"Uneatable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (The two latter belonged to his own boat, and had been ironed because they had refused to eat some bad beef. Frewen himself had told Keller that it was uneatable, and again angry ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... monkey is always very fond of persimmon fruit, he had no use for the seed he had just found. The persimmon-seed is as hard and uneatable as a stone. He, therefore, in his greedy nature, felt very envious of the crab's nice dumpling, and he proposed an exchange. The crab naturally did not see why he should give up his prize for a hard stone-like seed, and would not consent to ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... eat the stewed apples and bottled cherries that were on the table. The brown bread, arranged in thin slices on a white crochet mat in a japanned dish, felt so damp and was so full of caraway seeds that it was uneatable. After a while some roach, caught on the estate, and with a strong muddy flavour and bewildering multitudes of bones, was brought in; and after that came cutlets from Anna's pigs; and after that a queer red gelatinous ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... habitually late for dinner. Not only are others, who were themselves considerate, kept waiting, but dinner is dried and ruined for everyone else through the fault of the tardy one. And though expert cooks know how to keep food from becoming uneatable, no food can be so good as at the moment for which it is prepared, and the habitually late guest should be made to realize how unfairly she is meeting her hostess' generosity by destroying for every one the hospitality which ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... ground after being shot in high trees. Their flavour is delicious, especially if they are hung for a day. I may here remark that, in New Britain, precisely the same species of pigeon is very often quite uneatable through feeding upon Chili berries, which in that island grow in profusion. In shooting in a Samoan forest one has nothing to fear from venomous reptiles, for, although there are two or three kinds of snakes, they are rarely ever seen and quite harmless. ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... form, whatever set of markings and colours it had would be, I consider, rendered stable for recognition, and also for protection, since if it varied too much the young birds and other enemies would take a heavier toll in learning it was uneatable. It might then be said that the character by which this species differs from the parent species is a useless character. But surely this is not what is usually meant by a "useless character." This is ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... following closely behind, and carrying the specimens willingly enough, but with their swarthy faces wearing rather a contemptuous look for the man who, in preference to a quiet siesta beneath a tree, chose to tramp on beneath the burning sun for the sake of a few uneatable birds. ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... action of the sun and air; and finally we donned our clothes again, they being by this time quite dry, feeling much refreshed and in every way considerably the better for our bath. Our next business was to go to breakfast, but our bread was by this time so completely destroyed as to be quite uneatable. We therefore threw it overboard, and made a meagre and unpalatable meal off more raw salt beef, washed down as ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... associates, they are developed for the express purpose of rendering the species conspicuous. The reason of this is that the animals in question are either the possessors of some deadly weapons, as stings or poison fangs, or they are uneatable, and are thus so disagreeable to the usual enemies of their kind that they are never attacked when their peculiar powers or properties are known. It is, therefore, important that they should not be mistaken for defenceless or eatable species of the same class or order, since in that case ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... here, or indeed at any other stancia throughout this part of the journey. The ispravnik at Verkhoyansk had assured me that deer-meat would always be forthcoming; and so it was, in a putrid condition which rendered it quite uneatable. There was nothing else obtainable but frozen milk (generally black with smoke and filth), so we were compelled to subsist solely on the meat from Yakutsk, so long as it lasted, and on "Carnyl,"[34] a kind of palatable pemmican brought from England and intended only ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... temperature, so the silver vases held branches of spruce, hemlock, and other Canadian firs. The French cook had to be very careful as to what dishes he prepared, for anything with moisture in it would freeze at once; meringues, for instance, would be frozen into uneatable cricket-balls, and tea, coffee, and soup had to simmer perpetually over lamps. One so seldom has a ball-supper with North Pole surroundings. We had a serious toboggan accident one night owing to the stupidity of an old Senator, who insisted on standing ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... of the artichokes were peeled and eaten raw by the inhabitants, but as these people are accustomed to consume all kinds of uncooked vegetables and unripe fruits few civilised persons would indulge in the Cypriote tastes. We found the artichoke stems uneatable in a raw state, but remarkably good when peeled and stewed, with a sauce of yolk of egg beaten up with oil, salt, pepper, and lemon-juice; they were then quite equal to sea-kale. There is a general neglect in the cultivation of vegetables ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... their lives? No—there was none: he could not picture Susy out of her setting of luxury and leisure, could not picture either of them living such a life as the Nat Fulmers, for instance! He remembered the shabby untidy bungalow in New Hampshire, the slatternly servants, uneatable food and ubiquitous children. How could he ask Susy to share such a life with him? If he did, she would probably have the sense to refuse. Their alliance had been based on a moment's midsummer madness; now ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... said the captain with a grin. Almost before the words had left his lips, Phil took a rapid aim and fired. At the same identical moment the crocodile shut his jaws with a snap, as if he had an intuitive perception that something uneatable was coming. The bullet consequently hit his forehead, off which it glanced as if it had struck a plate of cast-iron. The reptile gave a wabble, expressive of lazy surprise, and sank slowly back ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... disagreeable odour; always supposing that there were only a few of them among a great number of the Heliconias. If the birds could not distinguish the two kinds externally, and there were on the average only one eatable among fifty uneatable, they would soon give up seeking for the eatable ones, even if they knew them to exist. If, on the other hand, any particular butterfly of an eatable group acquired the disagreeable taste of the Heliconias while it retained the characteristic form and colouring of its own group, this would ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of uneatable bitter oranges which decks my tent-pole, I have to-day hung up a long bough of finger-sponge, which floated to the river-bank. As winter advances, butterflies gradually disappear: one species (a Vanessa) ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... locality, for the Telemark deserves only too well its surname of the Buttermilk Country. At Tiness, Listhus, Tinoset, and many other places, no bread is to be had, or if there be, it is of such poor quality as to be uneatable. One finds there only an oaten cake, known as flat brod, dry, black, and hard as pasteboard, or a coarse loaf composed of a mixture of birch-bark, lichens, and chopped straw. Eggs are a luxury, and a most stale and unprofitable one; but there is any quantity ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne
... no railway, and there was then none in all Italy except between Naples and Castellamare. They seemed to pass a fresh custom-house every day, but, by tipping the searchers, generally got through without inconvenience. The bread was sour and the Italian butter rank and cheesy—often uneatable. Beggars ran after the carriage all day long and when they got nothing jeered at the travellers and called them heretics. They spent half the winter in Rome, and the children were taken up to the top of St. ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... bread-fruit between the rind and the core is all eatable. The core itself, which is about the size and shape of the handle of a knife, is uneatable. The bread-fruit is never eaten raw. The usual mode of dressing it is to remove the rind and the core, divide the pulp into three or four pieces, and bake it in an oven similar to the one just described. When taken out, in somewhat less than an ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... proved so poor that they could not sell it at market; and, rather than waste it, they had it ground at the village mills with the idea of consuming as much of the flour as possible at home. But the flour was so bad as to be uneatable. As I parted with Tibbald that morning he whispered to me, as he leaned over the hatch, to say a good word for him with Hilary about the throw of oak that was going on in one part of the Chace. 'If you was to speak to he, he ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... In fine, for the uneatable part of this little dinner (as contradistinguished from the undrinkable) we paid only seven shillings and sixpence each. And Bullfinch and I agreed unanimously, that no such ill-served, ill-appointed, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... dandelion to a bee, but not half so sweet. Row upon row of stiff golden trees stood in his garden; they no longer knew a breeze when they heard it. When he sat down to eat, his feast turned to treasure uneatable. He learned that a king may starve, and he came to see that gold cannot replace the live, warm gifts of the Earth. Kindly Dionysus took back the charm, but from that day King Midas so hated gold that he chose to live far from luxury, ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... and craven horse, who responds only to pain and is attached to nothing ... the cow and the ox happy so long as they are eating and docile because for centuries they have not had a thought of their own.... I do not speak of the cat, to whom we are nothing more than a too large and uneatable prey: the ferocious cat whose side long contempt tolerates us only as encumbering parasites in our own homes. She at least curses us in her mysterious heart: but all the others live beside us as they might live beside a rock or ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... varieties of wild spinach, and a plant that makes a good salad, known by the Arabs as 'Regly;' also wild onions as large as a man's fist, but uneatable. ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... dear Mrs. Moodie, like a good Christian as you are, give me a morsel of the baby's biscuit, and try and make us some decent bread. The stuff your servant gives us is uneatable," said Wilson to me, ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... was obliged to come this way or to be left. It is sometimes as close work to get the passengers on board, Mr. Toast, as to get the people. I have often admired how gentlemen and ladies love procrastinating, when dishes that ought to be taken hot, are getting to be quite insipid and uneatable." ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... carried on in this wilderness. These people literally dig their bread out of earth and stone and ant-heaps, scrape it off the trees, distill it out of uneatable fruit. There is the root-digger, whose booty of mountain ovens is said to go to far Turkey to be turned into scent. He would long have given up digging, to live entirely on poaching, but for his hope to unearth some day treasure of gold and jewels. One ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... the accidents in the rapids had seriously reduced the commissary by this time, and the provisions left were more or less injured. The bacon was uneatable, and had to be thrown away: the flour was musty, and the saleratus was lost overboard. On August 17th the party had only enough food remaining for ten days' use, and though they hoped that the worst places had been passed, the barometers were broken, and they did not know what descent they had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... One word here about uneatable decorations, never admit them at a children's party; they are the very part of the feast the little people will most crave; red leaves for them must be of red currant-jelly, yellow ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... the natives of these islands, and would form an important part of their sustenance. All the fine tropical fruits are as much cultivated productions as our apples, peaches, and plums, and their wild prototypes, when found, are generally either tasteless or uneatable. ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... said an old German friend, prodding at a tough slice from a dish we all found uneatable. "This is not Ochsenfleisch at ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... doomed to a long wait at Culoz. There was no train due westward till 12.40, and I had to put in nearly three solid hours, which I spent in wandering into the village, where I found an unpretending auberge and a rather uneatable breakfast. ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... she became reconciled to the sight of me, and consented to let me have what there was in the house to eat. This was not much, as she took care to point out. The nearest approach to meat there was eggs, excepting, of course, the fat bacon—quite uneatable in the English fashion—which is the basis of all the soup made throughout a great part of France. Having lighted a fire on the hearth, and fried me some eggs with bits of fat bacon instead of butter, she said she must go and call 'papa,' who was working ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Breakfast was uneatable; her journey to work was a dream. She shrank from going into the workroom, from seeing Gaga. All her confidence had disappeared. She was a bewildered little girl—not eighteen, but a child still without sense of direction. At one minute Toby seemed the only choice to ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... the reception of Sunday visitors: it being one of the principal fashionable places of resort on the Sabbath. We had a half boiled and half stewed fowl, beefsteak, and fritters, for dinner. The, beef was perfectly uneatable, as being entirely gone—but the other dishes were good and well served. The dessert made amends for all previous grievances. It consisted of peaches and grapes—just gathered from the imperial garden: the Emperor allowing his old ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... was called upon to give an account of the Mayor's feast how the rector had said grace before dinner, and Mr Possitt had done so after dinner, and how the soup had been uneatable. 'Dear me!' said Mrs Winterfield. 'And yet his wife was housekeeper formerly in a family that lived very well!' The Mrs Winterfields of this world allow themselves little spiteful pleasures of this kind, repenting of them, no doubt, in those frequent moments ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... days begin to be a little warm, they leave their winter-holes and enter the barns—compelled, most probably, by the failure of their winter-store. Great numbers are then destroyed by the cats. Their fur is of little value, and their flesh uneatable. ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... the soup, but we did not eat the bread. Not that we were not hungry, and not that the bread was uneatable. It was fairly good bread. But we had reasons. My cell-mate had discovered that our cell was alive with bed-bugs. In all the cracks and interstices between the bricks where the mortar had fallen out flourished great colonies. The natives even ventured out in the broad daylight and ...
— The Road • Jack London
... halt. Clambering to a grassy knoll, we made a frugal meal of the hardest of biscuit soaked in muddy water, the only food, by the way, which the troops tasted from the time of leaving Gasko until their return. These biscuits are manufactured at Constantinople, and are so hard as to be uneatable unless soaked; they, however, form a good substitute for bread, which is seldom to be procured. But we must not linger too long, for already the sun is high in the heavens. On, on, once more, brave little horses ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... greatly, had not the proprietor of the hotel, a pompous gentleman (X. afterwards learnt he was President of the Race Club), stood sentry over the door, whence issued the rows of servants with the dishes, narrowly watching what each guest partook of and detecting with an eagle eye the uneatable scraps which the defeated diner had striven to conceal beneath his knife and fork. The most amusing thing during the progress of the meal was the conversation of an elderly English couple, who, in truly ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... climates of Europe thrive but indifferently in the warm regions of the coast of Peru. Apples and pears are for the most part uneatable. Of stone fruits only the peach succeeds well. Vast quantities of apricots (called duraznos) grow in the mountain valleys. Of fifteen kinds which came under my observation, those called blanquillos and abridores are distinguished for fine flavor. ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... to Bob was the food. The rancid butter, the coarse bread, the almost uneatable bacon, the tough meat, tried him sorely. At first he could scarcely swallow it. He got used to it at length, however, and found that he was none the worse for it. He also longed for the luxury of a private bath. Oh! ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... fitful gleams of sunlight mocked their shiverings with promise of warmth—promise unfulfilled. Their brandy was now exhausted, and some ship's biscuits in the boatswain's pocket were sodden and uneatable. Thirst began to add to the horrors of the situation. Olive was moaning for water, and they ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg |
