief, firmly, though quickly, knotted at the back of his neck. The terror of Russians and Sepoys struggled ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... is, indeed, entitled The Rogue, and it had as running title The Spanish Rogue. There is a novel by George Fidge entitled The English Gusman; or, The History of that Unparalleled Thief James Hind (1652, 4to). Salamanca had an unsavoury reputation owing to the fictions of Titus Gates. cf. The Rover (II), Act v: ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... exposed to a common danger, while the assailants enjoy a safety which renders their exploit a peculiarly inglorious one. Two Boers, Trichardt and Hindon, the one a youth of twenty-two, the other a man of British birth, distinguished, or disgraced, themselves by this unsavoury work upon the Delagoa line, but with the extension of the blockhouse system the attempts became less successful. There was one, however, upon the northern line near Naboomspruit which cost the lives of Lieutenant Best ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... despite the unsavoury thing of which they seemed to hold a promise, fell sweetly on my ear, inasmuch as for the time they relieved my fears touching Madonna. It was not to advise me of her capture that he had had me haled into his ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... me to cut a slice out of one of the wolves, although it was with no pleasant feelings that I did so. For some minutes I gnawed away at the unsavoury morsel, till nausea compelled me to stop. I then set to work to collect sticks and branches, the waning daylight scarcely affording me sufficient time to pick up as many as I required. With those I could obtain I lighted a fire, spreading it in a circle; ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... his over whose innocence Mrs. Quickly was so creditably vigilant. On the other hand, no student of Jonson will need to be reminded how closely and precociously familiar the big stalwart Westminster boy, Camden's favoured and grateful pupil, must have made himself with the rankest haunts and most unsavoury recesses of that ribald waterside and Smithfield life which he lived to reproduce on the stage with a sometimes insufferable fidelity to details from which Hogarth might have shrunk. Even his unrivalled proficiency in classic learning can hardly have been the fruit of greater or more willing ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... as to price, Lady C—— hinted that she doubted its being perfectly sweet: the very suspicion of vending an unsavoury article roused the old she-dragon at once into one of the most terrific passions imaginable, and directing all her ire against the ladies, she poured forth a volley of abuse fiery and appalling as the lava of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Mr. Whyte, to view Melbourne by night—a familiar scene to her, no doubt. What took her to Little Bourke Street I don't know. Perhaps she got lost—perhaps it had been a favourite walk of hers in the old days; at all events she was found dead drunk in that unsavoury locality, by Sal Rawlins. I know this is so, because Sal told me so herself. Sal acted the part of the good Samaritan—took her to the squalid den she called home, and there Rosanna Moore fell dangerously ill. Whyte, who had missed her, found out where she ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... way. The London solicitor, professionally consulted by the dishonest firm, gave his opinion that such a work publicly issued would be a boon to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and would not escape the unsavoury attentions ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... his own. The planter and the slave-driver care just as much about negro opinion, as the epicure about the sentiments of oysters. M. Ude throwing live eels into the fire as a kindly method of divesting them of the unsavoury oil that lodges beneath their skins, is not more convinced of the immense aggregate of good which arises to the lordlier parts of the creation, than is the gentle peer who strips his fellow man of country and of family for a wild-fowl ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 's great suspicion of the murder, But no sound proof who did it. For my part, I do not think she hath a soul so black To act a deed so bloody; if she have, As in cold countries husbandmen plant vines, And with warm blood manure them; even so One summer she will bear unsavoury fruit, And ere next spring wither both branch and root. The act of blood let pass; only descend To ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... delighted the aesthete, and her mystery enthralled the poet. She had feared Sir Jacques. Why? Paul toyed with the question in his own fashion and made of Hatton Towers a feudal keep and of his deceased uncle a baron of unsavoury repute. The maid Flamby, so called because men had likened the glory of her hair to a waving flambeau, he caused to reside in a tiny cottage beneath the very shadow of Sir Jacques' frowning fortress; and the men-at-arms looking down from battlement and bartizan marvelled when the morning ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... worthless from their very youth, they would not be guilty of such an enormity as this to-day when their heads are hoary; nor, indeed, would we have presented such a comedy, unless we had seen before now how fathers become their sons' rivals at places of unsavoury repute. Spectators, we wish ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... blackish seeds about the bigness of peppercorns; whose taste is also hot on the tongue somewhat like pepper. The fruit itself is sweet, soft and luscious, when ripe; but while green it is hard and unsavoury: though even then being boiled and eaten with salt-pork or beef, it serves instead of turnips and is as much esteemed. The papaw-tree is about 10 or 12 foot high. The body near the ground may be a foot and a half or 2 foot diameter; and it grows up tapering to the ...
— A Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... quantities of cray-fish, until its stomach becomes crammed to such a degree as to distort the shape of its whole body. When this kind was drawn out, it was treated very rudely by the boys—because its flesh was known to be extremely unsavoury, and none of them cared to eat it. Marengo, however, had no such scruples, and he was wont to make several hearty meals each day upon the ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... completeness evidently a surprise to the Genoese, as well as a source of immense exultation, which is vigorously expressed in a ballad of the day, written in a stirring salt-water rhythm.[7] It represents the Venetians, as they enter the bay, in arrogant mirth reviling the Genoese with very unsavoury epithets as having deserted their ships to skulk on shore. They ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... measure to each publicly and openly, and without any distinction. By these means no nourishment was lost: it could be more equally divided than by any other way; and although necessarily a scanty, it was by no means an unsavoury mess.' ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... mention of Glendevon in public records is of a somewhat unsavoury order, and affords a rather curious illustration of the beliefs of the people of Scotland in the seventeenth century. John Brughe, one of the most notorious necromancers and wizards of his day, was tried at Edinburgh on November 24th, 1643, for practising sorcery and other unholy arts, and amongst ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... and to sketch all the cathedrals we see,' said the ardent art-student, struggling manfully with the unruly umbrella, the unsavoury odours from the gutter, and the garrulous crowd leaning over her shoulder, peering under her hat-brim, and examining all her belongings with ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... narrowly, puzzled. He knew nothing of this man, beyond his reputation—something unsavoury enough, in all conscience!— had seen him only once, and then from a distance, before that conference in the rue Chaptal. And now he was becoming sensitive to a personality uncommonly insinuating: Wertheimer was displaying all the poise of an Englishman of the better caste More than anybody in ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... The scuttle-bearing buttons, boon and blank And grimy loads his evening load of coals, Filled with respect for the cook's and butler's rank, Lo, the round cook half fills the hot retreat, Her kitchen, where the odours of the meat, The cabbage and sweets all merge as in a pall, The stale unsavoury remnants of the feast. Here, with abounding confluences of onion, Whose vastitudes of perfume tear the soul In wish of the not unpotatoed stew, They float and fade and flutter like morning dew. And all the copper pots and pans in line, A burnished army of bright utensils, shine; And the stern ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various |
