"Ungraceful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were made. The very dust and discolorations of the poor furnishings, the confined air, made one turn one's face aside as from too coarse a betrayal of personal reserve. The naked indecency of domestic life seemed to display and vaunt itself, sparing none of its homely and ungraceful details, to the young man on the threshold ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... day off. There is no mistaking this. Nineteen or twenty years old, homely as a mud fence; ungraceful, doltish, she sits staring out of the window and her eyes blink at the rain. A peasant from southeastern Europe, a field hand who fell into the steerage of a transatlantic liner and fell out again. Now she has ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Two tall and not ungraceful lamps lighted the same chamber in which Hilda was first presented to the reader. The handmaids were still at their spindles, and the white web nimbly shot as the mistress entered. She paused, and her brow knit, as she ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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
... entirely too much to the expression of opinion on the part of the faculty, when we would have preferred that he should simply indicate his own views or desire. One characteristic of General Lee I noted then and have often recalled: I never saw him take an ungraceful posture. No matter how long or fatiguing a faculty meeting might be, he always preserved an attitude in which dignity, decorum, and grace were united. He was a very well built man, with rounded body and limbs, and seemed ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... assure you! It is as common as going to bed; it is almost prosy. LIFE is heroism, if you like; but death is a mere cessation of business. And to make a rapid and rude exit off the stage before the prompter gives the sign is always, to say the least of it, ungraceful. Act the part out, no matter how bad the ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... the person you intend to serve, but you would waste much time, and should the vertebrae have not been removed by the butcher, you would be compelled to exercise such a degree of strength that would make one's appearance very ungraceful, and possibly, too, throwing gravy over your neighbor sitting next to you. The correct way to carve this roast is to cut diagonally from fig. 1 to 2, and help in slices of moderate thickness; then it may be cut from 3 to 4, in order to separate the small bones; ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... things that stand in the way 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 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... parishes on the estate all dined at the Towers to-day, in order to pay their respects to their bishop. "Lothair's oecumenical council," said Hugo Bohun, as he entered the crowded room, and looked around him with an air of not ungraceful impertinence. Among the clergy was Mr. Smylie, ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... though he were a part of Shelton's soul. It came as a shock to realise that this young foreign vagabond had taken such a place within his thoughts. The pose of his limbs and head, irregular but not ungraceful; his disillusioned lips; the rings of smoke that issued from them—all signified rebellion, and the overthrow of law and order. His thin, lopsided nose, the rapid glances of his goggling, prominent eyes, were subtlety itself; he stood ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... surprise," says vivacious Pennant, "I met again with Sir John Cutler, Grocer, in marble and on canvas. In the first he is represented standing, in a flowing wig, waved rather than curled, a laced cravat, and a furred gown, with the folds not ungraceful; in all, except where the dress is inimical to the sculptor's art, it may be called a good performance. By his portrait we may learn that this worthy wore a black wig, and was a good-looking man. He ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... he saluted his disconcerted companion, who moved off with ungraceful displeasure. Fleda and Mr. Carleton then began to follow back the road they had come, in the highest good humour both. Her sparkling face told him with even greater emphasis than ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... writers have labored hard to prove, and have succeeded. The streets of Magdala are any where from three to six feet wide, and reeking with uncleanliness. The houses are from five to seven feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan—the ungraceful form of a dry-goods box. The sides are daubed with a smooth white plaster, and tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with disks of camel-dung placed there to dry. This gives the edifice the romantic appearance of having been riddled with cannon-balls, and imparts to it a very ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... majestically towards the river, through a fog, which prevented our being advantageously seen, and which got down the throat of the sword bearer, who coughed incessantly during our progress, much to my annoyance, not to speak of the ungraceful movements which his convulsive barkings gave to the red velvet scabbard of the official glave as it stuck out of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... do at all! Most ungraceful, and totally devoid of the dignity that should inspire it. Now look at me. It should be something like this," making him a reverence that might well have created admiration in the court of ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... surely neither ungraceful nor unamiable, led Addison into the two most serious faults which can with justice be imputed to him. He found that wine broke the spell which lay on his fine intellect, and was therefore too easily seduced into convivial excess. Such excess was in that age ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... form. When the hands are not being used, they should rest quietly in the lap—never should the elbows be rested on the table. The chair should be neither too near nor too far from the table; both are ungraceful and awkward. ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... 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 ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... a strange one, and for the time quite a silent one. The company had started from their seats, and for a moment held breathless but strain'd positions. In the middle of the room stood the young man, in his not at all ungraceful attitude—every nerve out, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... conchology were not particularly successful, for while he manfully moved about in the uncomfortable and ungraceful position peculiar to shell-seekers, he looked rather at the healthy, honest, eager little face near him than at the ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... girls grow more rapidly than boys and are actually taller and heavier than boys at corresponding ages. From fifteen onward, however, the boys rapidly outstrip the girls in growth. Lack of muscular co-ordination is responsible for the awkward movements, ungainly appearance, ungraceful carriage, with their attendant self-consciousness, so characteristic of both boys ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... 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 ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... In the old days, what with her literary cultivation and her social success, she had always been the flattered and admired one of their little group. Delafield felt himself clumsy and tongue-tied beside her. It was a superiority on her part very natural and never ungraceful, and it was his chief delight to bring it forward, to insist upon it, ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... passenger. Poised on one foot, and holding firmly to his shoulders, Nan sailed down the High Street in the full glare of the lamps. It was not a dignified mode of progression, but it was very far from being ungraceful. ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the time we left Naples of sunny Italy till we arrived in the docks of Brooklyn, eleven and one-half days' voyage with only a short stop at Gibraltar, that fortified rock for which Great Britain is ready to play all her power just to maintain that dry and ungraceful rock, but, the key of two seas, and in Azores Islands to exchange mail, our journey was a never ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... rose-colored silk, covered with flounces, rosettes, a mass of ribbons, etc., and with a girdle, suspended to which were many ornaments of different devices, all of silver, and which, as she walked, rang like bells. Nothing can be more ungraceful than such a dress, which, however, Alete wore with grace. When she appeared, a cry of admiration escaped from every mouth, and the spectators' eyes turned involuntarily to ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... able to form an effective and organised opposition. It was on the 27th of February, 1846, that Lord George made his debut in his new capacity. His speech was excellent in everything but its logic. Modest yet courageous in manner, plain but not ungraceful in style, his address told upon the house. The tone, however, was too aristocratic for the place and the times, and his arguments proved that he had not mastered the controversy, into the midst of which he had so chivalrously launched. He brought forward numerous details; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Castle, of which only one wing was left habitable, as the youthful beech, in all its vigour of shoot and bud, would appear to the same aged oak stripped of its boughs, and rifted by lightning, one-half laid in shivers on the ground, and the other remaining a blackened and ungraceful trunk, rent and splintered, and without either life or leaves. Sir Geoffrey could not but feel, that the situation and prospects were exchanged as disadvantageously for himself as the appearance of their mansions; and that though ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... undecorative! Bed, dresser, and washstand, forcibly recalling to one the big bear, middle-sized bear, and little bear of nursery lore, were clumsy and heavy and bad, even in hardwood; but when they were simply stained imitations of the real thing, and ornate with wooden knobs, machine carving, and ungraceful lines, they were truly unspeakable. The bed with its fat bolster, on top of which, like Ossa on Pelion piled, stood the pillows, perhaps covered with shams which bade one "Good night" and "Good morning" in red cotton embroidery—was especially hideous ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... to and fro through the room, reading. She watched him, angrily confident that she should presently see him change countenance. Suddenly he drooped as if his spine had partly given way; and in this ungraceful attitude he read the remainder of the letter. When he had finished he threw it on the table, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and roared with laughter, huddling himself together as if he could concentrate the joke by collecting himself into the smallest ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... the bench is so high as not to permit the feet to rest upon the floor, the weight of the limbs below the knee may cause the flexible bone of the thigh to become curved. The child thus seated, is inclined to lean forward, contracting an injurious and ungraceful habit. Again, when the feet are not supported, the child soon becomes exhausted, restless, and unfit for study. In the construction of a school-room, the benches should be of different heights, so as to be adapted to the ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... strumming, which kept time to a monotonous chant. Two other girls executed a dance to this, which, for its slowness, might be considered an African minuet. The dancing children were bright-looking, and not ungraceful. Work stops at noon for a recess; and the mothers run from the field to visit the imprisoned babies, whom they carry to their own homes and keep till the afternoon-hour for work comes round, which it does at two P.M. We went next to the negro-houses, which are built, as we have described ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... repeated suggestion produces familiarity and dulls the effect upon him of the features which at first repelled him. Familiar cases of this are furnished by fashions of dress and by slang. A new fashion of dress seems at first to be absurd, ungraceful, or indecent. After a time this first impression of it is so dulled that all conform to the fashion. New slang seems vulgar. It makes its way into use. In India the lingam symbol is so common that no one pays any heed to its ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... 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 in the women and children of the race; and with the swarthy ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... carved and many-paned windows of which were of very remote date, and evidently formed from the relics of some monastery or religious house. Here and there, the fancy or interest of the owner had induced him to remodel the structure; and an ill-designed and ungraceful mixture of the modern with the ancient gave to the whole somewhat of a grotesque appearance, that was heightened by the noble trees, which had once towered in majesty and beauty, being in many places lopped and docked, as if even the exuberance of nature was a crime in the ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... intensely uncomfortable—the suspension of respiration, indeed, quickly resolves itself into a feeling of suffocation—and the posture necessitated by the approximation of lips and lips is unfailingly a constrained and ungraceful one. Theoretically, a man kisses a woman perpendicularly, with their eyes, those "windows of the soul," synchronizing exactly. But actually, on account of the incompressibility of the nasal cartilages, he has to incline either his or her head to an angle of at least 60 degrees, and ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... time we saw them walk!" Clara said. Her face twisted with the expression of a past loathing. "How it disgusted us! It seemed to me the most hideous motion I had ever seen—so unnatural, so ungraceful, so repellent. It took me a long time to get used to that. ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... questionable honour and integrity; and of this his friends as well as his enemies were aware. As a speaker in the House of Commons he was luminous upon his own subject, but he had no pretensions to eloquence; his voice was feeble and his manner ungraceful; however, he was (unfortunately) one of the first men in the House, and was listened to with attention upon any subject. He left no children. Mrs. Huskisson has a pension of L1,200 a year. The accounts from Paris improve, inasmuch as there seems a better prospect than there has been lately of tranquillity ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... learn to ride as a lady should ride, without a good deal of instruction; because her seat on horseback is so thoroughly artificial, that without some competent person to tell her of her faults, she is sure to fall into a number of awkward ungraceful tricks. Besides, a riding-school, with its enclosed walls and trained horses, affords an opportunity of going through the preliminary lessons without any of those accidents which on the road, or in a field, are very likely ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... such an occasion, and how that other beauty looked on another occasion—and she felt as she read like a spell-bound princess in a fairy tale, mewed up in a battlemented tower, and deprived of her legitimate share in all the pleasures of earth. She had no patience with Mary—that wild, unkempt, ungraceful creature, who could be as happy as summer days are long, racing about the hills with her bamboo alpenstock, rioting with a pack of fox-terriers, practising long losers, rowing on the lake, doing all things unbecoming ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... in ten millions. The exact proportion of Poets, Painters, Oratory, Statesmen, and all other Great Artists. Well,—three or nine,—Mary Damer is one of them. She never saw fear or jealousy, or knowingly allowed an ignoble thought or an ungentle word or an ungraceful act in herself. Her atmosphere does not tolerate flirtation. You must find out for yourself how much genius she has and has not. But I will say this,—that I think of puns two a minute faster when I'm with her. Therefore ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... at the 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 ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... hollowed out from a piece of wood, and covered at each end with a bull's hide, producing a most barbarous noise, accompanied by a baba, or rattle, loud shouts, palaver, songs, and violent gesticulations, forming a system of confused uproar, unmusical, and ungraceful. Their motions are irregular, sometimes in violent contortion, and at others voluptuous and slow. Nothing can be done without a palaver; and at the change of every dance, he from whom the proposition originates, makes a solemn harangue over ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... hope it is not impossible to have such a regard to these, as neither to lose so known a mark of the author on the one hand, nor to offend the reader too much on the other. The repetition is not ungraceful in those speeches, where the dignity of the speaker renders it a sort of insolence to alter his words; as in the messages from gods to men, or from higher powers to inferiors in concerns of state, or where the ceremonial of religion seems to require ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... for the first time by nothing so much as by his ugliness. And yet few persons who knew him would have hesitated to allow to his nervous, suffering visage a certain indefinable charm. The large head set on a figure markedly ungraceful, on which the clothes seldom fitted, was shapely and refined, although the features were indefensible, even grotesque. And his mouth, with its constrained thin lips and the acrid lines about it, was unmistakably a strong one. His deep-set eyes, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... 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, ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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 red morocco, which consisted of a flat piece placed on my back, and ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the men staring at the three pretty, feminine faces that peered from the interior of the limousine. They had remained silent thus far, but now one of them, a fellow with dark eyes and a sallow complexion, reined his horse nearer the car and removed his hat with a sweeping gesture that was not ungraceful. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... smell of fire, and shortness of food and raiment, that she feared she had betrayed a stranger's wonder and admiration every time the train stopped, and the idlers of the station platform lingered about her window and silently paid their ungraceful but complimentary tribute of simulated ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... forlorn. Nothing was ragged or untidy, but nothing either had the least look of home comfort or home privacy. As to home elegance, or luxury, the look of such a room is enough to put it out of one's head that there can be such things in the world. The ugly ingrain carpet, the ungraceful frame of the small glass in the pier, the abominable portraits on the walls, the disagreeable paper with which they were hung, the hideous lamps on the mantelpiece;—wherever the eye looked, it came back with uneasy discomfort. Philip's ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... along in ill-humor; shop-girls and others, who were out from sheer necessity, sped along with smileless faces, and frozen ulster-tails, sulking as they jerked from one icy elevation to another in the flooded slippery walk, and raising their upper lips in ungraceful curves, as their straightened curls stood out in painful stiffness, or fell in wet, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... could write 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 even a grace about this bulky beast and ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... fields, furrows among stumps, a log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with dry hay. But Nels had prospered. He used the log cabin as a barn; and a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie house, the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and pink trimmings. Every tree had been cut down. The house was so unsheltered, so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust out into the harsh clearing, that Carol shivered. But ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... hardly be separated, even for a week's holiday, from his beloved Spectator. His output of work was enormous and incessant, and was throughout critical and didactic. The style was pre-eminently characteristic of the man—tangled, untidy, ungraceful, disfigured by "trailing relatives" and accumulated epithets; and yet all the time conveying the sense of some real and even profound thought that strove to express itself intelligibly. As the style, so the substance. "The Spectator," ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... has, I know not what peculiarity of its own; and if you force yourself to express the naturalness (le naif) of this, in another language, observing the law of translation, which is, not to expatiate beyond the limits of the author himself; your words will be constrained, cold and ungraceful." Then he fixes the test of all good translation:—"To prove this, read me Demosthenes and Homer in Latin, Cicero and Virgil in French, and see whether they produce in you the same affections which you experience in reading those authors ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... unattractiveness! Margaret, just say, 'I love you, 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 ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... at my schoolfellows asleep in their little narrow beds, all in exceedingly ungraceful attitudes, and looking towzley and queer, I saw that, as I held the blind on one side, the sunlight shone full on Mercer, and I hurt myself directly by bursting out into a silent fit of laughter, which drew my bruised face into pain-producing puckers. But it was impossible to help ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... yet laughing also, and one could want no better picture of human affection than this of Bermondsey Bert and his shapeless, work-distorted, maybe bibulous-looking mother, exchanging that resounding and ungraceful kiss at the hospital gate. I have heard Bert shout "Mother!" from a hundred yards off, when he spied her coming through the gate. No false shame there! No smug "good form" in that—nor in the time-honoured jest which ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... fashion of saying "Miss" for "Mrs.," as "Miss Jones" and "Miss Peters" for "Mrs. Jones" and "Mrs. Peters." This sounded exceedingly vulgar to my ears, and I waited almost impatiently for the time to come when I could use the prerogative of a wife for its correction. He had, an ungraceful way of lounging in his chair and half reclining on the sofa, even in company, that was terrible. It made me uneasy from head to foot. Then he said, "I shew it to him" for "I showed it to him,"—"of-ten" for "oft'n"—and "obleeged" ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... passed up the avenue, President Lincoln appeared in front of his mansion. The boys greeted him with a volley of stunning cheers, which the President acknowledged by a series of bows, which were not half so ungraceful as one might have expected after reading the descriptions of ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... are exceedingly short, scarcely reaching the calf of the legs, which are enveloped in a pair of flaming red stockings. Who the devil could invent such an ungraceful ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... don't deserve it. I am not in the least brave at heart... Sometimes I almost dread getting strong, for then I shall have to face so much... I'm conceited, too, for I hate the idea of limping, and being stiff and ungraceful. I thought I did not care for appearance, but I did—oh, a great deal! It is a humiliating discovery, and I am trying hard to cure myself, but pride dies slowly! There was a girl at school who was lame. I used to be so sorry for her, and yet, compared with other ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... barbarism; slang &c 563; solecism &c 568; mannerism &c (affectation) 855; euphuism^; fustian &c 577; cacophony; words that break the teeth, words that dislocate the jaw; marinism^. V. be inelegant &c adj.. Adj. inelegant, graceless, ungraceful; harsh, abrupt; dry, stiff, cramped, formal, guinde [Fr.]; forced, labored; artificial, mannered, ponderous; awkward, uncourtly^, unpolished; turgid &c 577; affected, euphuistic^; barbarous, uncouth, grotesque, rude, crude, halting; offensive to ears ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... a thread on the floor. Sat down again. Picked up her pencil, rolled it a moment in her palms, then, catching her toes behind either foreleg of her chair, in an attitude that was as workmanlike as it was ungraceful, she began to draw, nervously, tentatively at first, but gaining in firmness and assurance as ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... I love to praise thee; and often and often, as thou knowest, have I studied for occasions to do it: insomuch that when, for the life of me, I could not think of any thing done by thee that deserved praise, I have taken pains to applaud the not ungraceful manner in which thou hast performed ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... and sweetness of feature were so happily blended, as formed one of the best imitations of the Apollo Belvidere. With this fine commanding figure, he was so much in the free and easy management of his limbs, as never to look encumbered, or present an ungraceful attitude, in all his various movements on the stage. Even his exits and entrances had peculiar graces, from their characteristic ease and simplicity. What must have greatly assisted Barry in the grace and ease ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... that De Quincey himself, after 1830, lived too little in touch with actual life to be aware that the style was becoming as unfashionable as it had always, save on very exceptional subjects, been ungraceful. Even on Wilson, who was to the manner born of riotous spirits, it often sits awkwardly; in De Quincey's case it is, to borrow Sir Walter's admirable simile in another case, like "the forced impudence of a bashful man." Grim humour he can manage ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... of the ornament is, there is too much of it, and besides, the depressed shape of the lower arches is bad and ungraceful, and the attempt at tracery in the upper walks is more ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... moderation, extravagance, bombastic straining for effect, are destructive of beauty, whether in color, form, motion, language, or thought;—in color, they would be called glaring; in form, inelegant; in motion, ungraceful; in language, coarse; in thought, undisciplined; in all, unchastened: these qualities are always painful, because the signs of disobedient and irregular operation. In color, for example, it is not red, but rose color, which is the most beautiful; neither is it the brightest green, but such gray ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... I would make the men discontented with the fashion of their garments, and still more just now the women, of all ranks, with the fashion of theirs; and with everything around them which they have the power of improving, if it be at all ungraceful, superfluous, tawdry, ridiculous, unwholesome. I would make them discontented with what they call their education, and say to them—You call the three Royal R's education? They are not education: no more is the knowledge which would enable you to ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... left hand on your hip or behind you. In the first place, you thus drag your partner too much forward, which makes her look ungraceful; in the next, this attitude is never used except in casinos, and it is almost an insult to introduce ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... solemn, even to a degree of eccentricity calculated to provoke a smile from the hearers. His voice was rather loud and hard, his features were inflexible, his utterance was exceedingly deliberate, and his language precise and elaborate. His motions were very slight, and, such as he had, ungraceful: for he would stand with his right arm a little raised, and the hand hanging down passively by his side for a long time together, except when a slight vertical motion appeared—he, the while, unconscious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... it seems to have been considered improper, or ungraceful, or unladylike,—the reasons are nowhere satisfactorily given, but the fact remains that until recently ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... were awakened by the terrible revolutions of France and the desolation of Poland; as a principle, we hated Napoleon, though he had neither act nor part in the doings of the democrats; and the sea-songs of Dibdin, which our youth now would call uncouth and ungraceful rhymes, were key-notes to public feeling; the English of that time were thoroughly "awake"—the British Lion had not slumbered through a thirty years' peace. We were a nation of soldiers, and sailors, and patriots; not of mingled cotton-spinners, and railway speculators, and angry protectionists. ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... vast and dazzling, but warm and cheerful hall. Already it was filled, and filled with a splendid assemblage. I do not know that the women were very beautiful, but their dresses were so perfect; and foreigners, even such as are ungraceful in domestic privacy, seem to posses the art of appearing graceful in public: however blunt and boisterous those every-day and home movements connected with peignoir and papillotes, there is a slide, a bend, a carriage of the head and arms, a mien of the mouth and eyes, kept nicely in ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... inartificially 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, there was ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... so much more than the English party, tells us, among other reasons of the little danger of the political influence of the parties themselves over the people, that not only their pretensions were far removed, but he adds, "They were UNGRACEFUL both in their persons and their houses." Morant takes the term UNGRACEFUL in its modern acceptation; but in the style of that day, I think UNGRACEFUL is opposed to GRACIOUS in the eyes of the people, meaning that their persons and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... unpaid wages. She was a young girl, and pretty for one of her sisterhood, who perpetuate, as a rule, the hard and strenuous lineaments and forms held to hard labor, until they have attained a squat solidity of ungraceful muscle. This little Hungarian Marie was still not overdeveloped muscularly, although one saw her hands with a certain shock after her little, smiling face, which still smiled, despite her wrongs. Nothing could exceed the sweetness ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... plumping down one of his creels in the middle of the crowd, he lifted up the musician, and seated him upon the rough, cold oysters,—a throne fitter, certainly, for a follower of Neptune than a votary of Apollo. One of the roughs danced an ungraceful measure to the music of the accordion, mimicking, as he did so, the queer contortions into which the musician twisted his features in perfect harmony with his woful strains. All of them were gentle to the blind man, though, as if his darkness had brought to them a ray of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... several 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
... natural grace which made them forgive his successes during the week, and his 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 ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... heart, and the tears rushed up into his eyes. The next moment the eidolon of Mary St. John, moving gracious and strong, clothed in worship and the dignity which is its own defence, appeared beside that of Jessie Hewson, her bowed head shaken with sobs, and her weak limbs urged to ungraceful flight. As if walking in the vision of an eternal truth, he went straight to Captain ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... carpenter in Bethlehem and spent most of His time among fishermen, tax-collectors, cripples, lepers, and outcasts of various sorts; and yet in the entire record of His short and troubled life there is not one mention of an ungraceful or an ungainly action. He was careful to observe even the trivialities of social life. Mary and Martha were quarreling before dinner. He quieted them with a few gracious words. The people at the marriage feast at Cana were worried because they had only water to drink. He touched ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... hang out a sign by his dress of what he has in his shop. Thou, indeed, art an exception; dressing like a coxcomb, yet a very clever fellow. Nevertheless so clumsy a beau, that thou seemest to me to owe thyself a double spite, making thy ungracefulness appear the more ungraceful, by thy remarkable tawdriness, when thou art ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... fired off. A large jar of rice wine, very sour but with an agreeable flavour, was then handed around, and I asked to see some of their dances. These were, like most savage performances, very dull and ungraceful affairs; the men dressing themselves absurdly like women, and the girls making themselves as stiff and ridiculous as possible. All the time six or eight large Chinese gongs were being beaten by the vigorous ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... 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 to ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... and that too but lamely taken from the Greek original; secondly, that the English language was then unpolished, and far from the perfection which it has since attained; so that the first version is not only ungrammatical and ungraceful, but in many places almost unintelligible." There is another English version, by the Langhornes, which has often been reprinted; there is an edition of it with notes by Wrangham. I have compared my translation carefully with the German of Kaltwasser, and ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... small, with rapid, nervous movements; energetic, never wholly ungraceful, but inclined to be restless. Her face did not betray the intelligence she possessed, as her eyes, though clear and well-shaped, were too close together. Her hawky nose was bent over a short upper lip and meaningless mouth. The chin showed more definite character than her other features, being ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... 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
... 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; ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... very active piece of movement. This group of curves is equal to about a two-feet length of pen-stroke, a fact which indicates an extraordinary amount of personal energy. Dickens was then writing his "Sketches by Boz," and this ungraceful elaboration of his signature was probably accompanied by a growing sense of his own capacity and power. During the time-interval between the signatures shown in Nos. 7 and 8, the first number of the "Pickwick Papers" was published—March, ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... you wish to explain?" said the second stranger in Italian, bowing with a not ungraceful bend, and a touch of his hand ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 as that of the Trojans, were the Maeonians, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Queen's road, I must just say a word or two about the people's costume, which, as we observe, is nearly the same for both sexes; for if there be any difference, it is but slight in detail. Their dress is the most unbecoming and ungraceful it is possible to conceive, and yet, we are bound to admit, most refined. Had the women the redeeming quality of beauty, or the charm of a pretty face, possibly even this dress might appear to better advantage. A coarse-looking black or blue blouse, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... 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 ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... figures had halted, a strange contrast. The man on the right, tall, slender, of athletic and graceful build, clad in trim simple undress uniform of the cavalry, sitting his horse as straight as a young pine; the other, bent, blanket-robed, hunched up on his pony in the peculiarly ungraceful pose of the Indian rider when at rest, but resolute and immovable; both sublimely devoted in the duty now before them. When by the sweeping advance of the Indian line these two, the young officer, ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... 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 his employment, ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... fellows, the masters of arts, and the masters of colleges passing along the streets in their different gowns. Very unbecoming gowns they are, in all cases; and much as the wearers must be accustomed to them, they seem to step awkwardly, and to have an ungraceful feminine touch in ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... one most curious variety (fig. 64); the flower is inverted like a bell, and the shaft is turned upside down, the smaller end being sunk in the plinth, while the larger is fitted to the wide part of the overturned bell. This ungraceful innovation achieved no success, and is found nowhere else. Other novelties were happier, especially those which enabled the artist to introduce decorative elements taken from the flora of the country. ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... naturally 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
... 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
... 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 out ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... running towards us, plunging about in the deep ground in clumsy attempts at juvenile activity. A few of the young women were very pretty, but, as usual in Cyprus, their figures were ungainly, and their movements, hampered by baggy trousers and enormous high boots, were most ungraceful. ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... water over them thrice 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
... an accident which occurred in his infancy, was slightly deformed. His right shoulder—as I understood, for I never saw him—grew out, giving an ungraceful and somewhat comical twist to his figure, which, in female eyes—youthful ones at least—sadly marred the effect of his intelligent and handsome countenance. This personal defect rendered him shy and awkward ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... of children thus left to themselves has rarely a good result; it does not aid development, save as regards the physical advantage of general nutrition, that is, of the vegetative life. Their movements become ungraceful; they invent unseemly capers, walk with a staggering gait, fall easily, and break things. They are evidently quite unlike the free kitten, so full of grace, so fascinating in its movements, tending to perfect its action by the light ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... to the litter, bound the war chariots of the vanquished chiefs to the Pharaoh. He dragged them behind him like animals in leash. These men, with fierce despairing faces, their elbows drawn together by a strap and forming an ungraceful angle, tottered awkwardly at every motion of the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... the different teachers who surround him, it evidently appears that he wishes to assume the character of a gentleman, his internal feelings tell him he has not attained it. Under that consciousness, he is properly and naturally represented as ungraceful, and ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... 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 ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... Duty." Bishops were represented as attending in the dressing department of the opera-house; one is seen to be measuring the dancers' skirts with a tailor's yard; another arranges their stockings in an ungraceful fashion; while a third inspects their corsets, decreeing some change in the form of those articles of attire. The Bishop of Durham was further portrayed in another broadsheet as armed with his pastoral staff, and sturdily contesting hand to hand with the Spirit of ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... hands were black; not grimy, but absolutely black, and neither hands nor necks ever knew water, I am sure. There was not the least shape to their garments; their dresses simply hung down in straight ungraceful lines; there was no colour of ribbon or flower, to light up the dinginess. But they had the golden-brown in their ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments, they strike rather than please; the images are magnified by affectation; the language is laboured into harshness. The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural violence. "Double, double, toil and trouble." He has a kind of strutting dignity, and ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... English form. For the rest of our specimens, we shall use 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, and makes his verses long ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... to the bird, with its wings and claws still in its own possession;—it is discouraging, I say, to observe that the beginning of such more faithful and accurate observation in former art, is exactly coeval with the commencement of its decline. The feverish and ungraceful natural history of Paul, called, "of the birds," Paolo degli Uccelli, produced, indeed, no harmful result on the minds of his contemporaries, they watched in him, with only contemptuous admiration, the fantasy of zoological instinct which filled his house with painted dogs, cats, and birds, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... ungraceful retorts which I mentioned may be instanced as follows. Demaratus, being asked in a troublesome manner by an importunate fellow, Who was the best man in Lacedaemon? answered at last, "He, Sir, that is the least like you." Some, in company ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... single uncivil speech or act of overt offence to which an angry guest could point. With each later course, the Prime Minister grew stiffer and more silent. Endurance was written in every line of his fighting head and round, ungraceful shoulders, in his veiled eyes and stolid mouth. Lady Tranmore gave a gasp of relief when at last ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... swiftness and vim, he rushed from end to end of the terrace. His feet twinkled in steps so complicated and various that he made the eyes that watched him wink as at a play of sparks in a furnace, and his arms and hands were never still, yet never, even for a second, fell into a curve that was ungraceful. Sometimes his head was bent whimsically forward as if in invitation. Sometimes he threw his whole body backward, exposing his brown throat, and staring up at the sun like a sun worshipper dancing to his divinity. Sometimes he crouched on his haunches, clapping his hands together ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... coon-skin cap sits high upon his head slightly slouched to the right. With the visage of the animal turned to the front, and the full plume-like tail, with its alternate rings, drooping to the shoulder, it forms a head-dress that is far from ungraceful. A belt around the waist—a short hunting-knife in its sheath—a large powder-horn hanging below the arm-pit—a bullet-pouch underneath, and voila tout! No, not all, there remains to be mentioned the rifle—the arm par excellence of the American hunter. ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... 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 ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 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, slovenly ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... moderation and restraint, is, I think, destructive of all beauty whatsoever in everything, color, form, motion, language, or thought, giving rise to that which in color we call glaring, in form inelegant, in motion ungraceful, in language coarse, in thought undisciplined, in all unchastened; which qualities are in everything most painful, because the signs of disobedient and irregular operation. And herein we at last find the reason of that which has been so often noted respecting the subtilty and almost invisibility ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... a short breath, a hesitating speech, and his manners were very ungraceful. To remedy his stammering, he filled his mouth full of pebbles and howled his sentiments at the angry sea. However, Plutarch says that Demosthenes made a gloomy fizzle of his first speech. This did not discourage him. He finally became the smoothest orator in that country, and it ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the long parliament. His domestic affairs were then in greater disorder; and he seemed not to possess any talents which could qualify him to rise in that public sphere into which he was now at last entered. His person was ungraceful, his dress slovenly, his voice untonable, his elocution homely, tedious, obscure, and embarrassed. The fervor of his spirit frequently prompted him to rise in the house; but he was not heard with attention: his name, for above ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... the great school of Paris, to which the Duke of Bedford at Caen, and Charles VII. himself at Poitiers, were attempting to raise up rivals; and silence reigned in the Latin quarter. The child-king was considered unintelligent, and ungraceful, and ungracious. When, on the day after Christmas, he started on his way back to Rouen, and from Rouen to England, he did not confer on Paris "any of the boons expected, either by releasing prisoners ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... 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), ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... of the Mountains, having lately been sealed to his twelfth wife, and having no suitable apartment for her, had ingeniously contrived a sleeping-place in a covered wagon-box at the end of the house,—an apartment which was now being occupied, not without some ungraceful remonstrance, by his first wife, a lady somewhat far down in the vale of years and long past the first glamour of her enthusiasm for the Kingdom. It had been her mischance to occupy previously in the community-house ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... with the life-long misery to which tailless horses are subjected, for we deprive them for ever of their caudal appendage, and the ridiculous stump sticking up where the tail ought to be, is as ungraceful as it is indecent, especially in the case of mares. Our friend, the late Dr. George Fleming, says in The Wanton Mutilation of Animals, "nothing can be more painful and disgusting to the real horseman and admirer of this most symmetrically formed and graceful animal than the existence of this most ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... Supplication to the Devil." This is a grotesque satire on the vices and the eccentricities of the age. As a specimen of prose style it is remarkable for its spirit and "go," qualities which may enable us to forget how turbid, ungraceful, and harsh it is. Nash had now dropped the mannerism of the Euphuists; he had hardly gained a style of his own. "Pierce Penniless," with its chains of "letter-leaping metaphors," rattles breathlessly on, ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearance of impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in a youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is confessedly to be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... title, ceremony, and phrase associated with the old system, and that, turning away with disgust from their own national precedents and traditions, they should have sought for principles of government in the writings of theorists, or aped, with ignorant and ungraceful affectation, the patriots of Athens and Rome. As little can we wonder that the violent action of the revolutionary spirit should have been followed by reaction equally violent, and that confusion should ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... instant's silence, and then Mr. Morrow made another movement. I may have been mistaken, but it affected me as the translated impulse of the desire to lay hands on the manuscript, and this led me to indulge in a quick anticipatory grab which may very well have seemed ungraceful, or even impertinent, and which at any rate left Mr. Paraday's two admirers very erect, glaring at each other while one of them held a bundle of papers well behind him. An instant later Mr. Morrow quitted me abruptly, as if he had really ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... movement which preceded the Renaissance, the inspirer of that group of Pre-Raphaelites, awkward, grotesque in drawing though at times they were, to whom we turn to-day with a sort of piety, finding in their ungraceful saints an inner life, a moral feeling which we ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... back, bashful at meeting two lovely girls while in the form of a beast; but Jinjur now took his hand and led him forward while she introduced him to Ozma, and Woot managed to make a low bow, not really ungraceful, before her girlish Majesty, the Ruler ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... fault, and partly through the efforts of injudicious friends and ambitious tailors. He was raising (to gratify a very young lady, it is said) a crop of whiskers, of the blacking-brush variety, coarse, stiff, and ungraceful; and in so doing spoiled, or at least seriously impaired, a face which, though never handsome, had in its original state a peculiar power and pathos. On the present occasion the whiskers were reinforced by brand-new clothes from top to toe; black dress coat instead ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... in which he delights too often; his equivocations, which Bentley endeavours to defend by the example of the ancients; his unnecessary and ungraceful use of terms of art; it is not necessary to mention, because they are easily remarked, and generally censured; and, at last, bear so little proportion to the whole, that they scarcely deserve the ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... the advantage as yet. Hubert in vain tried to be at ease, whilst Mutimer was quite himself, and not ungraceful in his assumption of equality. For one thing, Hubert could not avoid a comparison between his own wasted frame and the other's splendid physique; it heightened the feeling of antagonism which possessed him in advance, and provoked ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... and gentlemen," said he, making a not ungraceful bow as he seated himself. "Hope you ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... His short jacket and knee-breeches of gray velveteen cover a chest broad rather than deep, and reveal the fine, narrow loins and muscular thighs of a frame matured and hardened by labor. His hands, also, are hard and strong, but not ungraceful in form. His neck, not too short, is firmly planted, and the carriage of his head indicates patience and energy. Thick, dark hair enframes his square forehead, and straight, somewhat heavy brows. His eyes of ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... remarks,[290] "Every few seconds over they go; one, two, or three summersaults at a time. Here and there a bird gives a very quick and rapid spin, revolving like a wheel, though they sometimes lose their balance, and make a rather ungraceful fall, in which they occasionally hurt themselves by striking some object." From Madras I have received several specimens of the common Tumbler of India, differing slightly from each other in the length of their beaks. Mr. Brent sent me a dead specimen of a "House-tumbler,"[291] ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... it might almost be said it was only when a spectator was present that he was not sobbing. For Rosie, who was an awkward, ungraceful young person, proved to be the dullest and most butter-fingered pupil ever invented for the torture of teachers; at least, so Lancelot thought, but then he had never had any other pupils, and was not patient. It must be admitted, though, that Rosie giggled perpetually, apparently ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... woman and three or four children. Day after blazing day I sat on rickety chairs, wash-tubs, ironing-boards, veranda railings, climbing creaking stairways, now and again descending a treacherous one in unintentional haste and ungraceful posture, burrowing into blind but inhabited cubby-holes, hunting out squatters' nests of tin cans and dry-goods boxes hidden away behind the legitimate buildings, shouting questions into dilapidated ear-drums, delving into the past of every human ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... 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
... her as fat, fair, and forty, we should certainly wrong her. Fair and forty she undoubtedly was, but fat she certainly was not. There was a slight tendency to embonpoint, but this was relieved by her tall and not ungraceful figure. She was what might be termed a decidedly handsome woman. The corpulent lawyer had subsided into the sleek, well-conditioned country gentleman. But there was at times a certain restlessness of the eye, and a nervous twitching at the corners of the mouth, which, to a keen observer, ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... 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 ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... The convenient, if ungraceful, cab had completely superseded the old pair-horse hackney-coaches in London in general use previous to 1850. According to the returns of the day, there were 6,793 of the modern single-horse hackney-coaches in the metropolis ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... obviate which, see that your chair and table suit each other in height, and that you so hold your work as hardly to need to bend your head at all. The practice of fastening the work to the knee, besides being ungraceful, ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... 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 than by ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... either side was able to produce, thrown often into close and serre confutations of one another. The practice was necessarily very useful to us, and eminently so to me. I never, indeed, acquired real fluency, and had always a bad and ungraceful delivery; but I could make myself listened to: and as I always wrote my speeches when, from the feelings involved, or the nature of the ideas to be developed, expression seemed important, I greatly ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... then," snapped Mrs. Spencer, with the ungraceful anger of a woman, long accustomed to having her own way, compelled for once to yield. "It'll be like chips in porridge anyhow—neither good ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... drink it?" asked her companion. "If it does hurt or harm to you or yours, or anything but good, may what is hanging over me be fulfilled!" and she extended a thin, but, considering her years, not ungraceful arm, in the act of holding out the bottle to ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... lordly air, and saluted her with a courtesy by no means ungraceful; and then the sweet lady said to him, regaling with a ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... important crossing or open space, not only in the so-called quartiers excentriques, but in such official neighborhoods as those of the Louvre and the Hotel de Ville, temporary bandstands are set up, and around them the people dance cheerfully, mostly in ungraceful waltzes, all the evening, and frequently all night. In front of the cafes in the popular quarters, the music of a violin or a hurdy-gurdy, or even of the dreadful organ of the "merry-go-rounds," or chevaux de bois, will furnish inspiration ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... in clay are of rare occurrence. The best is one figured by Ker Porter, which represents a mother with a child in her arms. The mother is seated in a natural and not ungraceful attitude on a rough square pedestal. She is naked except for a hood, or mantilla, which covers the head, shoulders, and back, and a narrow apron which hangs down in front. She wears earrings and a bracelet. The child, which sleeps on her left shoulder, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson |
