"Ungraceful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nut-shell. When pursued by the hunters, he is said to bury his head in the sand, and having done this, to imagine that he cannot be discovered by the keenest search. Do not you, my lord, imitate the manners of the ostrich. Believe me, they are ungraceful; and, if maturely considered, will perhaps appear ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... had had on this very day, for some unknown reason, words between them more or less unfriendly, and Tai-yue was again sitting all alone in her room, giving way to tears. Pao-yue was once more within himself quite conscience-smitten for his ungraceful remarks, and coming forward, he humbly made advances, until, at length, Tai-yue little by little ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... unexpected an assertion of superiority? at least before the late Teutonic conquest? Gwendolen colored deeply, but, with her usual presence of mind, did not show an ungraceful resentment by moving away immediately; and Miss Arrowpoint, who had been near enough to overhear (and also to observe that Herr Klesmer's mode of looking at Gwendolen was more conspicuously admiring than was quite consistent with good taste), now with the utmost tact and kindness came close ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... development hypothesis, we ascertain, as we proceed outwards, that the course is not one of progression from the low to the high, but of descent from the high to the low. Passing northwards, we meet, where the lichen-covered land projects into the frozen ocean, with the diminutive Laps, squat, ungraceful, with their flat features surmounted by pyramidal skulls of small capacity, and, as a race, unfitted for the arts either of peace or war. We meet also with the timid Namollas, with noses so flat as to be scarce visible ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... wrath. All was fanaticism, uncharitableness, and denunciation. Long, lank hair, a mixture of gray and black, fell down his neck, and in some degree obscured the sides of his face, and, parting on his forehead, fell in either direction in straight and formal screens. On the top of this ungraceful exhibition was laid impending forward, so as to overhang in some measure the whole fabric, a large hat of three equal cocks. His coat was of a rusty black, and his breeches and stockings were of the same color; his shoes without luster, and half-concealed beneath huge plated buckles. He stalked ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... touch. A mother must battle against the tendencies that drag her downward. She must take pains to grow, or she will not grow. She must sedulously cultivate her mind and heart, or her old age will be ungraceful; and if she lose freshness without acquiring ripeness, she is indeed in an evil case. The first, the most important trust which God has given to any one is himself. To secure this trust, He has made us so that in no possible way can we benefit the world so much as by making the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... She bowed to him, shook the lines, and the old horse moved on. Just before reaching a bend in the road, she looked back at him. How powerful was his bearing, how strong his stride; and with all his bigness he was not ungraceful. ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... Venner and the Autocrat, upon the cottage worldliness, the routine of abundant and common comforts achieved by a distressing household industry, the shrillness, the unrest, the best-parlour emulation, the ungraceful vanity, of Americans of the country-side and the country-town; upon their affections made vulgar by undemonstrativeness, and their consciences made vulgar by demonstrativeness—their kindness by reticence, and their religion ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... cause such a fury. A mere twenty Earth pounds of an indifferent grade of rock and a little iron, an irregular, ungraceful lump, spawned somewhere a billion years before as a star died. But it still had most of the awesome velocity and inertia ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... pose, and so gentle in every movement! It was evidently no drudgery to her; the material was handy, and the task one of love. All the behavior of the wood thrush affects one like music; it is melody to the eye as the song is to the ear; it is visible harmony. This bird cannot do an ungraceful thing. It has the bearing of a bird of fine breeding. Its cousin the robin is much more masculine and plebeian, harsher in voice, and ruder in manners. The wood thrush is urban and suggests sylvan halls and courtly companions. Softness, gentleness, composure, characterize every movement. In only ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... remember that Christianity still persecutes to the full extent of its power, and that a Creed which answers argument with prosecution cannot expect tender treatment in return; and I would also ask him, in the words of Ruskin, "to consider how much less harm is done in the world by ungraceful boldness ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... craft to follow the Indian canoes and the bateaux of the French missionaries down the great rivers, was the flatboat—a homely and ungraceful vessel, but yet one to which the people of the United States owe, perhaps, more of real service in the direction of building up a great nation than they do to Dewey's "Olympia," or Schley's "Brooklyn." A typical flatboat of the early days of river navigation was about fifty-five ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... to literary tasks, but still regarded himself as a scholar. Leisure fitted his temperament—he was never in haste, even when he was in a hurry, and he carried with him the air of having all the time there was. Nothing is so ungraceful as haste. Addison always had time to listen; and we make friends, not by explaining things to other folks, but by allowing others ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... waiting for him on the path under the yew-trees, with two of his troopers on guard in the background. He had removed his coat and vest, and stood, a not ungraceful figure, in the sunshine, bending his rapier and feeling its point with his thumb. He was doing this when his eyes surprised his opponent's entrance, and, without desisting from ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... obliged to be content with this ungraceful concession, and proceeded to begin my narration. I described the situation of my father's dwelling. I mentioned the year, month, day, and hour of her nephew's appearance among us. I expatiated minutely on his form, features, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... eyes, settled this question. "The lady is asleep. See, she has dropped her book." And; in fact, the whole attitude was lax and not ungraceful. Her right hand hung down, and the domestic story, its ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Mark Ratcliff,' and set me some atoning penance for my idiocy. You do not know what a curse that vile paper has been to me," and he shot the offending missive into the foolish little river and broke into vigorous and ungraceful language with regard ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... riding, being given a horse much inferior to either Uncle David's or Norah's—the latter rides like a jockey, and, of course, astride, which I consider very ungraceful. She turns out well, however, and all her get-up is good—her habits come from a Melbourne tailor. I think I will get some clothes in Melbourne on my way back; they may not have newer ideas, but it may be useful for purposes of comparison with the Sydney cut. My riding clothes were evidently ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... words of M. Sajous's note, to smile agreeably and then to laugh; she became gay. 'It makes me laugh,' she said, and then, 'I'm not tipsy, I want to sing,' and so on through the whole performance of a not ungraceful giserie, which we stopped at that stage, for I was loth to have the degrading performance of drunkenness carried to the extreme I had seen her go through at the Charite. I now applied a tube of alcohol, asking the assistant, however, to give ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... returned to the house of Edgar's cousin. Melissa's partner at the ball was the son of a gentleman of independent fortune in New-London. He was a gay young man, aged about twenty-five. His address was easy, his manners rather voluptuous than refined; confident, but not ungraceful. He led the ton in fashionable circles; gave taste its zest, and was quite a favorite with the ladies ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... public, and not a little to those religious sects who extended their supervision to all the affairs of life, that had a chief concern in settling the country, and who have entailed so much that is inconvenient and ungraceful (I might almost say, in some instances, disgraceful) on the nation, blended with so much that forms its purest sources of pride. Men are always an inconsistent medley ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a dead pine sapling from the stock of firewood under his wagon, and, of course, emphasising his address by an easy and not ungraceful clatter of the adjective used so largely by poets in denunciation of war—"we ain't goin' to travel these carrion a mile to the gate, an' most likely fine it locked when we git there. Hold on till I git my internal machine to work on the fence. Dad! Where's that ole morepoke? O, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... both gentle and timid, and he will always try to avoid danger by flight. It is when running that he exposes his only ungraceful point. ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... forcible and always intelligible to his audience. Lincoln had the sense of words, the imagination, the intensity of feeling, which go to the making of great literature; but for his masterpieces he always needed time. His voice was high and strained, his gestures ungraceful, his manner painful, save in the recital of those passages which he had carefully prepared or when he was freed of his self-consciousness by anger or enthusiasm. Neither of them, in any single speech, could be compared to Webster in the other of the two most famous ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... trouble you, Miss Deb," interrupted Jan, tilting himself backwards over the arm of the chair in a very ungraceful fashion, and leaving his legs dangling. "Others will, if he wo—if he can't. Lionel has just been saying that as Sibylla's sisters, he shall ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... varnished boots and lilac gloves on Sunday. Toward the close of his college course, he became particularly attached to a poor bursar, by name Lescande, who excelled in mathematics, but who was very ungraceful, awkwardly shy and timid, with a painful sensitiveness to the peculiarities of his person. He was nicknamed "Wolfhead," from the refractory nature of his hair; but the elegant Camors stopped the scoffers by protecting the young man with his friendship. Lescande felt this deeply, and adored his ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... in view, impossible, indeed, to close the eyes upon. Far enough it was from any semblance to historical fact, but almost possible, almost admissible, in the form of the woman, as historical fiction. She dared to sit upon the floor now, in the ungraceful huddled Eastern fashion, clasping her knees to her breast, with her back half turned to her lord, the friend of Caesar, so that he could not see the design that sat behind the mask of her sharp indifference. She rested her chin upon ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... from a ladle-shaped vessel of bamboo with a long handle, and then gives me a little blue towel to wipe them upon, a Votive towel with mysterious white characters upon it. Then we all ascend; I feeling very much like a clumsy barbarian in my ungraceful foreign garb. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... natives of sago districts consume a considerable quantity of sago flour, which is boiled into a thick, tasteless paste, called boyat and eaten by being twisted into a large ball round a stick and inserted into the mouth—an ungraceful operation. Tamarind, or some very acid sauce is used to impart to it some flavour. Sago is of course cheaper than rice, but the latter is, as a rule, much preferred by the native, and is found more nutritious and lasting. LOGAN, in the Journal of the Indian Archipelago, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... had seen a ghost. I afterwards concluded that Miss Ambient wasn't incapable of deriving pleasure from this weird effect, and I now believe that reflexion concerned in her having sunk again to her seat with her long lean but not ungraceful arms locked together in an archaic manner on her knees and her mournful eyes addressing me a message of intentness which foreshadowed what I was subsequently to suffer. She was a singular fatuous artificial creature, and I was never more than ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... central tower. There is a legend to the effect that there were seven towers in the original design—the central one, two at the west end, and one at each angle of the transepts; and this seems to be supported by the solid character of some of the piers in the transepts. Yet, despite the rather ungraceful outline of the whole building, when its mere size is realised, it gradually asserts its importance and incontrovertibly proves its right to be considered one of the very ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... about fifteen and of a heavy, ungraceful build. His hair was thick and rather scraggly, his face was of the square type, and his expression what people call stolid. He had freckles but not too many, and his mouth was large and his lips tight-set. His face wore a characteristic frown which was the last feeble trace of ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... "Which is a much more definitive word than that, being never employed in any other way than as a relative; whereas that is a word of many senses; sometimes a demonstrative pronoun, often a conjunction. In some cases we are indeed obliged to use that for a relative, in order to avoid the ungraceful repetition of which in the same sentence. But when we are laid under no necessity of this kind, which is always the preferable word, and certainly was so in this sentence: 'Pleasures which the vulgar are not capable of receiving,' is much better than 'pleasures ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... their style, features, and attire. They all wore light-coloured "dual garments" of great width, and tight bodices. Their coiffure was carefully finished, but a part of the forehead was hidden by an ungraceful fringe of hair. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... superhistoric sense, to which, and to which alone, the higher drama appeals. All these come within the scope of imaginative truth. To illustrate my third head by an example. Tieck criticises John Kemble's dressing for Macbeth in a modern Highland costume, as being ungraceful without any countervailing merit of historical exactness. I think a deeper reason for his dissatisfaction might be found in the fact, that this garb, with its purely modern and British army associations, is out of place on Fores Heath, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Empire was still the same he employed at the military school; and as his shoes had been made by the same measure, from that time, and no new one ever taken, his shoes, as well as his boots, were always badly made and ungraceful. For a long time he wore them pointed; but I persuaded him to have them 'en bec de canne', as that was the fashion. At last his old measure was found too small, and I got his Majesty's consent to have a new one-taken; so I summoned the shoemaker, who had succeeded his father, and was exceedingly ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... unnaturally distorts his features, as to give to his countenance a very unpleasant expression. On such occasions, you would imagine that he was suddenly seized with some violent paroxysms of pain. He is one of the most ungraceful speakers I have ever heard address a public assemblage of persons. In addition to the awkwardness of his general manner, he 'makes mouths,' which would of themselves be sufficient to mar the agreeableness of his delivery. And his manner of speaking, and the ungracefulness of his ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... paint-brushes, and palettes, this young person slipped into the most comfortable chair near the fire, and, having waited for the rest to seat themselves, proceeded to open the council. Mollie, who was sixteen, large, fair, beautiful, and not as tidy as she might have been, dropped into a not ungraceful position at her feet. Aimee, who was a little maiden with a tender, spirituelle face, and all the forethought of the family, sat near, with some grave perplexity in her expression. 'Toinette and Tod, posed in the ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... party at the Homestead were assembled near the door, when, discerning them too late to avoid them, Lady Temple's equipage drew up in the peculiarly ungraceful fashion of waggonettes, when they prepare to shoot their passengers ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... will display the greatest difference of light and shade when it is seen in the strongest light, as by sunlight, or, at night, by the light of a fire. But this should not be much used in painting because the works remain crude and ungraceful. ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... ungraceful, thick starship on the verge of aging into scrap. Towering here between the village and the huge, bluish-green leaves of the Kappan forest, she was in the process of being transformed into a planet-bound object of a ...
— A Transmutation of Muddles • Horace Brown Fyfe
... have no other means of locomotion than their little feet. These beauties, as we may suppose them to be, since they are masked more closely than society ladies at the Opera ball, wear over their garments a habbarah, a sort of black taffeta sack, which fills with air and swells in the most ungraceful fashion if the animal's pace ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... grace nor style to the figure. It is too short to give the distinction and dignity that handsome wraps with long lines almost invariably do, although they seem to add age to the form. There is a hint of youth in this ungraceful jacket to be sure, but it is not especially attractive in its suggestion ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... of civilization and religion and common decency. They can be met in but one way: by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture. And so, too, the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps. The guiding of thought and the deft coordination of deed is at once the ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... one to presume that my mule and I had become reconciled by our lengthened companionship. Discomfort amounting to positive agony had taught me to adopt more attitudes, graceful or ungraceful, than all the combined systems of Delsarte and other physical culturists ...
— Six Days on the Hurricane Deck of a Mule - An account of a journey made on mule back in Honduras, - C.A. in August, 1891 • Almira Stillwell Cole
... smaller poems interspersed throughout the volume. Mr Tennyson has his "Claribels," and "Isabels," and "Adelines," and "Eleanores"—ladies with whom he frequently plays strange, though, we admit, by no means ungraceful vagaries; and Mr Patmore, as in duty bound, and following the imitative bent of his genius, must also have his Geraldine to dally with. The two following stanzas of playful namby-pambyism, are a specimen of the manner in which this gentleman ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... companion of the moment. There was nothing extraordinary in the face except the eyes burning fitfully under the gloom of incredibly thick, coarse, reddish eyebrows. His mouth was a curious mixture of softness and cruelty, and his hands were broad, but not ungraceful. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... "These," says Mr. Graves, "were not precisely his sentiments, though he thought, right enough, that every one should, in some degree, consult his particular shape and complexion in adjusting his dress; and that no fashion ought to sanctify what was ungraceful, absurd, or really deformed."] ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... constrained, uneasy, and ungraceful, can spoil the happiness of a dozen people. Therefore he is bound to create an artificial manner, if a natural one does not come to him, remembering always that "manners are ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... away, strong and rugged and ungraceful, from the head to the heel of him a man. Life had gone hard with him. She wondered whether that were the reason her heart went ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... the top, and tied with a drawing-string around the waist. My first impression was, that the men had got up in a great hurry, and put on their trousers hinder-end foremost. It would be difficult to invent a costume more awkward and ungraceful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... You will esteem it perhaps a paradox when I tell you that the very causes which preserve your temper in an external state of equability, your refinement of mind, your self-respect, your delicate reserve, your abhorrence of every thing unfeminine and ungraceful, may produce exactly the contrary effect on your feelings, and provoke internally a great deal of contempt and dislike for those whose conduct transgresses from your exalted ideas ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... "An ungraceful elision" of the possessive inflection, as Mason calls it. Cf. Dryden, Hind and Panther, iii.: "Affected Kindness ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... expand. The soul of the true artist is filled with unspeakable apprehension by the possibility of seeing these master-pieces destroyed or scattered abroad, these treasures plundered, all this wealth annihilated; and especially by the danger of seeing the ungraceful and meagre forms of modern utilitarianism usurp the place held by the manners, the habits, the face of all things in this privileged land of beauty, all consecrated by the admiration of ages. Alas! Holy Father, ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... thanked her mutely. He was as plain-looking a man as he had been a boy, more hatchet-faced than ever. He was long and lean and angular, and his positions were ungraceful. But his eyes were the eyes of Don Quixote. The eyes had appealed to Nelly as long ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... ground beside her. Another almost as grotesque was a Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Breughel the Elder—a snow-scene in the wide street of a red brick, high-gabled village—soldiers, parents, children, all in the stiff, ungraceful Flemish dress of the sixteenth century, the poor little children, in square trousers and pinafores, clinging to their mothers' narrow skirts. Oddly enough, it made the story more real to me than it had ever seemed before, quite painfully ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... us "the heads of those who aspire to glory in apparel resemble a parterre, you see alleys and figures traced on them with a great deal of ingenuity." The bosom, elaborately bound downwards, is covered with a square bit of stuff, or a calico pagne—most ungraceful of raiment-wrapped under the arms, and extending ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the natives of Port Jackson, having fallen to the low pitch of their voices, recommenced their song at the octave, which was accompanied by slow and not ungraceful motions of the body and limbs, their hands being held up in a supplicating posture, and the tone and manner of their song and gestures seemed to bespeak the good will and forbearance of their auditors. Observing that they were attentively listened to, they each selected one of our people, ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... might have given the hint to Raphael for one of his figures, in a similar attitude, introduced into the famous cartoon of the same subject. Before St. Paul, below, a woman is sitting—looking at him, and having her back turned to the spectator. The head-dress of this figure, which is white, is not ungraceful. I made a rude copy of it; but if I had even coloured like * * * I could not have done justice to the neck and back; which exhibited a tone of colour that seemed to unite all the warmth of Titian with all the freshness of Rubens. In ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Christopher was established as queer, and his townsfolk were disposed to let him rest at that. His pale face was remarkable for nothing except a pair of dreamy eyes which could at times give sign of inward lightnings. His hair was lank; his figure was attenuated and ungraceful; he wore his clothes awkwardly. He was commonly supposed to be sulky, and some people thought his tone of voice bumptious and insolent. He was far from being a favourite, but those who knew him best liked him best, which is ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... made it impossible for the House to comply with His Majesty's wish. At the next sitting the Committee reported; and on the report there was an animated debate. The friends of the government thought the proposed address offensive. The most respectable members of the majority felt that it would be ungraceful to aggravate by harsh language the pain which must be caused by their conscientious opposition to the King's wishes. Some strong expressions were therefore softened down; some courtly phrases were inserted; but the House refused ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... always worth consideration; but handwritings are surely equivocal testimonies of character; they depend so much on education, on times and seasons and moods, conscious and unconscious wills, &c. What would be said by an autographist to the strange old, ungraceful, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... a fuzzy, ungraceful lot at this season. Even the best of them had big bellies and carried dirty and tangled manes, but as the grazing improved, as the warmth and plenty of May filled their veins with new blood, they sloughed off their mangy coats and lifted their wide-blown nostrils to the western wind in exultant ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... place where we may talk of what we have done without being charged with self adulation. There is the place where we may lounge without being thought ungraceful. There is the place where we may express affection without being thought silly. There is the place where we may forget our annoyances, and exasperations, and troubles. Forlorn earth pilgrim! no home? Then die. That is better. The ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... rolling in; they drew back and silenced each other.—"The Doctor!" This was the remarkable person they called Jack Doubleface. Nature had stuck a philosophic head, with finely-cut features, and a mouth brimful of finesse, on to a corpulent and ungraceful body, that yawed from side to side as ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... there was perhaps too strong a suggestion of command in his attitude, and when Helen came abreast of him, he laid a hand restrainingly upon her arm. She shook it off, not with ill-humored petulance, for Helen was never ungraceful nor undignified, but with a disdain that hurt the man far more than anger. Nevertheless, knowing that he was right, he was determined that she should run no risk. Letting his hand swing at his side, he walked a few paces before her, ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... fawn-skin falling from waist to instep. Their bodies were painted vermilion from brow to ankle; they carried in their hands red harvest apples, which they tossed one to another as they move lightly across the open space in a slow, springy, yet not ungraceful dance. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... assume she must be your wife, for how could it be supposed that you would have an unattractive sweetheart? A true woman may be ungraceful; but then, her ugliness implies a thousand disagreeable things for you. One supposes you must be a notary or a magistrate, as these two professions have a monopoly of grotesque and well-dowered spouses. Now, is this ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Presbyterian Sabbaths in the city, the extravagance of the independent preachers in the camp, the precise garb, the severe countenance, the petty scruples, the affected accent, the absurd names and phrases which marked the Puritans,—the valour, the policy, the public spirit, which lurked beneath these ungraceful disguises,—the dreams of the raving Fifth-monarchy-man, the dreams, scarcely less wild, of the philosophic republican, all these would enter into the representation, and render it at once more ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a forceful woman. She had power. It was in her lean, high-shouldered, ungraceful figure. It was in her thin, mobile lips and her high-bridged nose with its thin, clean-cut nostrils. She impressed herself upon her environment. Standing there at the mantel, her hands clasped behind her, she was so caught up by the possibilities of the future that she succeeded in imparting ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... ungraceful thing. True beauty is always found in a setting of modesty, and then only appears the bright jewel that ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... mountains hang down "somewhat so poetical," as Mr. Ashe(439) said, that your own poet Gray will scarce keep tune with you. All this refers to your cascade scene and your letter. For the library it cannot have the Strawberry imprimatur: the double arches and double pinnacles are most ungraceful; and the doors below the book-cases in Mr. Chute's design had a conventual look, which yours totally wants. For this time, we shall put your genius in commission, and, like some other regents, execute our own plan without minding ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... he was close beside her, and stood leaning an elbow on the corner of the spinet, a long and not ungraceful figure, with the black curls of his full-bottomed wig falling about his swarthy, ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... cap again, and made a not ungraceful gesture, indicating the wearer of the weather-beaten peonies and the green-and-yellow ulster, who clung to his thin elbow with a red, hard-working hand. "Me an' my wife, that is. Bein' on a sort of outin', a kind of Beanfeast for Two, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... expresses your meaning, and therefore sounds harshly. I am accustomed to speak plainly myself, and to strip of their flowery entourage the sentiments to which I listen. It may be an ungraceful habit, but it is a safe one. I am persuaded that if vice were always called by its true name, shame, misery, and ruin would ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... said—a kind of "white Brahmanas"; and it was certain that, as a matter of fact, the pride of race and the possession of western civilisation created a sense of superiority, the display of which was ungraceful and even dangerous, when not tempered by official responsibility. This feeling had been sensitive enough in the days of Lord William Bentinck, when the class referred to was small in numbers and devoid of influence. ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... leather belt buckled tightly around his waist. I lingered a moment on the curbstone, and looked after him with a sensation of mingled pride, amusement, and curiosity. That was my Family; there it was, in that broad back and those not ungraceful legs, striding up Sixth Avenue, with its noble intellect intent on thoughts of breakfast. I was thankful that it had not been written in the book of fate that this limb of the closely pruned Wesley tree should be lopped off by the sword of war. But as Washington ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... relative in the background." From this genteel eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me out in the character of a generous editor. It is in this part that I best remember him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop; looking quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane adventurer; smiling with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one peaked eyebrow with a great appearance of finesse; speaking low and sweet and thick, with a touch ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... evening progressed—became unpleasantly hot. Dancing was in full swing and the orchestra had just struck up the first strains of that inspiriting new dance—the latest importation from Vienna—a dreamy waltz of which dowagers strongly disapproved, deeming it licentious, indecent, and certainly ungraceful, but which the young folk delighted in, and persisted in dancing, defying the mammas and ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... hamlets. The Spanish and mestizo cavaliers, however, condescend to dance only with mestiza partners, and very seldom invite a pretty native girl to join them. The natives very rarely dance together; but in Samar I was present on one occasion at a by no means ungraceful native dance where "improvised" verses were sung. The male dancer compared his partner with a rose, and she answered he should be careful in touching it as a rose had thorns. This would have been thought a charming compliment in ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... those of the other islands; but that the gold country lay still more to the eastwards. By their description the men were not of large size, yet brawny and well set, without beards, having wide nostrils and broad smooth ungraceful foreheads, which were so shaped at their birth as a beauty, for which reason, and because they always went bareheaded, their skulls were hard enough to break a Spanish sword. Here the admiral observed the length of the day and night, and found ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... they were themselves not in favor of the new mode. They had little sympathy for the elimination of the graceful dance by the introduction of what they called the "shuffle" or the "bunny-hug," "turkey-trot," and other ungraceful and unworthy dances. It was decided that the Castles should, through Bok's magazine and their own public exhibitions, revive the gavotte, the polka, and finally the waltz. They would evolve these into new forms and Bok would present them pictorially. A series of three double-page ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... resumed its usual peaceful course. The names of these daughters, in order of age, were as follows: Jovita, Micaela, Socorro, and Emilita. In appearance, they were four insignificant beings, neither beautiful nor ugly, graceful nor ungraceful, young nor old, sad nor vivacious. There was nothing remarkable in any one of them, and yet by the domestic hearth the character of each was quite distinct. Jovita was sentimental and reserved, Michaela was quick tempered, and Emilita was the liveliest ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... resulted that my desire to play with her increased greatly. And she, knowing this, was as perverse as a princess in a fairy tale; she laughed mercilessly at my timid ways, at my awkward manners and my ungraceful fashion of entering the parlor; there was kept up between us a constant interchange of playful raillery, an oral ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... arrested by some play of light and shade. Cuban villages, with few exceptions, are unattractive, although there is not infrequently some particular building, usually a church, that calls for a second look or a careful examination. Most of these little communities consist of a row of low and ungraceful structures bordering the highway. They are usually extended by building on at the ends. If the town street gets undesirably long, a second street or a third will be made, on one or both sides of the main street, and thus the town acquires breadth as well as length. The houses are ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... morning he was delighted by the coming of a little herd of about a dozen giraffes, and he crouched among the bushes, watching them drink; the towering bull of about eighteen feet in height began by straddling out its forelegs in the most ungraceful way, till it could lower itself enough to reach the water ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... set by an inexperienced surgeon. This, also, was a blemish in his deportment; and though his broad shoulders, sinewy arms, and expanded chest, betokened the strength which he often displayed, it was strength of a clumsy and ungraceful character. His language and gestures were those of one seldom used to converse with equals, more seldom still with superiors; short, abrupt, and decisive, almost to the verge of sternness. In the judgment of those who were habitually acquainted with the Constable, ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... adjusted his collar before the looking-glass which the propriety and satisfactoriness of our behavior had induced Frau Schmidt to add to our responsibilities, pulled his cuffs down, and remarked en passant that "the 'cello was a horribly ungraceful instrument." ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... a man who might, perhaps, have numbered some five and thirty years; but at a hasty glance, he would have seemed considerably younger. He was above the ordinary stature; though a gentle, and not ungraceful bend in the neck rather than the shoulders, somewhat curtailed his proper advantages of height. His frame was thin and slender, but well knit and fair proportioned. Nature had originally cast his form in an athletic mould; but sedentary habits, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... inspiration of the poem conceived as a whole, but rather to have dropped of itself into the mind of the poet in one of his rambles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has patiently built up around it a setting of verse too often ungraceful in form and of a material whose cheapness may cast a doubt on the priceless quality of the gem it encumbers.[353] During the most happily productive period of his life, Wordsworth was impatient of what ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... for the two horsemen were talking in ordinary, conversational tones as they rode leisurely down to the ford. When they passed Lorraine, the horse nearest her shied against the other and was sworn at parenthetically for a fool. Against the skyline Lorraine saw the rider's form bulk squatty and ungraceful, reminding her of an actor whom she knew and did not like. It was that resemblance perhaps which held her quiet instead of following her first impulse to speak to them and ask them to carry her to ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... of us through all the ungraceful, inartistic realisms of our lives; the high poetry is ever there, the kingdom of romance is at hand; the only trouble is to find the rhymes—O! if we could ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... signally in the one especial result that might have been expected from it: all my French dancing lessons had not given me a good deportment, nor taught me to hold myself upright. I stooped, slouched, and poked, stood with one hip up and one shoulder down, and exhibited an altogether disgracefully ungraceful carriage, which greatly afflicted my parents. In order that I might "bear my body more seemly," various were the methods resorted to; among others, a hideous engine of torture of the backboard species, made of steel covered with ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... breakfast table sits one of aspect so different, that you could ill believe they belonged to the same family. She is younger and taller—tall indeed, but not ungraceful, though by no means beautiful. She has all the features that belong to a face—among them not a good one. Stay! I am wrong: there were in truth, dominant over the rest, TWO good features—her two eyes, dark as eyes well could be without being all pupil, large, and rather long like her sister's until ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... a canon of the cathedral, and a preacher of considerable popularity. He had one of the most meagre and forbidding physiognomies I ever beheld, and his beard was black and unshaven. But he preached well; fluently, and even eloquently: making a very singular, but not ungraceful, use of his left arm—and displaying at times rather a happy familiarity of manner, wholly exempt from vulgarity, and well suited to the capacities and feelings of his youthful audience. His subject was "belief in Christ Jesus;" on which he gave very excellent ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... poem 'easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting.' Of the songs in Comus he remarks: 'they are harsh in their diction, and not very musical in their numbers.' He could see nothing in the splendour and elevation of Gray, but 'glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments.' The passionate intensity of Donne escaped him altogether; he could only wonder how so ingenious a writer could be so absurd. Such preposterous judgments can only be accounted for by inherent deficiencies of taste; Johnson had no ear, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... be about one inch higher than the level of the elbows. A line dropped from the edge of the desk should strike the front edge of the seat. Sliding down into the seat, bending too much over the desk while writing and studying, sitting on one foot or resting on the small of the back, are all ungraceful and unhealthful positions, and are often taken by pupils old enough to know better. This topic is well worth the vigilance of every thoughtful teacher, especially of one in ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... soft interlude. It was an improvisation. She sat low at the instrument, and the lines of her body settled into ungraceful curves and angles that gave it an appearance of deformity. Gradually and imperceptibly the interlude melted into the soft opening minor chords of the ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... "'Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... he discuss a subject which he did not understand? Carlino thanked her. He had been on the point of falling in love with her; had greatly feared such a catastrophe. Her words, coming as they did so soon after her appearance in a certain offensive hat, with an ungraceful feather, and after some rather bourgeois expressions of admiration for that poor, tiresome devil Mendelssohn, had saved him a jamais. The two sparred gaily for some time, and, in spite of his poisoned tonsils, Carlino was in such high spirits that Noemi congratulated him on the subject of ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... a book, perhaps one that had read a great deal would say, that an Arabian horse is a very clumsy, ungraceful animal." This was written by Horace Walpole to Miss Berry, in 1791, in allusion to Dr Johnson's depreciation of Thomas Gray the poet.[192] It is an acute observation, well worth being wrought out. There is a grandeur and ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... a little upper room. She has a small, brisk, wide-awake figure, not ungraceful; frank, simple, straightforward, and downright. She had on a robe, I think, but I did not look so low, my attention being chiefly drawn to a sort of man's sack of purple or plum-colored broadcloth, into the side-pockets of which her hands were thrust ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... boyish slenderness and spring, though the awkward angles were somehow softened away. He no longer stooped and shambled, but held his head up and his shoulders back; and if he did still prance, as his uncle declared, like the Mighty Ones of Scripture, it was not an ungraceful prancing. Briefly, Jack Ferrers ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... wintry. They are generally inspiriting, life-giving, but, if perpetual, would glare too much on the tired sense; one likes sometimes a cloudy day, with its damp and warmer breath,—its gentle, down-looking shades. Sadness in some is intolerably ungraceful and oppressive; it affects one like a cold rainy day in June or September, when all pleasure departs with the sun; everything seems out of place and irrelative to the time; the clouds are fog, the atmosphere leaden,—but 'tis ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Elizur Wright's translation,—a meritorious one, still master of the field which, near fifty years ago, it entered as pioneer. Mr. Wright here expands La Fontaine's thirty-two verses to forty-four. The additions are not ungraceful, but they encumber somewhat the Attic neatness and simplicity of the original. We ought to say, that La Fontaine boldly broke with the tradition which had been making Alexandrines—lines of six feet—obligatory in French verse. He rhymes irregularly, at choice, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... distinguish themselves in some way or other, tilted back the bench on which they sat so far that they completely lost their equilibrium, and indubitably proved the possibility of their getting out, at least, by finding themselves on the floor in various ungraceful positions, and with ...
— Hollowmell - or, A Schoolgirl's Mission • E.R. Burden
... the largest (as it also is the largest of antelopes), being sometimes of the size and weight of a full-grown horse! It is an animal of rather an ungainly appearance; but its beautiful buff colour and mild disposition make up for its ungraceful shape; and it is scarcely ever out of good condition. Its home is Southern Africa, where it is still found in large herds; and its flesh affords a plentiful subsistence both to travellers and the half-savage ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... be: see note, l. 12. without duck or nod: words used to describe the ungraceful dancing and awkward courtesy of the ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... Toplitz, as if by accident, he met the Princess Mary out on a hunting party. The princess was on horseback; but she rode awkwardly, and her demeanor was shy and ungraceful. She well knew the object of this casual meeting, and when the King of Rome approached to greet her, she turned pale and trembled as she felt the gaze of his large blue eyes. Her paleness did not increase her beauty, nor ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... a loss in reading his own compositions, which it is supposed he has been preparing with much pains and thought for the instruction of his people? The want of a little more care in this article, is the cause of much ungraceful behaviour. You will observe some clergymen with their heads held down from the beginning to the end, within an inch of the cushion, to read what is hardly legible; which, besides the untoward manner, hinders them from making the best advantage of their voice: others again ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... of the new life which had come into the world, and give unerring promise of the progress which followed. The same improvement is seen in bronze-casting as in sculpture; and though to our eyes it still remains crude and ungraceful, yet by comparing it with the work of the previous century we mark a hopeful ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... fewer examples of iron and lead. They were fairly adroit workers in silver, electrum, and especially in gold. The amulets, cups, necklaces, and jewellery discovered in their tombs or in the ruins of their houses, are sometimes of a not ungraceful form. Their pottery was made by hand, and was not painted or varnished, but they often gave to it a fine lustre by means of a stone-polisher. Other peoples of uncertain origin, but who had attained a civilization as advanced ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... herself on a fragment of fallen rock to recover her breath and strength, while her companion, on whose sinews no personal exertion seemed to make any impression, stood at her side, leaning in his own and not ungraceful manner on his long rifle. Several minutes passed, and neither spoke; Mabel, in particular, being lost in ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... of different colours. They wear yellow leather boots, and no stockings. Over the boots they wear large slippers, in which they shuffle along with a gait very little less awkward than the toddle of a cramp-footed lady in China. If they are ungraceful on foot, matters are not much better when they ride. Sitting astride a donkey (for they do not use side-saddles), a Turkish lady is about as comical an object as you could wish to behold, though I have no doubt she is quite unconscious of looking anything but dignified, as she presses ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... may be sometimes occasioned by the adhesion of the lungs to the pleura, after an inflammation of them; or to the adhesion of some abdominal viscera to their cavity, or to each other; which also are more liable to affect ladies from the unnatural and ungraceful pressure of tight stays, or by sitting or lying too long in one posture. But in these cases the pain should be more of the smarting, than of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... of etiquette to assume any ungraceful or uncouth position, such as standing with the arms akimbo, sitting astride a chair, smoking in the presence of ladies, wearing your hat, leaning back in the chair, standing with legs crossed or feet on the chairs, leaning forward in the chair with ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... farm—with the corner of a white deal table between them, sat two young people evidently different in rank, and meeting upon no level of friendship. The young woman held in her hand a paper, which seemed the subject of their conversation. She was about four- or five-and-twenty, well grown and not ungraceful, with dark hair, dark hazel eyes, and rather large, handsome features, full of intelligence, but a little hard, and not a little regnant—as such features must be, except after prolonged influence of ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald |
