"Unreadable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... small store of Arabic at the time—Lane of the Nights is not Lane of the Dictionary—and his pages are disfigured by many childish mistakes. Worst of all, the three handsome volumes are rendered unreadable as Sale's Koran by their anglicised Latin, their sesquipedalian un English words, and the stiff and stilted style of half a century ago when our prose was, perhaps, the worst in Europe. Their cargo of Moslem learning was most valuable to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... my head, for the riddle seemed quite unreadable, and as we had already sat up until long past midnight I begged for my candle, and proposed to defer our conversation until the morning. Jack, declaring that none of the beds in the damp old house was fit to sleep in without ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... present themselves to people like myself—that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the ordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artists regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is really not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of literature, just as Professor Radium of 'Comic Cuts' is ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... the colored maid who came in daily to perform such chores cleared away the things. Jessie, with an unreadable countenance, brought back the bottle of Scotch and the glasses and a bowl of cracked ice and set them on ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... novels, poems, plays, they begin by an attack on their pet aversion, who has nothing to do with the matter in hand. They cannot praise A, B, C, and D, without first assailing E. It will generally be found that E is a popular author. But the great virtue of a reviewer, who would be unreadable and make others unread, is a languid ignorant lack of interest in all things, a habit of regarding his work as a tedious task, to be scamped as rapidly ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... return to it from time to time I do not suppose I shall ever outgrow the feeling, in spite of its having been borne in on me, when I first conversed with readers of poetry in England, that Thomson is no longer read—that he is unreadable. ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... second in order of interest among the reformers, lies dead and buried in the works of the learned and unreadable M'Crie. It remains for some one to break the tomb and bring him forth, alive again and breathing, in a human book. With the best intentions in the world, I have only added two more flagstones, ponderous like their predecessors, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ever ready to engage. In this particular field he acquired a skill of fence which rendered him the most redoubtable of antagonists. Many years afterwards, at the time when the Prelude was fresh from the press, he was maintaining against the opinion of a large and mixed society that the poem was unreadable. At last, overborne by the united indignation of so many of Wordsworth's admirers, he agreed that the question should be referred to the test of personal experience; and on inquiry it was discovered that the only individual present who had got through ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... (Unreadable) and almost exclusively absorbed by material concerns. The climate, too, variable and oppressive in summer and winter alike, imposed upon the Chaldaean painful exactions, and obliged him to work with an energy of which the majority of Egyptians ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... defined. The Dandiacal Sect a new modification of the primeval superstition Self-worship: How to be distinguished. Their Sacred Books (Fashionable Novels) unreadable. Dandyism's Articles of Faith.—Brotherhood of Poor-Slaves: vowed to perpetual Poverty; worshippers of Earth; distinguished by peculiar costume and diet. Picture of a Poor-Slave Household; and of a Dandiacal. Teufelsdroeckh ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... of his method and sensibility: 'In contemplating the origin, rise, and fall of nations, the mind is alternately filled with a mixture of sacred pain and pleasure.' Would you read further? Then you will find Fauna and Flora, twin goddesses of ineptitude, flitting across the page, unreadable as a geographical treatise. His first masterpiece was translated into French, anno VI., and the translator apologises that war with England alone prevents the compilation of a suitable biography. Was ever thief treated with so grave ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... as well as the interests, of the planters. The article in the Quarterly is valuable, as being an able and liberal digest of various narratives; some derived from Hayti itself. Rainsford's book is nearly unreadable, from the absurdity of its style; but it is truly respectable in my eyes, notwithstanding, from its high appreciation of L'Ouverture's character. It contains more information concerning Toussaint than can be found, I believe, anywhere else, except in the Biographie; and it has the ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... his shoulders and stared. "What a tirade!" he thought. The silence and immobility of Councillor Mikulin impressed him. The bearded bureaucrat sat at his post, mysteriously self-possessed like an idol with dim, unreadable eyes. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... of the half-dozen men squatting on their heels about a fire were three-quarters bare, showing dusty, brown bodies. Two had dirty calico shirts loose above hide breech-clouts. Dark-brown eyes, as unreadable as Johnny Shannon's, surveyed Drew, but none of ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... desiring to "put us to it," kept ordering these books sent them. They never took one of them from the postoffice, hence the accumulation in the postoffice grew until there was room for little else. These books were surveys and agricultural reports. Unreadable to say the least, but heavy in the extreme. The postoffice at Santa Fe was a little bit of a concern, and the postmaster said there was no room for the books there. Earlier in the year I had carried one ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... pulled her blanket around her. She was typically Indian at the moment, unreadable and cold. But she nodded in acquiescence and went ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... the men who loaf, my dear," she replied. "When you undertake the transcription of an author's scrawl at ninepence the thousand words you have to work hard, especially when, as it is in this case, the thing's practically unreadable. Besides, the woman in it makes me lose my temper. If I'd had a man of the kind described to deal with I'd ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... use in correspondence on postals that makes the matter unreadable unless the recipient has a duplicate key card is made as follows: Rule two cards the size of postal, one for the sender and one for the receiver, dividing them into quarters. These quarters are subsequently ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... shall be better treated this time," smiled Cervera, dropping into a chair opposite the detective, and fixing her sensuous, dark eyes on Nick's calm, unreadable face. ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... a shadow should spread to her work was unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with Dante, with Pascal. A novelist—for as a poet, after trying hard to think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable—as a novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a time when ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less than Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable. ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... Etudes chimiques sur la vegetation. Recherches sur le developpement d'une mucedinee dans un milieu artificiel, p. 192, Paris, 1870. We have seen in the case of yeast that this ratio may be as low as [Proofers note: unreadable symbol]] On the other hand, if we deprive the yeast of air entirely, or cause it to develop in a saccharine medium deprived of free oxygen, it will multiply just as if air were present, although with less activity, and under these circumstances its fermentative character will be most marked; ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... and show him the way people did things. It would open his eyes and his brains. Electrically, something self-protective within her added the further message: it would keep him out of the way for a time. Sally breathed deeply. An unreadable smile was upon her lips, and no smile at all was in her eyes. Afar off she scented change; but what manner of change she did not as yet recognise. It was her instinct at work, her instinct for turning life to her own advantage. It was an infallible instinct, like that of ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... For years past I have felt a longing to undertake this work, but the task was by no means an easy one. Leaving out all episodical matter, the leading narrative of the Epic forms about one-fourth of the work; and a complete translation even of this leading story would be unreadable, both from its length and its prolixness. On the other hand, to condense the story into shorter limits would be, not to make a translation, but virtually to write a new poem; and that was not what I desired to undertake, nor what I was ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... very far away from him, and, gathering up the reins again, brought Castor and Pollux to their scattered senses; but her face was not quite so grim and unreadable as before. After all, it was something to be of so much importance to one man. The very idea of her power over him had something intoxicating in it, thus proving her to ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... it cannot fight, or pray, or marry, or make a joke, or do any other stricken human thing. But this discovery has been quite recent. The capitalist newspaper was never actually unread until it was actually unreadable. ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... walls were covered with staring, yellow plaster; only one side of it, that opposite the working-chair, being partly covered—and that only by two big maps: one of the Russian Empire, with its dependencies; the other covered with a mass of line-tracery and unreadable jottings, written in what was evidently a cipher. The key to this was hidden in the brain of the man who had ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... most important works of each quarter, it gave extensive critiques of only a few books in each number and thus avoided the multitude of perfunctory notices that had made previous reviews so dreary and unreadable. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... stumbling on through limping disappointments to prostrate failure! Poverty comes pleading, not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares. The unreadable author particularly requests us to make a critical examination of his book, and report to him whatever may be our verdict,—as if he wanted anything but our praise, and that very often to be ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... could do by consuming and producing mere printed paper, he did. And as the "supreme man of letters" of his time he will ever be honoured and long continue to be read. He deliberately cultivated a form of speech which made him unreadable to all except English-speaking readers, and intelligible only to a select and cultivated body even amongst them. He wrote in what, for practical purposes, is a local, or rather personal, dialect. And thus he deprived ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... own instrument. I have been cut up beginning le Figaro up to la Revue des Deux Mondes, including la Gazette de France and le Constitutionnel. And THEY have not finished yet! Barbey d'Aurevilly has insulted me personally, and the good Saint-Rene Taillandier, who declares me "unreadable," attributes ridiculous words to me. So much for printing. As for speech, it is in accord. Saint-Victor (is it servility towards Michel Levy) rends me at the Brabant dinner, as does that excellent Charles ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... 'Complete Duty of Man' would, if nothing else did, prevent his name from sinking into oblivion. It deserves to live for its intrinsic merits. It is one of the few instances of a devotional book which is not unreadable. It is not, like some of the class, full of mawkish sentimentality; nor, like others, so high-flown that it cannot be used for practical purposes by ordinary mortals without a painful sense of unreality; nor, like others, so intolerably dull as to disgust the reader with the subject which it designs ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... have been studying the Gipsy character. They have been a theme upon which a "bookworm" could gloat, a chest of secret drawers into which the curious delight to pry, a difficult problem in Euclid for the mathematician to solve; and an unreadable book for the author. A conglomeration of languages for the scholar, a puzzle for the historian, and a subject for the novelist. These are points which it is not the object of this book to attempt to clear up and settle; ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... which a few chairs had been uncovered, and a table cleared. A man rose from a chair beside the table, and he and Falloden shook hands. He was a round-faced and broad-shouldered person, with one of the unreadable faces developed by the life of a prominent solicitor, in contact with all sorts of clients and many varieties of business; and Falloden's sensitive pride had soon detected in his manner certain shades of expression to which the heir of Flood ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... chessboard with my letters on it. I tried reading them downward, across, upward and diagonally, in the direction of the moves of different chess pieces—king, queen, rook and bishop. Nothing came of that, whatever I did; the thing was as unreadable as ever. But there remained one chess-move to try—the eccentric move of the knight; the move of one square forward, backward or sideways, and then one square diagonally, or, as it has sometimes been more concisely expressed, the move to the next square but one of a different ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... was yet low, Rina, true to her promise, came to attend upon Natalie. There was no change in her manner; her unreadable eyes expressed no consciousness of the events of the night before. She questioned Natalie in her best professional way. It was not yet necessary to disturb the dressings on the arm; but she volunteered to ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... other verities. His voice haunts me now, suggesting that, in spite of the reasons I have advanced, the general reader can scarcely be expected to read modern poetry, and that therefore his habit of skipping must continue. He would say that most modern poetry is unreadable, at least by the average man. He would say that if the infinitely complex study of emotional mind-states that lies behind the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, or the eerie otherworldliness of Yeats, or the harsh virility of Sandburg is to be regarded as an intensification ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... dealing with the composition and making of enamels for application to metals for the most part, but also for other allied purposes. It is written in a thoroughly practical way [Transcribers Note: Text source unreadable], and its author—Paul Randau—has made its subject a very particular study. The [Transcribers Note: Text source unreadable] almost all things which come from the German chemical expert, is a model of good workmanship [Transcribers Note: Text source unreadable] ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... it. A few hours might turn storm to sunshine, or perchance increase the storm to a veritable cyclone against which no man could stand. He passed into the street and out of the crowd, his face firm set, unreadable. He showed no sign of fear, he seemed curiously indifferent to man's opinion of him. It was noted by some that he did not go in the direction of the Rue Valette, and when he had passed out of sight they told one another that there was a set ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... most unreadable specimens of the sex on which he pronounced this highly original dictum, entered the room just then; and he found himself at once out of his chair and his ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... it aloud," she proposed calmly, "and I will assist in the corrections. For the French edition I may be able to suggest. The papers today are most amusing," she continued. "The German press is almost unreadable. No wonder that there is a price upon your ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dispersed, the two strangers who had been seated on the bench appeared at the window and called for their mail. The postmaster handed to one of them a letter addressed, Evangelist Blank. The address was written in almost an unreadable hand. The evangelist opened the letter. It ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... a little unsteadily; the two men grasped hands and for an instant neither spoke. Darrell saw before him a tall, powerfully built man, approaching fifty, whose somewhat bronzed face, shrewd, stern, and unreadable, was lighted by a pair of blue eyes which once had resembled Whitcomb's. With a swift, penetrating glance the elder man looked searchingly into ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... paragraphs in the Journal des Debats. M. Henry Houssaye was himself once a journalist. But he thought better of that, and became a historian. He has written one or two volumes which, without being unreadable, have achieved immense popularity. Stevenson used to delve in them for matter suitable to his romances. The French Academy now contains pretty nearly everything except first-class literary artists. Anatole France ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... misery, some other deception of which that girl had been a victim? It seemed hardly probable. It was not even easy to imagine. What struck me most was her—I suppose I must call it—composure. One could not tell whether she understood what she had done. One wondered. She was not so much unreadable as blank; and I did not know whether to admire her for it or dismiss her from my thoughts as a ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... her hand to him impulsively. There was an unfathomable, unreadable look in her dark eyes. As he gallantly lifted the cold fingers to his lips, she said, without taking her almost hungry gaze ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... alteration of perspectives will have gone so far that historians will be a little perplexed to explain the causes of the Great War. The militarist monomania of Germany will have become incomprehensible; her Welt Politik literature incredible and unreadable.... ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... pattern forms, with his shepherd's plaid trousers, his grey spats and patent-leather boots, a colour scheme of no mean order. Nor is it merely Mr. Smith's finely mottled face. The face, no doubt, is a notable one,—solemn, inexpressible, unreadable, the face of the heaven-born hotel keeper. It is more than that. It is the strange dominating personality of the man that somehow holds you captive. I know nothing in history to compare with the position of Mr. Smith among those who drink over his bar, except, though in a lesser degree, the ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... about La Guiccioli has no foundation, other than a somewhat random remark of Shelley, and the fact that he left her nothing in his will. It is distinctly ascertained that she expressly prohibited him from doing so; they continued to correspond to the last, and her affectionate, though unreadable, reminiscences, are sufficient proof that she at no time considered herself to ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... sentence broken by apology. I should have to write a dozen of letters before I could print a line, and the line, at last, would be only like a bit of any other botanical book—trustworthy, it might be, perhaps; but certainly unreadable. Whereas now, it will rather put things more forcibly in the reader's mind to have them retouched and corrected as we go on; and our natural and honest mistakes will often be suggestive of things we could not have ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Newfoundland or a Collie and as innocent and winsome. They were wonderful eyes, soft and spring-like at times, glowing with a rich, human understanding which on the instant could harden and flash lightning. Deceptive eyes, unreadable, but alluring alike to men and to women in all walks ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... lock more impregnable to the hand of honor than the strongest bank safe which the expert Mr. Hobbs might vainly have tried to open; but even when that seal has already been rightfully broken and the contents of the letter exposed, those contents are to the eye of delicacy as unreadable as if written in that Bass language which Adam and Eve are said to have spoken while in the garden of Eden, and which, since the fall, none but angels have ever been able to comprehend. Now, if Cicero thought it base for a third party to read a private letter, what eloquent thunder ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to pursue her walk to the house and give battle for freedom. Willoughby appeared to her scarce human, unreadable, save by the key that she could supply. She determined to put faith in Colonel De Craye's marvellous divination of circumstances in the dark. Marvels are solid weapons when we are attacked by real ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mingled solecisms in language and mistakes in science, the empty verbiage that dilates on a platitude in one place, and the jejune abstract that hurries over a knotty argument in another, without regretting that so unreadable a poet should have ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... reputations, within that half-century, have not been exalted, how many have not been depressed! We have seen Tennyson advanced beyond Virgil and Victor Hugo beyond Homer. We have seen the latest freak of futurism preferred to The Lotus Eaters, and the first Legende des Siecles rejected as unreadable. In face of this whirlwind of doctrine the public ceases to know whether it is on its head or its feet—"its trembling tent all topsy-turvy wheels," as an Elizabethan has it. To me it seems that security can only be found in an incessant exploration of the by-ways of literary history and analysis ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... pony-phaeton. But in one respect he was altogether unlike his father. His whole time was spent among his books, and he was at this moment engaged in revising and editing a very long and altogether unreadable old English chronicle in rhyme, for publication by one of those learned societies which are rife in London. Of Robert of Gloucester, and William Langland, of Andrew of Wyntown and the Lady Juliana Berners, he could discourse, if not with eloquence, at least with ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... himself troubled. Her soft loveliness in the delicate light that left her eyes unreadable depths of shadow, her timidity and anxiety for his safety, were from their very unconsciousness most dangerous. And while he grasped at self-control, she came still nearer to the head of the steps and held out her small fair hand, mistaking his ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... that are obvious to the vulgar part of mankind. Their art is the transmutation of styles. By happy alchemy of mind they convert dross into gold—and gold into tinsel. They see farther into a millstone than most others. If an author is utterly unreadable, they can read him for ever: his intricacies are their delight, his mysteries are their study. They prefer Sir Thomas Browne to the Rambler by Dr. Johnson, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy to all the writers of ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Russell's timid nomination of him for a post in the Government... Shelley would have been a poet to the last. But how dull, how very dull, would have been the poetry of his middle age!—a great unreadable mass interposed between him and us... Did Byron, mused the Duke, know what was to be at Missolonghi? Did he know that he was to die in service of the Greeks whom he despised? Byron might not have ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... not go forth into the world without due acknowledgment being made to that worthy old Dominie, Richard Johnson, to whose erudite but somewhat unreadable work the author is so largely indebted. As he flourished at the end of the sixteenth century, and the commencement of the seventeenth, great allowances should be made for his style, which is certainly not suited to the taste ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... an unreadable name beginning with an L,—and that's all; and a pretty penny he must have paid to send us such ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... potential terror, a devouring enigma of space. Yes. But our lives have been nothing if not a continuous defiance of what you can do and what you may hold; a spiritual and material defiance carried on in our plucky cockleshells on and on beyond the successive provocations of your unreadable horizons." ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... in his. To him the content of a book matters not at all. He loves books because they are books, and discriminates them only by the irrelevant standard of their rarity. A rare book is not less dear to him because it is unreadable, even as to the snob a dull duke is as good as a bright one. Indeed, why should he bother about readableness? He doesn't want to read. 'Uncut edges' for him, when he can get them; and, even when he can't, the notion of reading a rare edition would ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... under that lonely bank. Certainly they would not be found before the aasvogels had picked them clean, and these would be at work upon them now. And if they were found, the paper would have rotted or been blown away, or, at the worst, rendered so discoloured as to be unreadable. For the rest, there was nothing to connect him with the murder, now that his confederates were dead. Hendrik would prove an alibi for him. He was a useful man, Hendrik. Besides, who would believe that it was a murder? Two men were escorting an ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... with diversities of early Christian belief, the course of country-dances in England, or the growth of mediaeval legends, he adds the grace of telling a tale and drawing a character. He has published nearly a hundred volumes, not one of them unreadable. But no one man may write with equal pen of German history, of comparative mythology and philology, of theological dissertations, and of the pleasures of English rural life, while he adds to these a long ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... an', havin' snatched a hasty breakfast, commenced t' pack my animal. Then it was that I discovered, slipped beneath a strap o' my saddle, a sheet o' paper. Unfoldin' it, I saw that it was scrawled over in a rude an' almost unreadable hand. This was what it said, 'This demand of ours shall remain uncancelled, an' shall be to you as was the Ark o' God among the Philistines. Unless you return to your father's house an' to the people o' your father's faith, you shall be visited by the Lord o' ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... writing became convulsive. "I can hear them," I guessed the tracing meant, and then it was quite unreadable for a space. Then came a little string of words that were quite distinct: "a different sort of Selenite altogether, who appears to be directing the—" The writing became a ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... before the drowning of the squatter. The one person he stood in awe of was his mother. Again his eyes sought the silent girl at his side. She had ever been a hallowing influence in his life, and to lose her would be worse than death. After tonight the glory in those unreadable brown eyes would ever shine for him. He threw one arm across her shoulder, and drew her closer. "My little moonlight girl!" he breathed in ecstasy, his cheek against hers. "Are ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... rulers. He has the power of all strong natures of creating around him an atmosphere of uncertainty, apprehension, and fear. Of all the many problems of this Session of probably fierce personal conflict, this was the most unreadable sphinx. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... disguising our handwritings as much as we could. It was not easy. Oswald tried to write one of them with his left hand, but the consequences were almost totally unreadable. Besides, if any one could have read it, they would only have thought it was written in an asylum for the insane, the writing was so ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... carry her off. She scouted the idea; but it returned. Perhaps Mordaunt was only a tool; perhaps he himself was being deceived. Helen turned pale at the very thought. She had never forgotten the strange, unreadable, yet threatening, expression which Brandt had worn the day she had refused to walk ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... of the Poets," speaks of him as a multifarious writer of unreadable trash,—and names but few of his productions. The truth was, Eusden, secluding himself at his rectory among the fens of Lincolnshire, took no part in society, declined all association with the polite circles of the metropolis, thus inviting attacks, from which his talents ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... looking out of the screen in his private office. The round, ordinarily cheerful, face was serious, but the innocent blue eyes were as unreadable as ever. He was wearing one of the new Mexican charro-style jackets, black laced ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... of the "Glen Morris Stories" is to sow the seed of pure, noble, manly character in the mind of our great nation's childhood. They exhibit the virtues and vices of childhood, not in prosy, unreadable precepts, but in a series of characters which move before the imagination, as living beings do before ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... need of it, nor the full tide of blessings which flow from it to the believing soul. Therefore do men cling to Him today as if it was but yesterday that He had died for them. When all other names carved on the world's records have become unreadable, like forgotten inscriptions on decaying grave-stones, His shall endure for ever, deep graven on the fleshly tables of the heart. His revelation of God is the highest truth. Till the end of time men will turn to His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Theologicus de Deo, an ugly, square, brown book of five hundred pages—is as unreadable as it is unprepossessing. Bayle says that it was shown to the King whilst out hunting, and that he forthwith read it with such energy as to be able to despatch within an hour to his resident at the Hague a detailed list of its heresies. Nothing in his reign ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... much more!... Was it surprising that Pelleas often appeared pensive in the face of those numberless problems, and that his humble and gentle look was often so profound and grave, laden with cares and full of unreadable questions? ...
— Our Friend the Dog • Maurice Maeterlinck
... her face with the old look, like the back o' somethin', or like you'd rubbed down the page when the ink was wet, an' had blurred the whole thing unreadable. An' I judged that, like enough, she knew nothin' ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... compromise. It has some breathings of the Miltonic grandeur; but that is all. For the rest it is a mere party polemic written for the moment; and, as is the case with all pamphlets, the very qualities which gave it its contemporary interest make it unreadable to posterity. Part of it is a sweeping assertion of the inalienable right of the whole people to choose, judge and depose their rulers; a democratic doctrine which a few years later, when England had ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... his teetering head, rested his chin on his hands, which were clasped over the top of his walking-stick. Occasionally his eyes roved to the portrait of his wife, and a melancholy, unreadable smile broke the severe line of ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... in addition to being the possessor of great learning he was a man of high character. His literary efforts were surprisingly varied. There are at least thirty-six volumes with his name on the title-page, most of them unreadable to-day; even such works, for example, as his Visit to the Philippine Isles and Siam and the Siamese, which involved travel into then little-known lands. Perhaps the only book by him that to-day commands attention is his translation of Chamisso's ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite;—insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran. We read in it, as we might in the State-Paper Office, unreadable masses of lumber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses of a remarkable man. It is true we have it under disadvantages: the Arabs see more method in it than we. Mohammed's followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as it ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... again in the man's gaze the undisguised worship and wonder which had always followed her from the eyes of the boy who had fought to be her knight. And she realized suddenly that he had sensed the effort behind her eager scrutiny, even though his own eyes remained whimsically unreadable. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... celebrates our separation from England; the Etruria Vendicata praises the murder of the abominable Alessandro de' Medici by his kinsman, Lorenzaccio. None of the satires, whether on kings, aristocrats, or people, have lent themselves easily to my perusal; the epigrams are signally unreadable, but some of the sonnets are very good. He seems to find in their limitations the same sort of strength that he finds in his restricted tragedies; and they are all in the truest ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... explained nervously because of the look in the black, unreadable eyes of this straight, slim Indian girl who was so beautiful—and so silent. "They go muy fas', Ramon an' Beel. Poco tiempo—sure, we fin' dem ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... wending my way along the streets toward the central portion of the Bavarian capital the familiar sign, "American Cigar Store," looking like a ray of light penetrating through the gloom and mystery of the multitudinous unreadable signs that surround it, greets my vision, and I immediately wend my footsteps thitherward. I discover in the proprietor, Mr. Walsch, a native of Munich, who, after residing in America for several years, has returned to dream away declining ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... earlier years that the bulk of the eclogues must be attributed—Spagnuoli was noted for the elegance of his Latin verse; but his facility led him into over-production, and Tiraboschi reports his later writings as absolutely unreadable. He was of Spanish extraction, as his name implies, became a Carmelite, and rose to be general of the order, but retired in 1515, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... unreadable text] about sunset that evening, and the command went into camp and I went to Jim's new log house. He had built one and had started in to build the second, having two carpenters at work finishing ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... writing was in some foreign language. In the lower left-hand corner was what appeared to be the name of the maker but this was so blotted out as to be unreadable. ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... correction to the Madras pendulum, wedge with friction, spots seen in my eyes, density of rays near a caustic. In this term I accomplished the preparation of a volume of Mathematical Tracts on subjects which, either from their absolute deficiency in the University or from the unreadable form in which they had been presented, appeared to be wanted. The subjects of my Tracts were, Lunar Theory (begun Oct. 26th, finished Nov. 1st), Figure of the Earth (1st part finished Nov. 18th), Precession and Nutation ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... An unreadable expression flitted briefly across the gambler's lean face. "I know what you mean. Let's just say that the laws of this planet discriminate slightly against Free Status people like yours truly. They require us to live ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... occasionally writing elegantly and impressively into Carlyle's proof-sheets is rather striking. Some of Jeffrey's other criticisms sound very curiously in our ear in these days. It is startling to find Mill's Logic described (1843) as a "great unreadable book, and its elaborate demonstration of axioms and truisms." A couple of years later Jeffrey admits, in speaking of Mr. Mill's paper on Guizot—"Though I have long thought very highly of his powers as a reasoner, I scarcely ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... still and watched the door. Half an hour passed—three-quarters, and then her brother re-entered alone. She went up to him at once, but his unreadable face told nothing. ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... knowledge, and that I must care about the best things—but how am I to begin?" She wondered what books he would tell her to take up to her own room, and recalled the famous writers that she had either not looked into or had found the most unreadable, with a half-smiling wish that she could mischievously ask Deronda if they were not the books called "medicine for the mind." Then she repented of her sauciness, and when she was safe from observation carried up a miscellaneous selection—Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Butler, Burke, Guizot—knowing, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... carrier pigeon would have no such difficulty in returning. Means must be found, however, to make it possible for each bird to carry many letters. M. Dagron, a clever photographer, discovered this means. He showed how he could photograph a letter and reduce it in size till the writing became unreadable, even under an ordinary magnifying glass. This could be done on films so thin that a roll of twenty of them could be inserted in one quill, each film representing a large number of letters. Having proved to the authorities the success of his invention, M. Dagron departed in a balloon, ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... conjectural and conflicting information concerning their royal prototypes of an antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable. Were there only a compensatory arrangement for this also in another class who should be driven by a like irresistible instinct to unreadable books, the heart of the political economist would be gladdened at seeing the substantial rewards of authorship so much more equally distributed by means of a demand adapted to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... departing from the general rule, gave no less than four criticisms in succession. This innovation greatly disgusted the publisher, who regarded them as so much lead weighing down his Review, although they proceeded from the pen of the Duke's right-hand man, the Rt. Hon. Sir George Murray. They were unreadable and produced no effect. It is needless to add the Duke had nothing to ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... founded on the form and substance of ancient documents; but I have hardly ever introduced into it literal quotations; I believe that unless it possesses a certain unity of language a book is unreadable, and I want ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... trustee for his readers. No matter how copious may be his notes, he cannot fully explain his processes or the reason of his confidence in one witness and not in another, his belief in one honest man against a half dozen untrustworthy men, without such prolixity as to make a general history unreadable. Now, in this position as trustee he is bound to assert nothing for which he has not evidence, as much as an executor of a will or the trustee for widows and orphans is obligated to render a correct account of the moneys in his possession. For this reason Grote ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... unity seems due to want of interest in politics. It is often said that the history of India in pre-Mohammedan times is an unintelligible or, at least, unreadable, record of the complicated quarrels and varying frontiers of small states. Yet this is as true of the history of the Italian as of the Indian peninsula. The real reason why Indian history seems tedious and intricate is that large interests ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... in the entente cordiale of the conspirators. Why else should he mistrust Liane's sincerity in asserting that she had seen Popinot? Aside from the question of what he imagined she could possibly gain by making a scene out of nothing—a riddle unreadable—one wondered consumedly what had happened to render Monk suspicious of ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... Before the public he would have liked to vindicate the efficiency of his department by establishing the identity of that man. He was a loyal servant. That, however, appeared impossible. The first term of the problem was unreadable—lacked all suggestion but ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Hooke called Cape Evans and sent weather reports to Wellington and Melbourne via Macquarie Island. Hooke and Ninnis on several evenings at about 11 o'clock have heard what happened to be faint messages, but unreadable. He sent word to Macquarie Island of this in hopes that they would hear and increase ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... exquisite descriptions of nature and the life-like sketches of character which will often reward the patient reader. That prolixity, which more than any other cause has made the work obsolete, and, as a whole, unreadable, was a recommendation rather than an objection at the time of publication. The "Arcadia," standing almost alone in the department of fiction, and far superior to its few competitors, took the place of a small circulating library. A spirit of lofty ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... unreadable face for an instant with an almost painful intensity. Then a smile swept away the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... unable to apprehend the greatness of the "Divine Comedy." Voltaire called the "Inferno" revolting, the "Purgatorio" dull, and the "Paradiso" unreadable. The reason is because they are not rightly attuned for the acceptance of the great truths which the poem teaches, and because they look at it from a wholly mistaken standpoint. If anyone supposes ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... III., that Titterby went, if I may put it so vulgarly, off the hooks. I think he must have got on to the conference between the mineowners and the representatives of the miners, and struggled until the gas became too thick for him. At any rate, after several unreadable pages, the following unhappy fragment stands ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... tradition, to challenge which is taught to be heresy and impiety. The poetical similes used in the Rig Vedas have been transformed into mythological tales. In the change of language the Vedas themselves are unreadable, except by the priests, who fatten on popular beliefs in the transmigration of souls and in the power of priestcraft to make that transmigration blissful—provided liberal gifts are duly forthcoming. Idolatry and witchcraft are rampant. Some saviour, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... 'Sabina,' a learned account of the Roman toilette. I here send you a companion to that work—not a direct translation, but a very minute abstract from a similar dissertation by Hartmann, (weeded of the wordiness which has made the original unreadable, and in consequence unread,) on the toilette and the wardrobe of the ladies of ancient Palestine. Hartmann was a respectable Oriental scholar, and he published his researches, which occupy three thick octavos, making in all one thousand four hundred and eighty-eight ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... Dresden, he believed that, in spite of the open enmity which existed between them, he could persuade the horse-dealer to enter into a new alliance with him. He therefore sent off one of his men to him with a letter, written in almost unreadable German, to the effect that if he would come to Altenburg and resume command of the band which had gathered there from the remnants of his former troops who had been dispersed, he, Nagelschmidt, was ready to assist him to escape from his imprisonment in Dresden by ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Suddenly she stiffened, sat upright in the bed, startled into wakefulness. Johnny put one dark, bony hand on her white shoulder, gently, reassuring. After a moment, finding herself, she turned away and lit a cigarette. Johnny finished pulling on his boots and stood, his hawk-like face unreadable in the cold gray light streaming through the huge ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... himself from the door jamb and with a parting "I should bibble," started back to his goats, which he had refused to graze outside the Basin as Holman Sommers advised. Helen May began valiantly to struggle with the fine, symmetrical, but almost unreadable chirography of the man of many words. She succeeded in transcribing the human polyp properly lithified and correctly constituting the strata of the psychozoic age, when Vic stuck his head in at ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... effort, but only her outward self. In her eyes was a message unreadable. Never before had ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... people who have spent the night in China, as it were, superficial and amusing, full of the tinkling of temple bells; and there are other books written by people who have spent years in China and who know it well,—ponderous books, full of absolute information, heavy and unreadable. Books of the first class get one nowhere. They are delightful and entertaining, but one feels their irresponsible authorship. Books of the second class get one nowhere, for one cannot read them; they are too ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... of the bridge. The colors were crude and primary—no fine shading or artistic handling to be seen. A title under the picture, and several inscriptions in French at the left side of the bottom, were so stained and blurred as to be totally unreadable with the ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... separated from Mysteries; it reached its greatest development under the early Tudors. The authors of Moralities strove to write plays not merely amusing, as farces, then also in great favour, but plays with a useful and practical aim. By means of now unreadable dramas, virtues, religion, morals, sciences were taught: the Catholic faith was derided by Protestants, and the Reformation by Catholics.[816] The discovery, then quite new, of America was discoursed about, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... court poet of Henry IV., had, in their turn, been consigned to oblivion, yet there was an increasing taste for the drama. The first comedy of Corneille, "Melite," was followed by many others, which, though now considered unreadable, were better than anything then known. The appearance of the "Cid," in 1635, a drama constructed on the foundation of the old Spanish romances, constituted an era in the dramatic history of France. Although not without great faults, resulting from strict adherence to the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... that liberal use of Analogical Hypothesis which is denied to History, and which, if sobered by research, and enlightened by that knowledge of mankind (without which Fiction can neither harm nor profit, for it becomes unreadable), tends to clear up much that were otherwise obscure, and to solve the disputes and difficulties of contradictory evidence by the philosophy ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... illegible, unreadable image, effigy imaginary, imaginative impending, approaching imperious, imperial imply, infer in, into inability, disability ingenious, ingenuous intelligent, intellectual insinuation, innuendo instinct, intuition involve, implicate ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... a scrap-book is: 1. One never has paste or gum tragacanth handy; 2. Mucilage won't stick, or stay, 4 weeks; 3. Mucilage sucks out the ink and makes the scraps unreadable; 4. To daub and paste 3 or 4 pages of scraps is tedious, slow, nasty and tiresome. My idea is this: Make a scrap-book with leaves veneered or coated with gum-stickum of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... which, while it is admirably written, teaches something false or something evil; nor is that a first-rate book which, though it discover a completely new thing, or emphasize the most valuable department of morals, is so constructed as to be unreadable. Now it will not be denied that as far as these two factors are concerned—and I repeat they are almost always found in combination—the position of the Book has dwindled almost to nothingness. One could give examples of almost every kind: one could show ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... to make his small salary as a teacher equal to the support of his family, his three children and his aged parents. There was his failure at literature, for his "History of the United States" brought him neither fame nor money, the public finding it dull and unreadable. ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... Cabbins, and some run between Decks. The French gave 'em Quarters, and put the Prisoners on board the Victoire, the Prize yielding nothing worth mention, except Liberty to about fifteen Christian Slaves; she was carried into and sold with the Prisoners at [text unreadable]. The Turks lost a great many Men, the French not less than 35 in boarding, for they lost very few by the great Shot, the Sally Men firing mostly at the Masts and Rigging, hoping by disabling to ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... native article. Here are doctors disagreeing about the treatment of a putrid fever then prevalent, and blackguarding each other with a characteristic virulence that renders the controversy not altogether unreadable. Here are President Wigglesworth and the Rev. Dr. Colman, endeavoring to raise a fund for the support of missionaries among the Indians of Massachusetts Bay. Easy would be the duties of such a mission now! Here—for there is nothing new under the sun—are frequent complaints of the disordered ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... why no one has ever tried to form an anthology of bad poetry. It would, of course, be easy enough to get together a dreary little volume of unreadable and unsaleable song. There are, however, certain stanzas so exquisite in their unconscious absurdity that an inverted immortality may be claimed for them. It is essential that their authors should have been serious, because parody and light verse have been carried ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... Nabob received a note from Hemerlingue, almost unreadable on account of the complicated scrawls, of abbreviations more or less commercial, under which the ex-sutler hid his ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... rational observation, and that those scientific works which have, to use a common expression, become 'antiquated' by the acquisition of new funds of knowledge, are thus continually being consigned to oblivion as unreadable. However discouraging such a prospect must be, no one who is animated by a genuine love of nature, and by a sense of the dignity attached to its study, can view with regret any thing which promises future additions and a greater degree of perfection to general knowledge. Many important ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... he issued Shelley's second novel from his press, and entered into negotiations with him for the publication of more poetry. The new romance was named "St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian." This tale, no less unreadable than "Zastrozzi," and even more chaotic in its plan, contained a good deal of poetry, which has been incorporated in the most recent editions of Shelley's works. A certain interest attaches to it as the first ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... are unreadable, they are very useful afterwards for reference, and my time could scarcely have been better spent. I find I gave five hundred words to the description of Turner's "Building of Carthage," and other pictures are treated with equal liberality. I carried the same laborious system ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... believe—no, I don't believe. I don't know. At the time I was certain. They all went down; and I don't know whether I have done stern retribution—or murder; whether I have added to the corpses that litter the bed of the unreadable sea the bodies of men completely innocent or basely guilty. I don't know. I ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... girl. Her body had been modified and her soul at once chastened and fired. Fresh in her memory was endless matter for meditation. And on the sofa, in a negligent attitude of repose, with shameless eyes gazing far into the caverns of the fire, and an unreadable faint smile on her face, she meditated. And she was the most seductive, tantalizing, self-contradictory object for study in the whole of Bursley. She had never been so interesting as in this brief period, and she might never be so ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... larger collection, containing much the same matter as the Cabinet, and probably in Johnson's mind when he jotted down Prince Titi), quite barren. La Princesse Minon-Minette et le Prince Souci, Apranor et Bellanire, Grisdelin et Charmante, are none of them unreadable. The next volume, too, is better as a whole than any we have had for a long time. Mme. Fagnan's Minet Bleu et Louvette contains, in its fifteen pages, a good situation by no means ill-treated. The pair are under the same spell—that of being ugly and witty for part of the week, handsome, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... of these authorities use the word in the same sense would go very far to establish the usage. On the other hand, the fact that any number of newspaper reporters agree in usage does not make the usage reputable. The style of newspaper reporters is not without merit; it is very rarely unreadable; but for all its virtue it is rarely a ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... the living of it after British standards are what Mr. Smith sought and here reveals. He could not write an unreadable book, this American artist. It is all interesting that he has to tell ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... four things are absolutely necessary to produce an artist, form, color, light and shade. Success in art implies a certain degree of ambition, and consequently upon its vanity and egotism; hence an artist's signature is generally peculiar and often unreadable from its originality, egotism and ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... Charles d'Orleans, that captive and captivating prince, wrote thousands of rondeaux; even before his time a gallant company of gentlemen composed the Livre des Cent Ballades, one hundred ballades, practically unreadable by modern men. Then came Clement Marot, with his gay and rather empty fluency, and Ronsard, with his mythological compliments, his sonnets, decked with roses, and led like lambs to the altar of Helen or Cassandra. A few, here and there, of ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... pseudo-mediaevalists like Mrs. Roche and Mrs. Radcliffe. This sort of work filled the few literary periodicals of the day, but was not read enough to make such publications profitable even then, and is pretty much all unreadable now. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Mills to whom those that love reading Thro' all that's unreadable call very clever;— And whereas Mill Senior makes war on good breeding, Mill Junior makes war on all ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Bryce saw something like effort in the dark unreadable eyes. Then suddenly Pierce smiled, his young face disarmingly innocent and merry. "Oh, come on, Bryce, it's not that serious. Be a good sport. You ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... page 47 is a best guess since the final number of the date is completely unreadable ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... and Kaffirs, interviewing witches and witch-finders, exploring the scenery of the interior, and accomplishing an expedition into the Bush, the result being a book of some 320 pages, in which not one is dull or unreadable. Of her lightness and firmness of touch we can give but one specimen, a sketch of a ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... turned to the platform. Shovel was apprehensive about Tommy, who was not exactly sobbing now; but strange, uncontrollable sounds not unlike the winding up of a clock proceeded from his throat; his face had flushed; there was a purposeful look in his usually unreadable eye; his fingers were fidgeting on the board in front of him, and he seemed to keep his seat ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... you shall be better treated this time," smiled Cervera, dropping into a chair opposite the detective, and fixing her sensuous, dark eyes on Nick's calm, unreadable face. ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... caballero of whom I shall sing." And Boca hummed a tune, gazing at Pete with unreadable eyes, half-smiling, half-sad. How young, smooth-cheeked, and boyish he was, as he glanced up and returned her smile. Yet how quickly his face changed as he turned his head toward the doorway, ever alert for a possible surprise. Boca pushed back her chair. "The guitar," she ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... of infancy, They speak,—yet utter not. Fair heavenly flowers Strewn on the floor-way of the angels' bowers! 'Twas HIS own hand that twined your chaplets bright, And thoughts of love are in your wreaths of light, Unread, unreadable by us;—there lie High meanings in your mystic tracery; Silent rebukings of day's garish dreams, And warnings solemn as your own ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... trenchant and forthright style which imparts such an air of heightened verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the new journalism. "The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are 'not for an age, but for all time,'" says Bernard Shaw, "has his reward in being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes trying to knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare peopling that same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire hunts, Ibsen photographing the local doctors and vestrymen of a Norwegian parish, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... or less successful love-poets of the conventional type writing in page xviii octosyllabics and the inevitable imitators of Dante with their unreadable allegories in arte mayor. The repository for the short poems of these writers is the Cancionero general of Hernando de Castillo (1511). It was reprinted many times throughout the sixteenth century. Among the writers ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... the sultan (to whom they all profess an unlimited adoration) sits trembling in his apartment, and dare neither defend nor revenge his favourite. This is the blessed condition of the most absolute monarch upon earth, who o—— no l—— but his will. [Editor's note: Two words are unreadable due to damage to the book which may have occurred at the time of printing. It seems probable that the sentence should end ".. who owns ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... it," continued Pembury; "it's rubbish, and unreadable; and though they condescend to let us see it, I don't suppose two fellows in the Form ever ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... little Prince, a third trump-card in the Hohenzollern game, is an unusually interesting event. The joy over him, not in Berlin Palace only, but in Berlin City, and over the Prussian Nation, was very great and universal;—still testified in manifold dull, unreadable old pamphlets, records official and volunteer,—which were then all ablaze like the bonfires, and are now fallen dark enough, and hardly credible even to the fancy of this ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... face with the old look, like the back o' somethin', or like you'd rubbed down the page when the ink was wet, an' had blurred the whole thing unreadable. An' I judged that, like enough, she knew nothin' whatever about ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... undeniably genuine. I really have, in some things, a greatness of soul. I will refrain—but in order that these effusions may not be lost to the world, I offer them to the annuals for 1839; not so much for the sake of pecuniary compensation, but in order to improve the reading of some of that very unreadable ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard |
