"Undesired" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... affect all the receivers round, unless some method were employed for rendering a receiver sensitive only to the waves intended to influence it. Also, if distinction were impossible, even with one transmitter in action its message might go to undesired stations. ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... would be the effect produced on one only, who, thrown by the accident of war into the situation of a captive, should have no grief more profound, no sorrow deeper seated than what arose from the being severed from old, and associated with new and undesired ties; one to whom life was full of the fairest buds of promise, and whose impatience of the present was only a burning desire to enter upon the future. Not so with Gerald Grantham. Time, place, circumstance, condition, were alike the same—alike indifferent to him. In ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... completed our journey to the Jugoslav capital in a fourth-class compartment into which were already squeezed two Serbian soldiers, eight peasants, a crate of live poultry and a dog, to say nothing of a multitude of small and undesired occupants whose presence caused considerable annoyance to every one, including the dog. We were glad when the train arrived ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... that she had a zealous, but an undesired defender, Katherine returned to her classes after a two weeks' absence apparently in good trim. With her re-appearance on the campus the Sans took heart again. Leslie had not been summoned to the president's office. Nothing had occurred to point ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... tarry to 'brittle' the buck, and merely told the Duke of Lennox, Mar, and others that he was riding to Perth to speak with Gowrie, and would return before evening. Some of the Court went to Falkland for fresh horses, other followed slowly with weary steeds. They followed 'undesired by him,' because a report rose that the King had some purpose to apprehend the oppressive Master of Oliphant. Ruthven implored James not to bring Lennox and Mar, but only three or four servants, to which ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... strong, the fugitive bethought him to part with his red coat. He already had run out from under his uniform cap, but a red coat with a double row of brass buttons and brass-topped epaulettes on it flashing next morning across a bland autumnal landscape would be calculated to attract undesired attention. So without slackening speed he took it off and cast it behind him into the darkness. Figuratively speaking, he breathed easier when he crossed the state line at or about five A.M. As a matter of fact, though, he was breathing ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... of different species of error and misconduct." To be professional Don Juan, to accept the provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may thus lead a man through a series of detestable words and actions, and land him at last in an undesired and most unsuitable union for life. If he had been strong enough to refrain or bad enough to persevere in evil; if he had only not been Don Juan at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there had been some possible road for him throughout this troublesome world; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at times the very face and gestures of Johnson, guided him towards that undesired establishment at the corner near the station. "Oh Lord!" he cried, "I'd rather go back to cribs. I should keep my money ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... is typified by the classical example of womanly modesty in the Medicean Venus, who withdraws the pelvis, at the same time holding one hand to guard the pubes, the other to guard the breasts.[9] The essential expression in each case is that of defence of the sexual centers against the undesired ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... smallest blame. There was an incompatibility, not of temper but of feelings, which made us strangers though calling one another man and wife. Upon this fact I rest my own justification; our living together under these circumstances was, I dare say, equally undesired by us both. It was, in fact, but a deference to the formal hypocrisy of the world. At all events, the irrevocable act which separates us forever is done, and I have now merely to state so much of my intentions ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... job is to get the patient to be patient, to wait until the body corrects itself and stops manifesting the undesired symptom. Thus comes the prime rule of all humane medicine: first of all, do no harm! If the doctor simply refrains from making the body worse, it will probably get better by itself. But the patient, rarely resigned to quiet ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... guest's town, at a certain hour on the day he is to leave. Thus gives the guest clearly, and without discourtesy, the precise time he is expected to remain at the home of the hostess, and he may remain the full time without any vague pre monitions of undesired presence. If the hostess did not state the time of arrival and departure the guest should in her acceptance give suggestive dates leaving them subject to change at the discretion of the hostess. Any other plan is embarrassing to both hostess and guest since ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... strangers and recent acquaintances; on getting to know her better they hastily re-armed themselves. Some one had once aptly described her as a hedgehog with the protective mimicry of a puffball. If there was an awkward remark to be made at an inconvenient moment before undesired listeners, Joan invariably made it, and when the occasion did not present itself she was usually capable of creating it. She was not without a certain popularity, the sort of popularity that a dashing highwayman sometimes achieved among those who were not in the habit of travelling on his ...
— When William Came • Saki
... scullery door. The lobby clock, which stood over six feet high and had to be wound up every night by hauling on a rope, was noisily getting ready to strike two. But for Mrs. Lessways' disorderly and undesired assistance, Hilda's task might have been finished a quarter of an hour earlier. She passed quietly up the stairs. When she was near the top, her mother's voice, at once querulous and amiable, came from ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... enthusiastically did everything in their power to help me. By their influence, the Church in 1864 conferred on me the undesired and undeserved honor, the highest which they could confer—the honor of being the Moderator of their Supreme Court. No one can understand how much I shrank from all this; but, in hope of the Lord's using it and me to promote His work amongst the Heathen, ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... children are often made to suffer because of the ignorance of parents is the leaving of undesired food on the child's plate. Every child, when he does not want his food, pushes the plate away from him, and many mothers push it back and scold. The real truth is that the motor suggestion of the food upon the plate is so strong that the child feels as if he were being forced ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... cottage charmingly situated between Montreux Vevey, complete sanitary accommodations vicinity boat, seabaths, golf-grounds excursions receives PAYING GUEST moderate terms, Prussians and Austro-Germans, alcoholists undesired."— Swiss Paper. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... the "because" of everything that swayed her sorrowful spirit,—"because" she was "unlov'd and undesired." ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... as he lay there watching Jean as she sat before the fire, he listened intently, expecting every minute to hear the voices and steps of the undesired rebels. Bitterly now he regretted his action in the past, and almost cursed himself for his blind folly. Several times he was on the point of warning Jean of her danger. But how could he tell her, and what good would it do? There was no place where she could ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... smiling. He did not in the least understand the embarrassment of a young woman who finds herself unexpectedly the object of a romantic and undesired sacrifice. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... matter. He did not wish to urge an undesired escort upon her, but he did not like to think of her working alone by the solitude of the ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... Thornly could no longer shield himself from the undesired knowledge; he must hear ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... the subject of maternity, and the relation that leads to it. Interchange thoughts and feelings with them as to what nature allows or demands in regard to these. Can maternity be natural when it is undesigned by the father or undesired by the mother? Can a maternity be natural, healthful, ennobling to the mother, to the child, to the father, and to the home, when no loving, tender, anxious forethought presides over the relation in which it originated?—when the ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... hopes which remained of our ever winning the war would inevitably be blotted out for good and all. As for Mr. Lloyd George in drab days before he became First Minister of the Crown in spite of his superhuman efforts to avoid that undesired consummation, he always loved to make his voice heard, and he always succeeded—just as a canary will in ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... she felt his arms about her; he snatched her to him, turned her face to his, calling her by strange, unpremeditated terms of endearment. Beyond these, no words at all were exchanged between them; they were undesired. Adelaide did not know whether it were servile or superb to care little about knowing his opinion and intentions in regard to her. All that she cared about was that in her eyes he was once more supreme and that his arms were about her. Words, she knew, would have been her enemies, ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... landlady his destination, hastened with all speed after him. The same causes operated in the same way with Sweeting. Thus it chanced on that afternoon that Caroline's ears were three times tortured with the ringing of the bell and the advent of undesired guests; for Donne followed Malone, and Sweeting followed Donne; and more wine was ordered up from the cellar into the dining-room (for though old Helstone chid the inferior priesthood when he found them "carousing," as he called it, in their own tents, yet at his hierarchical table he ever ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... he might assure his fortune with the Whigs and get to his feet at last. God knew it was time, for the household in the Billingsgate attic was pretty threadbare. His busy brain had worked happily on the plan. He would be the innocent, cursed from childhood with undesired companions, who would suddenly awaken in horror to the guilt of things he had not understood. There would be a welcome for a well-informed penitent.... But he must move slowly and at his own time.... And now he was being himself hustled into the dock, ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... terms of distant civility only when compelled to appear together in the presence of women or their other superiors, had been moved to more than one visit at the Hays', but Hartley speedily returned to his undesired siege at the quarters of Captain Dade, while Donovan joined forces with two other youngsters, Bruce and Putney, because it gave them comfort to bother Field; who, being the adjutant, and a very busy man, could visit only at certain hours of ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... self-respecting. The customs of the time placed many disadvantages in the way of her social and moral reform. As a rule, the young girl was confined to a convent until she reached marriageable age; when that came and with it an undesired husband, she was ready for almost any prank that would relieve the monotony of her uncongenial marital relations. The convents themselves were so corrupt or so easily corruptible, that, very frequently, young girls did not leave them with unstained purity. To certain of these institutions, women ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... certainly beleeve, that the month will be no sooner ended, then that you'l begin to stink here; for the Mistris will begin to consider with her self, that she can make a shift with the Maid and Wet-Nurse; so that then you must expect to get your undesired Pass. ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... treacherous criticism ever so softly?—what was the man worth whom a woman inferior to herself did not value? The sentiment which lurks more or less in all animate nature—that of not desiring the undesired of others—was lively as a passion in the super-subtle, epicurean heart of Eustacia. Her social superiority over him, which hitherto had scarcely ever impressed her, became unpleasantly insistent, and for the first time she felt that she had ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... undesired or unwelcome child born than her daughter Alice, and the helpless infant shared with its father the resentful anger which dominated her unwilling mother the wretched months before its advent into ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... set a high value upon). The women are generally of the middle height, with Turkish eyes, straight hair, and clear olive complexion, but are not nearly so amorous as the Spanish belles, whom I have described to you in former letters. I have some feats to boast of when I return, which is undesired and undesirable—I always except you from my complaints, and hope you will expect me with the same delight that I anticipate meeting you. You can have no conception of Lord S.'s ecstasy when I informed him of my probable movements. The man is ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... the desired conditions and receive help in many unlooked-for ways that will lift you out of the undesired environment. Life will then seem very different to you, for you will have found happiness through awakening within yourself the power to become the master of circumstances ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... nearly half a million a year in Great Britain, over half a million in Austro-Hungary, and three-quarters of a million in Germany. When we examine this excess of births in detail we find among them a large proportion of undesired and undesirable children. There are two opposed alternative methods working to diminish this proportion: the method of preventing conception, with which we have here been concerned, and the method of preventing live birth by producing abortion. There can be no doubt about the enormous extension ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... had come into common use, it was no doubt the custom to have a rude species of door-fastening, calculated rather to keep the door fixed in its place as against the violence of the weather, than to furnish any obstacle against the ingress of undesired visitors. But, gentlemen, we are not living in those times, but in our own; and we are here to administer justice, not with regard to the ideas prevalent among our remote ancestors, but with regard to the ordinary and reasonable practices of ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... coffin. Adj. causing pain, hurting &c v.; hurtful &c (bad) 649; painful; dolorific^, dolorous; unpleasant; unpleasing, displeasing; disagreeable, unpalatable, bitter, distasteful; uninviting; unwelcome; undesirable, undesired; obnoxious; unacceptable, unpopular, thankless. unsatisfactory, untoward, unlucky, uncomfortable. distressing; afflicting, afflictive; joyless, cheerless, comfortless; dismal, disheartening; depressing, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... is persuaded that the presence of his undesired guest brings him no evil he will give you his full confidence and spontaneously accept you as a benevolent and ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... types of Austrian soldiery of his time. This monument has been removed—destroyed, I believe, by the Pragers when they regained their freedom in October 1918. The removal of this monument leaves a blank, not a sentimental one, merely an artistic one, and has led to an unexpected and probably undesired effect. It has given undue prominence to a little building that stands some way up the place, a building of strict utility with no pretensions to architectural consideration, a building which now stands out ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... were addressed to Madame Trebassof, who shrugged her shoulders at the undesired gallantry of the gay Councilor. She did not join in the conversation, excepting to calm the general, who wished to send the whole regiment to the guard-house, men and horses. And while the roisterers laughed over ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... the unwonted flash in her eye and drove the hot, angry blood to her smooth, white forehead and knotted her levelled brows to a dark and lowering frown, had entered her life and being, unsought for and undesired. It did not belong to her world. Yet there it sat on its usurped throne deformed and hideous, driving out all tenderness and compunction, ruling her with a rod of iron, hardening her, embittering ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... producing such an outstanding medical man as the Reverend John Clayton; and with the laymen acquiring enough information, perhaps from a few medical books, in order to practice, themselves, in case a doctor were unavailable or undesired. ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... subordinated, had done to his family, rose upon the recollection of the younger; all the still bitterer sting of that injury which had been personal to himself; all the burden and peril of this present undesired visit, the discontent, the threats, the evident power of doing evil, woke the temper and spirit of the young doctor. It was not Fred's fault that his brother had made that mistake in life which he ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... both qualities by the couplets in question. Rhythm is the syllabic and quantitative measure of the words, in which Robin both in weight and time, balances Bobbin; and Dailie holds level scale with Ailie. But rhyme is the added correspondence of sound; unknown and undesired, so far as we can learn, by the Greek Orpheus, but absolutely essential to, and, as special virtue, becoming titular of, the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... house, will you, father?" whispered Rose; for the man had opened a back door leading into the shed and was regarding his undesired guests with ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... anxious-looking exploration in search of Deronda might be observed by her husband, and afterward rebuked as something "damnably vulgar." But all traveling, even that of a slow gradual glance round a room, brings a liability to undesired encounters, and amongst the eyes that met Gwendolen's, forcing her into a slight bow, were those of the "amateur too fond of Meyerbeer," Mr. Lush, whom Sir Hugo continued to find useful as a half-caste among ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... you for a man," she said again. "You stand there, revealed; and surely you stand there, shamed. By plotting and planning, by assuming our dress, you have succeeded in forcing your undesired presence into this sacred cloister, where dwells a little company of women who have left the world, never to return to it again; who have given up much in order to devote themselves to a life of continual worship and adoration, gaining thereby ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... by this time had about enough of this free-and-easy and undesired playing on his account. The man's face, moreover, with all its joviality, by no means attracted him, and he shouted to him in ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... 1848, and still more in 1871, the people of France at large turned instinctively to those natural leaders whom at all other times they had so persistently ostracized. Alarmed in the first case by an unexpected and undesired triumph of the Parisian populace—in the second, chastened by a great national disaster, without definite views or objects of their own—they deliberately trusted their interests to the larger landowners, whose interests must coincide with theirs; to the men of hereditary culture, ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... merchandise, left only wide enough for one, seemed like those she had read of in Egyptian tombs and pyramids: a sarcophagus ought to be waiting in her chamber. When she opened the door of it, the bright fire, which Beenie undesired had kindled there, startled her: the room looked unnatural, uncanny, because it was cheerful. She stood for a moment on the hearth, and in sad, dreamy mood listened to the howling swoops of the wind, making the house quiver and shake. Now ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... the yew trees are gigantic, And the yellow coast of "Spain," Breasting on the dim "Atlantic," Stores the undesired rain. ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... in a sermon, and wished you at the antipodes. And blushing all the time, like a full-blown poppy,' and off she went on a fresh score—but Phoebe, though disconcerted for a moment, was not to be put out of countenance when she understood her ground, and she continued with earnestness, undesired by her companion—'Very likely I managed badly, but I know you do not really think it improper to see Robert alone, and it is very important that you should do so. Indeed it is, Lucy,' she added—the youthful candour and ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... time for ceremonials, truly, Mr. Dunmore; yet, had family concurrence been perfect, it seems to me that her brother might have undertaken this mission. I have no wish to thrust myself undesired into any household circle at such ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Undesired and wholly irrelevant there flashed into his mind that walk with Mary, a short ten days ago, when he had reproached her with her limitations, her power to grasp only the obvious. And it was suddenly revealed ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... hard to explain just what Miss Hester's position was among the denizens of the poorer quarter. She was liked and disliked, admired and feared. She would descend upon her victims with unasked counsel and undesired tracts. Her voice was a trumpet of scathing invective against their shiftlessness, their untidiness, and their immorality, but her hand was as a horn of plenty in straitened times, and her presence in sickness was a comfort. She made no pretence to being good-hearted; in fact, she resented ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... bodily visions are those which are most doubtful, and should in no wise be desired, and if they come undesired still they should be shunned as much as possible, yet not by treating them with contempt, unless it be certain that they come from an evil spirit; indeed, I was filled with horror, and greatly distressed, when I ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... pier yearns towards the merchantman lying along-side, with the colors of his own native land at her peak, and the name of the port he sailed from long ago upon her stern! But if it tell the near approach of the undesired, inevitable guest, what sound short of the muffled noises made by the undertakers as they turn the corners in the dim-lighted house, with low shuffle of feet and whispered cautions, carries such a sense of knocking-kneed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... to speak for the absent who is. I assure you, therefore, most solemnly, that your interest in Miss Beverley I never heard but by common report, that our being alone together was by both of us undesigned and undesired, that the honour she did our house in calling at it, was merely to acquaint my mother with my sister's removal to Mrs Harrel's, and that the part which I had myself in her condescension, was simply to be consulted upon a journey which she has in contemplation ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... parishioners in their seats during what they termed the "play-acting" which took place on this occasion, but when they left the Church and went their several ways, they all resolved on the course they meant to adopt with the undesired introduction of "'Igh Jinks" for the future. And from that date henceforward not one of the community attended Church. Sunday after Sunday, the bells rang in vain. Mr. Arbroath conducted the service solely for Mrs. Arbroath and for ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... now the procession had thinned out to almost none, only a straggling couple occasionally hurrying by as if they feared they were late and must hasten to be in time for the sport. I began to think it possible she had changed her mind and would stay at home rather than go with an undesired escort. ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... distant, legible as at the very moment they were first engraven on the memory. Not by the power of meditation are the long-ago vanished thoughts or emotions restored to us, in which we found delight or disturbance; but of themselves do they seem to arise, not undesired indeed, but unbidden, like sea-birds that come unexpectedly floating up into some inland vale, because, unknown to us who wonder at them, the tide is flowing and the breezes blow from the main. Bright as the living image stands now before us the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... her mother pass the window. The room was dark, save in the fireplace where Rita and Dic were sitting, illumined by the glow of hickory embers, and occasionally by a flickering flame that spluttered from the half-burned back-log. Unexpected and undesired, Mrs. Bays, followed closely by our friend Williams, entered through the front door. Dic sprang to his feet, but he was too slow by several seconds, and the newcomers had ample opportunity to observe his strict attention ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... down the road upon which the slanting red light of the declining sun was shining, and there she saw a cloud of dust. This road was not a great thoroughfare, and she knew that was the stage, and it probably would bring the undesired summer guests. ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... almost forgot that even such a gentle, domestic creature as the cow has been the unconscious inspiration of much nonsense and has doubtless often chewed the bitter cud of reflection in deploring her undesired popularity. First she was forced (very much against her will, no doubt) to jump over the moon to the undignified strains of "Hey Diddle, Diddle." Then, just when beginning to breathe easily again after that astounding performance, Gelett Burgess came along ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... a hasty sign of comprehension. He supposed that the difficulty had arisen from the conduct of one or more of the regular customers. He felt that he would very much like to meet the man whose undesired attentions had driven his ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... maidens, how in one short hour The schemes, pursued in vain for twenty years, Are—by a stroke, though undesired, complete— Crown'd with success, not in my way, but Heaven's! This at a moment, too, when I had urged A last, long-cherish'd project, in my aim Of peace, and been repulsed with hate and scorn. ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... wrinkles and furrows were inscriptions that Time had graved, and in which he had written legends of wisdom that had been tested by the tenor of a life. And Ernest had ceased to be obscure. Unsought for, undesired, had come the fame which so many seek, and made him known in the great world, beyond the limits of the valley in which he had dwelt so quietly. College professors, and even the active men of cities, came from ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... anything to expect commercially. He had peremptorily banished Esme Elliot from his heart and his hopes, though she still forced entrance to his thoughts and would not be denied, there, the precarious rights of an undesired guest. He was now simply and solely a journalist with a mind single to his purpose, to go down fighting the best fight there was in him. Defeat, he believed, was practically certain. He would make it a defeat of which no man ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... with a ci-devant servitor reminded Stephen too forcibly of the vicar's classification of himself before he went from England. Mrs. Smith was conscious of the defect in her arrangements which had brought about the undesired conjunction. She ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... There was one other, far up among the stunted, shriveled pines and cedars that jutted from the opposite heights. They could hear at intervals a weird, mournful note, a single whistling call in dismal minor, but it brought no new significance. Every day of their undesired and enforced sojourn, every hour of the interminable day, that raven-like, hermit bird of the Sierras had piped his unmelodious signal to some distant feathered fellow, and sent a chill to the heart of more ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... told that she could solely be useful by keeping the children out of the way; for in spite of all rebuffs, they persisted in haunting the footsteps of the housekeeper and maids, Fay gazing with delight at the splendours that were revealed, Amy proffering undesired aid, Letty dancing in the most inconvenient places, romancing about her mamma and little brother, and making sure that her big beautiful brother was ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... administration of it, which constitutes on large element in an Englishman's respect for the law. At times this automatic power, which has been thus created Faust-like, by reason of the impossibility of pre-adapting its mechanism to the exigences of every case, works to unforseen and undesired ends—sometimes even to absurd ones. And, with thinkers of a certain phase of modern thought, it has been a favourite taunt against the average British mind, that it rather delights in the contemplation of such abnormal workings of the great automatic law in which it has created. Some manifest ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... and to me an undesired call. I began to think, how can I leave my wife and seven small children, to go to Baltimore to live, a distance of more than a hundred miles from them. This, I thought, could not be. I thought my children would need my watchful care, ...
— A Narrative of The Life of Rev. Noah Davis, A Colored Man. - Written by Himself, At The Age of Fifty-Four • Noah Davis
... enforcement of public approval and condemnation. When certain acts are regarded as of crucial importance, the group does not depend on the precarious effectiveness of public opinion, but deliberately attaches punishments to the performance of undesired acts, and, more infrequently, rewards to the practices of others. Most of our laws are enforcement of social condemnations, for the performance or the non-performance of specific acts, rather than direct encouragements of action. But which laws will be passed depends in the first place ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... by the looks of the two girls, that it was precisely what they did not wish, and admired again the sort of necessity which the family habits seemed to produce, of everything being to be communicated, and everything being to be done together, however undesired and inconvenient. She tried to dissuade Mary from going, but in vain; and that being the case, thought it best to accept the Miss Musgroves' much more cordial invitation to herself to go likewise, as she might be useful in turning back with her sister, and lessening the ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... to speak only when addressed. But as a white man, I answer you that I require no instruction concerning my conduct, and shall merely thank you for your good intentions and your kind advice, which is the more generous because unsolicited and wholly undesired!" ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... an undesired note to the chorus of rejected appeal? How dare I lift up my voice in the Wilderness, when other voices, far stronger and sweeter, are drowned in the laughter of fools and the mockery of the profane? Truly, ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... determined to make a stand at this point, taking the head of the great Consolidated Companies as his model, and with lance in hand to charge the world just as he would have "bucked" the Yale line. Even the undesired diplomatic position was apparently not forthcoming; now he would not only make an effort on his own account, but he would insist upon his right to do so. He did not know that the real reason he had heard nothing from his father during these weeks was because the ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... "It'd be no use trying to do anything, even if you weren't so slothful and sedentary as you are! It moves in a vicious circle. Because material success is what the majority want, the majority'll go on wanting it. Hardy says somewhere that it's innate in human nature not to desire the undesired of others." ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... he could don without assistance, and for a while was minded to call for help and complete the matter, but bethought him of the nuts he had brought away from dinner, and the joy it would be to eat them with no crowd to eye him, and no Grand Hereditaries to pester him with undesired services; so he restored the pretty things to their several places, and soon was cracking nuts, and feeling almost naturally happy for the first time since God for his sins had made him a prince. When the nuts were ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in the small', that is, a design or implementation that may not hold any surprises but does things in a way that is reasonably intuitive and relatively easy to comprehend from the outside. The antonym is 'grungy' or {crufty}. 2. /v./ To remove unneeded or undesired files in a effort to reduce clutter: "I'm cleaning up my account." "I cleaned up the garbage and now have 100 Meg ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... distinction in genere between the two classes of effects, but there is an essential difference between the motive of action which calls out the energies of civilized man and the mere appetite which controls the life of the beast. The action of man, indeed, is frequently followed by unforeseen and undesired results, yet it is nevertheless guided by a self-conscious will aiming as often at secondary and remote as at immediate objects. The wild animal, on the other hand, acts instinctively, and, so far as we are able to perceive, always with a view to single and direct purposes. The backwoodsman ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... the unreal editor; "it goes on pretty much as it used. The Timminses, who give tiresome little dinners which they cannot afford to dull people who don't want them, are still alive and miserably bent on heaping reluctant beneficiaries with undesired favors, and spoiling the simple 'pleasure of the time' with the activities of their fatuous vanity. Or perhaps you think I ought to bring a hopeful mind even to ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... sort of breakfast is set forth, which is denominated Supper. This Supper consists of fruit, followed by buckwheat cakes, followed by meat or eggs; and to eat one's way through it induces a curious sense of standing on one's head. After two days I discovered a remedy for this undesired dizziness. I turned the menu upside down, and ordered a meal in the reverse order. The Supper itself was a success; but the waitress (who, in the winter, teaches school in Texas) disapproved of what she deemed my frivolous proceeding. Her eyes took on an inward look beneath ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... of carrying on the close friendship of a lifetime beyond its natural limit into the generations yet to be, is an old and not a wholly bad one. It insures for the young couple a genuine love from both sides the family line. To be sure, that love may be an oppressive and undesired gift which one or the other of the young people ardently wishes to ignore or to be freed from, but it contains also some elements of a good start for those same young people in a mutually devoted double parentage. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... make sure that Baynes did not get her. His other reason was based on his knowledge of an event that had transpired at his camp the previous night—an event which he had not mentioned at the bungalow for fear of drawing undesired attention to his movements and bringing the blacks of the big Bwana into dangerous intercourse with his own boys. He had told at the bungalow that half his men had deserted. That story might be quickly disproved should his boys and ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... her so fair, yet by me so undesired; and beholding her so merry, while my heart was amazed with the worst sorrow, and considering, too, that but for her all this would never have been, but I sitting happy by my lady's side,—thinking on ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... child. Zerkow had welcomed it with pronounced disfavor, since it had a mouth to be fed and wants to be provided for. Maria was out of her head so much of the time that she could scarcely remember how it looked when alive. The child was a mere incident in their lives, a thing that had come undesired and had gone unregretted. It had not even a name; a strange, hybrid little being, come and gone within a fortnight's time, yet combining in its puny little body the blood of the Hebrew, the ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... to her will and dropped all opposition. He appeared to welcome their decision to wait over another day; but Kelley busied himself with thinking how he could ward off any undesired information which might approach the two women—the mother especially. It would be quite wonderful if, with another twenty-four hours to spend, Florence did not get ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... more than one old pupil here have lost their lives, and that some of you boys have lost those near and dear to you. There can be no school to-day. It would not be decent——" And then the Doctor's voice fairly gave way, and we found ourselves dismissed to an unexpected—and, for once, an undesired—holiday. These things sink deep into the youthful imagination, and the memory of them can never be lost. As I look back upon the years I spent at school, that dark October morning stands out with a prominence that ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... renounce the inheritance. Upon more than one occasion this rule has been a matter of political consequence, for its operation has sometimes meant that an able and ambitious commoner has been compelled to surrender his seat in the more important chamber and to assume a wholly undesired place in the upper house. In 1895 Mr. William W. Palmer, later Lord Selbourne, inheriting a peerage but desiring to continue for a time in the Commons, put this rule to a definite test by neglecting to apply for a writ of summons as a peer. The decision ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... admired in him, of strife without the appearance of strife, lost something of its value. To look at Peter was to wonder whether there could be such a thing as a well-groomed combatant; and until to-day she had never thought of Peter as a combatant. The sight of his lean face summoned, all undesired, the vague vision of an ideal, and perhaps it was this that caused her voice to falter a little as she came forward and called ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... acted, in the first tumults of your feelings, as every woman would have acted. That you did not immediately perceive the little prospect there was that a breach of this nature would be repaired, or that Colden would make use of your undesired and unsought-for renunciation as a means of reconcilement with his father, was no subject of surprise or blame. These reflections could not occur to you but in consequence ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... bridegroom reigned a peace the world could not give or take away. He loved with a love that cast the love of former days into the shadow of a sweet but undesired remembrance. A long twilight life lay before him, but he would have plenty to do! and such was the love between him and Arctura, that every doing of the will of God was as the tying of a fresh bond between him and her: she was his because they were the Father's, whose will ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... wise, helpful woman that she had once warmly desired to see herself. Her own defects were now familiar and sorely disheartening to her, and she had grown aware that she could not by inspiration set and preserve in smooth, swift motion the various wheels of Otter, not even if—unlooked for and undesired sequel!—she received express permission to dance upon the ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... over which your will has no control. It's never an honest promise; it can be only an honest hope. Love comes and goes and no man can stay it, and no man is its prophet. Coming unasked, sometimes undesired, often unwelcome, it goes unbidden, without reason, without logic, as inexorably as it came, governed by laws that no man has ever ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... and drew a plan of streets indicating the way to the place of the wood merchant. In spite of his remark and the undesired intrusion of business upon his dejeuner, the Major's manner was as friendly as could be expected from a Town Major. We left ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... such priceless and exquisite "fooling." And when they were calmer, and began to think of the possibility of the worthy Bozier suddenly recovering from her neuralgia and coming to look after her pupil,—or the undesired but likely entrance of a servant to attend to the lamps, or to put fresh wood on the fire, they turned each from the other, with reluctance and half laughing decorum,—Sylvie resuming her seat by the fire, and Aubrey ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... according to social etiquette, between the death of one husband and the wedding of another, and even that was so short as to be barely decent. Six months—yet in that space of time much might happen—things undreamed of and undesired—slow tortures carefully measured out, punishment sudden and heavy! Wrapped in these sombre musings I walked beside him in profound silence. The moon shone brilliantly; groups of girls danced on the shore with their lovers, to ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... carried on by the wind which followed the tide. He sat quite still and tried to think calmly, tried to piece together in his mind the sequence of events which had brought him to this part of the world and which had led to his remaining where he was, an undesired hanger-on at the threshold of Miles Fentolin. He had the feeling that to-night he had burned his boats. There was no longer any pretence of friendliness possible between him and this strange creature. Mr. Fentolin suspected him, realised that he himself was suspected. ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his tilling came civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural surplus. It appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded the seas, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... foreign to his nature. One may guess that he was in no humour to carry coals. In a distant corner of the room he seated himself and fell to frowning at the table on which his elbow rested. At no time was he a man upon whom one would be likely to foist his company undesired, for he had at command on occasion a hauteur and an aloofness that challenged respect even from the ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... hands, and fell fainting to the ground. The next Monday, July 10, the royal barges came down the Thames from Richmond, and at three in the afternoon Lady Jane landed at the broad staircase of the Tower, as queen, in undesired splendour. But that same evening messages came saying that Mary had declared herself queen. She had sent addresses to the peers, commanding them on their allegiance ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... are often told, the majority of human beings belong either to the Undesired Class or the Undesirable Class. To realise that this is so, we are bidden to read the newspapers or to walk along the streets of the cities—whichever they may be—wherein dwell the highest products of our civilisation. In the better class quarters it is indeed the ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... as if he had told her that his youth loved her; that she had not gone altogether unclaimed and undesired; she had had her part ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... as if it must have been made years before the house, the fact being that the one which Mrs Lucas had found there was too dilapidated to be of the slightest service in keeping out wind or wet or undesired callers. She had therefore caused to be constructed an even older one made from the oak-planks of a dismantled barn, and had it studded with large iron nails of antique pattern made by the village blacksmith. He had arranged some of them to look as if they spelled A.D. 1603. Over the door hung ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... always looked upon as a hot headed and indiscreete man, and soe accordingly handled, hearing him, but never trusting him with anything but his own offered and undesired endeavours to gett the Regicides sent ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... masculine selfishness of this "jealousy," which, while indifferent to chastity and fidelity, per se, punishes by proxy, leaving the real culprit untouched and happy at having not only had his intrigue but a chance to get rid of an undesired wife! ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... quite timidly. "Since you press me thus gravely, I must admit that I have been obliged to repel the affection of a certain man. Yet, please don't infer, sir, that he has ever been ungentlemanly. He even has done me the honor, if one can so term an undesired proposal, to protest that he wished to ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... property is to give. A measureless desire to bestow itself, and in itself all good, is the definition of the love of God. And Christ comes 'to the unthankful and to the evil,' bringing a gift which none of us have asked, and giving as much of Himself as He can give, undesired, to every heart, that thereby we may be led to desire these better gifts which cannot be bestowed ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... brought our Republic to a severe test, and a Presidential election, occurring in regular course during the Rebellion, has added not a little to the strain. * * * But the election, along with its incidental and undesired strife, has done good, too. It has demonstrated that a People's Government can sustain a National election in the midst of a great Civil War, until now it has not been known to the World that this was a possibility. It shows, also, how sound ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... passions have no more to do, Serene, since ours the dusty arles Death doles, Oblivions dim of all there is to rue!— Peace comes to hearts of whom proud Love has tired; Beyond all danger dwell the undesired. ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... side to side, in negation or unwillingness, dates back to the nursing period of the individual's life, when this movement was made in rejecting undesired food. Directly useful in this case, it was carried over to analogous situations that aroused the ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... Assistances? Claudia was seen by Witnesses enough, to draw a Ship which no humane Strength could move. Tuccia a Vestal Virgin was seen to carry Water in a Sieve: The Devil never assists men to do supernatural things undesired. When therefore such like things shall be testified against the accused Party not by Spectres which are Devils in the Shape of Persons either living or dead, but by real men or women who may be credited; it is proof enough that such an one has ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... made a determined attempt to destroy the fleet by means of eight fireships which were floated down stream on the unsuspecting British. Fortunately they were ignited prematurely, and the boats of the Pembroke and other ships were again out, employed in the hazardous task of towing these undesired visitors into such places as would permit them to burn themselves out without danger to the shipping. Six were quickly got into safety, whilst the other two grounded and burnt out without causing further inconvenience. Captain ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... remote from ken, That unregarded sings and undesired, Like to a star unnamed by lips of men, That faints at dawn in saffron light retired, Like to an echo in some desert deep From age to age unwakened ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... him was all insincere? Let the matter drop, and be good enough to leave my presence, which, you will remember, you entered unsummoned and undesired." ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... do you bear Mrs. Milsom's eighth that you speak so cheerfully of its early demise? It can't be more than ten days old at the most, for it certainly seems no time since a cradle jumping out of the fire announced its undesired arrival. Think of the poor mother's feelings. Mothers as a race have an unfortunate tendency to value their offspring, even when, as in this case, the supply exceeds ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... family simmered down to a friendly basis. They accepted my independence as a matter of course. It had been undesired by them, true enough, its birth painful, but like many an unwanted child, once born, once safely here, they became accustomed to it, fond, even proud, as it matured. I spent every Christmas with Edith in Hilton, going up with Malcolm on the same train, and returning with him in time ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... desire none of his concern for that! It never was endangered till it had his undesired concern!—Forgive me, Sir—but when my brother knows how to act like a brother, or behave like a gentleman, he may deserve more consideration from me than it is possible for me ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson |
