"Uninteresting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... compelled, however, to create a fresh existence for myself in this world so little adapted for me. I need not trouble you with an account of these complications, which would be as uninteresting to you as they were painful to myself. You may picture me spending whole days in going from one person to another. I was ashamed of myself, but necessity knows no law. Man does not live by bread alone; but he cannot live without bread. But through ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... is heavy, cheap, and uninteresting, and coming down to the latest productions of Ingenieros, Manuel Ugarte, Ricardo Rojas and Contreras, this ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... emerged from the cloud. She looked away down the aisle at Mrs. Lovejoy, who was patting the uninteresting baby to sleep. ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... where the writer cannot know the exact words, or where the exact words are unimportant, or lengthy and uninteresting, the Third Person is preferable.* Thus, where Essex is asking Sir Robert Cecil that Francis Bacon may be appointed Attorney-General, the dialogue is (as it almost always is in Lord Macaulay's writings) in the First Person, except where it becomes tedious and uninteresting so as to require ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... him were descended the grandfather and father of the emperor Galba. The grandfather was more celebrated for his application to study, than (402) for any figure he made in the government. For he rose no higher than the praetorship, but published a large and not uninteresting history. His father attained to the consulship [647]: he was a short man and hump-backed, but a tolerable orator, and an industrious pleader. He was twice married: the first of his wives was Mummia Achaica, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... it appear as if Smith chose the latter subject of his own motion, in accordance with a rule of the society whereby the chairman of one meeting selected the subject for debate at the next meeting; and it would have been a not uninteresting circumstance if it were true, for it would show the line his ideas were taking at that early period of his career; but as a matter of fact the rule in question was not adopted for some time after the second meeting, and it is distinctly mentioned in the minutes that on this ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Epi was rather uninteresting. Owing to the dense French colonization there the natives have nearly all disappeared or become quite degenerate. We spent our time in visits to the different French planters and then sailed for ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... historians, especially those who think it necessary to say everything they can,—to give minute details of all events. These small details, appropriate enough in works written for specialists, are commonly dry and uninteresting; they are wearisome to the general reader, and are properly soon forgotten, as mere lumber which confuses rather than instructs. No historian can go successfully into minute details unless he has the genius of Macaulay. On this rock Freeman, with all his accuracy, was wrecked; as an historian ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... still more displeasing theories about them, vague portents of perversity on Nick's part and a strange eagerness on Peter's, learned apparently in Paris, to discuss, with a person who had a tone she never had been exposed to, topics irrelevant and uninteresting, almost disgusting, the practical effect of which was to make light of her presence. "Let us leave this—let us leave this!" she grimly said. The party moved together toward the door of departure, and her ruffled spirit ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... interested. She could not rejoice over a new gasoline engine that was to do all the work, when Sandy and Neil were to be made part of the cruel engine of war. And for the first time Wallace found her uninterested and consequently uninteresting. ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... started to prove God," she said earnestly. "Won't you begin now—to-day? Haven't you yet learned that evil is the very stupidest, dullest, most uninteresting thing in the world? It is, really. Won't you turn from your material endeavors now, and take time to learn to really live? You've got plenty of time, you know, for you aren't obliged to work ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... consequences of corruption, and might be promulgated, therefore, without attaching any reproach to our rulers; but they are so accustomed to the mystery adherent to tyranny, that even the most unimportant lawsuit, uninteresting intrigue, elopement, or divorce, are never allowed to be mentioned in our journals, without a previous permission from the prefect of police, who ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... spirit and endurance. From these districts Darius collected large bodies of admirable infantry; and the countries of the modern Kurds and Turkomans supplied, as they do now, squadrons of horsemen, strong, skilful, bold, and trained to a life of constant activity and warfare. It is not uninteresting to notice that the ancestors of our own late enemies, the Sikhs, served as allies of Darius against the Macedonians. They are spoken of in Arrian as Indians who dwelt near Bactria. They were attached to the troops of that satrapy, and their cavalry was one of the most formidable forces in ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... arrived at the catenary,—when we have lost the spring of the fall, and arrived at the plunge of it, that we begin really to feel its weight and wildness. Where water takes its first leap from the top, it is cool, and collected, and uninteresting, and mathematical, but it is when it finds that it has got into a scrape, and has farther to go than it thought for, that its character comes out; it is then that it begins to writhe, and twist, and sweep out zone after zone in wilder stretching as it falls, and to send ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... the Captain was uninteresting and seemed to be beside the purpose of the visit. Hyacinth shifted his chair and fidgeted, uncertain what ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... as well as wiser to be practical, to discourage wild dreaming, she tried to direct her thoughts to insignificant details. Yet even here that rare golden light penetrated to the innermost recesses of her mind; and each drab uninteresting fact glittered with a fresh interest and charm. "I forgot to order that cretonne for the porch," she thought disconnectedly, in an endeavour to conciliate the Fates by pretending that life was as commonplace as it had always been. "That black background with the blue larkspur is pretty—and I ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... tried to face the question of her disappointment. Was it possible to feel any real interest in a man who preferred a Government post to the army at such a time, and who had brought his golf clubs out to America? Her imagination for a moment revolved around the problem of his apparently uninteresting and yet, in some respects, contradictory personality. Was it really her fancy or had she, every now and then, detected behind that flamboyant manner traces of something deeper and more serious, something which seemed to indicate ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... closely examine the notion of God, who serves as its basis? Doubt generally arises either from indolence, weakness, indifference, or incapacity. With many people, to doubt is to fear the trouble of examining things, which are thought uninteresting. But religion being presented to men as their most important concern in this and the future world, skepticism and doubt on this subject must occasion perpetual anxiety and must really constitute a bed of thorns. Every man who has not courage to contemplate, without ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... designed. If it shall have any effect in calming the perturbation which has been lately excited, and which still subsists in the minds of the lower classes of the community, I shall not be ashamed of having given to the world a composition in every other light uninteresting. I will take this opportunity of adding, with the same intention, a few reflections on the present circumstances of our own and of a ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... from what I was told by others personally concerned, and from a paper of information which Rasay was so good as to send me, at my desire, I have compiled the following abstract, which, as it contains some curious anecdotes, will, I imagine not be uninteresting to my readers, and even, perhaps, be of ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... which the crews of these vessels were situated, being such as had never before occurred, it cannot be uninteresting to know in what manner they passed their time during three months of nearly total darkness, and in the ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... than dungeons, rags, and bread and water; when, moreover, the prisoner claimed no pity, but rather congratulation on his badge of merit, improved Sunday dinner, and promotion to the carpenter's shop, so as absolutely to excite a sense of wasted commiseration and uninteresting prosperity. Conversation constrained both by the grating and the presence of the warder, and Aubrey, more tenderly sensitive than his brother, and devoid of his father's experienced tact, was too much embarrassed to take the initiative, was afraid of giving pain by dwelling on his present occupations ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for one moment to reflect on the character of these new deities of whom I have been speaking: Hercules, Castor, Minerva, Diana. It must be confessed that, as compared with the great deities of the calendar, they are uninteresting; with the exception, perhaps, of Hercules, they do not seem to have any real religious significance. They are local deities brought in from outside, and have no root in the mind of the Roman people as we have so far been studying it. They seem to indicate the growth of a population in ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... in the High Street there was Chuffles, the grocer, a small, hairy, silently intent polygamist, who was given rough music by the youth of the neighbourhood because of a scandal about his wife's sister, and who was nevertheless totally uninteresting, and Tonks, the second grocer, an old man with an older, very enfeebled wife, both submerged by piety. Tonks went bankrupt, and was succeeded by a branch of the National Provision Company, with a young manager exactly like a ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... how much address my cousin avoids adding, and 'very uninteresting, and very ugly, and very disagreeable, and very much unsought,' and fifty other things she might add with such perfect truth and modesty! But is it true, that the theatre was open only one ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... should have been unable to appreciate, or even to discover the hidden happiness of her quiet cloistered home. No wonder that the days should have seemed long the observances wearisome, the duties monotonous, and uninteresting. But, oh! the wondrous power of prayer which draws down grace from heaven to refresh the soul, as the mountains attract the moisture-laden clouds to fertilize the earth! Separated in person from the object of her holy affection, but closely united to her in God, ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... care not to fling ourselves into something far more infuriating to a normal human being—and that is boredom. The prospect of a carefully inspected sanitary life, tethered to some light, little, uninteresting daily job, six or eight hours of it, seems to me—and I am sure I write here for most normal, healthy, active people—more awful than hunger and death. It is far more in the quality of the human spirit, and still more what we all in our hearts want the human spirit ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... strike the half-hour after five, and to see Henry opening the door to show Mrs. Chepstow into his consulting-room. A woman who had lived her life and won her renown—or infamy—could scarcely be uninteresting. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... that the following old letter, from a retired lawyer of the seventeenth century to his future son-in-law, might not be altogether uninteresting to your readers, as referring to the value of land and money at the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... and Almagro, at which the writer was present. It is told with much spirit; and is altogether so curious, from the light it throws on the characters of the parties, that I have thought the following translation, which has been prepared for me, might not be uninteresting to ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... yet been opened to the public, we cannot but feel that the history of the first ten years of the reign of George the Third is but imperfectly known to us. Nevertheless, we are inclined to think that we are in a condition to lay before our readers a narrative neither uninstructive nor uninteresting. We therefore return with pleasure ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that we sought our rest together or at the same time, but one night, after a week's fruitless seeking, I came to our door at a late hour to find Dave there before me, and not yet asleep. He began to talk while watching me lay aside the rather uninteresting disguise I ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Pa." Mrs. Monroe was serving an uninteresting meal on heavy plates decorated in toneless brown. Soda crackers and sliced bread were on the table, and a thin slice of butter on a blue china plate. The teaspoons stood erect in a tumbler of red pressed glass. The younger girls had ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... uninteresting period, with both pitchers working their heads off, and nothing but ciphers going ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... face, though it was far from apparent that she was painted. Her hair, at all events, was her own and was not dyed. And yet, though she possessed an abundance of it, such as many a girl might have envied, it remained utterly uninteresting and commonplace, for its faded straw-like colour was not attractive to the eye, and it grew so awkwardly and so straight as to put its possessor to much trouble in the arrangement of the youthful ringlets she thought ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... in choice of subject. He must be named among the painters who have studied with industry, and have made themselves great by doing so; but having obtained a consummate method of execution, he has thrown it away on subjects either altogether uninteresting, or above his powers, or unfit for pictorial representation. "The Cherry Woman," exhibited in 1850, may be named as an example of the first kind; the "Burchell and Sophia" of the second (the character of Sir William ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... intolerant bigotry, they kept the kingdom in constant turmoils, even to the verge of revolution, gradually pushing the king into impolitic measures, against his will and his better judgment, and creating a reaction to all liberal movements. These turmoils, which are uninteresting to us, formed no inconsiderable part of the history of the times. The only great event of the reign was the war in Spain to suppress revolutionary ideas in that miserable country, ground down by priests and royal despotism, and a prey to every ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... from the Greek islands. He married her, barely delaying his marriage long enough to write me that he was bringing home a bride. She was young, hardly more than a child, indeed, and marvellously beautiful"—Keith moved impatiently; he found these family details tedious and uninteresting—"a radiant soulless creature, whose only law was her own selfish enjoyment, and whose coming brought pain and bitterness to La Glorieuse. These were her rooms. She chose them because of the rose garden, for she had a sensuous ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... indeed, which is sixteen miles from Benares, and Mirzapore, which is thirty miles distant, there is a great extent of low hill-country. These districts we visited several times. The most of our journeys were in the wide open plains of the North-West. The country, though level, is by no means uninteresting. You receive as you travel a very favourable impression of the productiveness of the land and the industry of the people. In the cold weather you see, as far as the eye can reach, a sweep of growing corn, wheat and other grains, which give the hope of an early and abundant harvest. Towns ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... he cut, translated into an epic poem, by the side of Achilles? Clarissa, the divine Clarissa, is too interesting by half. She is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles—she is interesting in all that is uninteresting. Such things, however intensely they may be brought home to us, are not conductors to the imagination. There is infinite truth and feeling in Richardson; but it is extracted from a caput mortuum of circumstances; it does not evaporate ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the stream. John, there, will perhaps tell you how she was spoken to on one occasion, by an over-bold, over-inquisitive islander, curious to know whose shroud she was preparing; and how she more than satisfied his curiosity, by telling him it was his own. It is a not uninteresting fact," added the minister, "that my poor people, since they have become more earnest about their religion, think very little about ghosts and spectres: their faith in the realities of the unseen world seems to have banished from their minds much of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... know every particular respecting me; and in my fear of omitting the least circumstance which may induce you to think favourably of your Sister and myself, I may possibly relate many which you may think uninteresting. ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... the eye could reach, the castaways saw no signs of life, not a sail, not a smoke, not a gull, not even the ripple of a wave; nothing but gaudy, motionless markings from one flat horizon to the other, dead traceries that swiftly became uninteresting, then monotonous, then disagreeable, then maddening in the aching eyes ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... the pack has been comparatively uninteresting from the zoologist's point of view, as we have seen so little of the rarer species of animals or of birds in exceptional plumage. We passed dozens of crab-eaters, but have seen no Ross seals nor have we been able to kill a sea leopard. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... live a barren and narrow life without ideals. This emphasis of sex is expressed not merely in immorality and illegitimacy, but also in a precocious interest in sex and in a precocious courtship. Early marriage, therefore, often represents the reaction from an uninteresting and empty environment and, however fortunate in itself, certainly does not demonstrate ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... is a pity that I know so little about it all as to be unable to explain to you his many expedients. Folk call him a wizard, for he produces so much. Nevertheless, personally I find what he does uninteresting." ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... of the long and uninteresting fight which followed it may be said that the most remarkable feature of the battle of the Yalu was that it took place between two nations which, had the war broken out forty years earlier, would have done their fighting ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... uninteresting to notice in how many small matters Portugal now differs from Spain. Portugal drinks tea, Spain chocolate or coffee; it lunches and dines early, Spain very late; its beds and pillows are very hard, in Spain they are much softer. ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... on one stalk," said Lumley, gayly: "by the by, it is not a complimentary simile. What young lady would be like a cherry?—such an uninteresting, common, charity-boy sort of fruit. For my part, I always associate cherries with the image of a young gentleman in corduroys and a skeleton jacket, with one pocket full of marbles, and the other full of worms for fishing, with three-halfpence in the left ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... story! And we remember so well what it used to be like to have to learn dull things we did not wish to know. So we said to ourselves, as we looked over our spectacles at each other, "No, they sha'n't be told a single uninteresting fact; they sha'n't be dull, poor dears, as we were so long ago, before we put on spectacles and began ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... say that we must like everybody. That is a physical, mental and moral impossibility. But we may do others the justice of seeing their good traits as well as the bad. And sometimes when we find a chance acquaintance drearily uninteresting, it is because we do not take the trouble to find out what ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... district of the Kong Mountains, which are of a tabular form, and rise on both sides to between 2000 or 2500 feet. The change of prospect was most grateful to those who had spent two months in a flat, marshy, and uninteresting country. These mountains lie in the direction of W.N.W. and E.S.E., where they are intersected by the Niger. Their outlines are extremely bold, and they appear to be chiefly composed of granite. The navigation of ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... way, may be made to serve a variety of useful purposes of a dramatic or semi-dramatic nature. They may safely be cast for the unpleasant or uninteresting characters of the nursery drama. They form convenient targets for the development of their brothers' marksmanship; and they make excellent horses for their brothers to drive, and, it may be added, for their brothers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... to-day arriving at Rome by rail drives to his hotel through the uninteresting streets of a modern town, and thence finds his way to the Forum and the Palatine, where his attention is speedily absorbed by excavations which he finds it difficult to understand. It is as likely as not that he may leave Rome without once finding an opportunity of surveying the whole site ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... the reader to my book, "Alps and Sanctuaries." {9} I propose to confine myself here to the ten or a dozen chapels containing life-sized terra-cotta figures, painted up to nature, that form one of the main features of the place. At a first glance, perhaps, all these chapels will seem uninteresting; I venture to think, however, that some, if not most of them, though falling a good deal short of the best work at Varallo and Crea, are still in their own way of considerable importance. The first chapel with which we need concern ourselves is numbered 4, and shows the Conception of the Virgin ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... for a distinct not to be mistaken vibration was clearly felt by all hands. This part of the anchorage is much exposed to the sea; and, in the event of a blow from the northward, we are in a position to encounter its full fury. Chefoo, notwithstanding its uninteresting appearance, seems to be a pretty regular port of call for men-of-war, several of which are lying at ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... musician? no!' and like all mere 'talents' Frank failed in his songs to give them just what is of most value—just that which separates an artistic performance from the vast region of well-meaning, respectable, but uninteresting commonplace. There was a curious lack in him also of correspondence between his music and the rest of himself. As music is expression, it might be supposed that something which it serves to express would always lie behind it; but this was not the case with him, although he was ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... historical sense at all. They had no notion of certain psychological facts about art which are now familiar to every educated man. They did not know that art cannot be good unless it expresses the character of the people who produce it; that characterless art, however accomplished, is uninteresting; that there may be more life and so more beauty in the idol of an African savage than ...
— Progress and History • Various
... beautiful and retired spots. Nobody but a person fond of Natural History can imagine the pleasure of strolling under cocoa-nuts in a thicket of bananas and coffee-plants, and an endless number of wild flowers. And this island, that has given me so much instruction and delight, is reckoned the most uninteresting place that we perhaps shall touch at during our voyage. It certainly is generally very barren, but the valleys are more exquisitely beautiful, from the very contrast. It is utterly useless to say anything ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the beauty of many of the beginnings of the airs, but this beauty is not maintained, in every case the air tails off into something that is much too near being tiresome. The plot, of course, is stupid to a degree, but plot has very little to do with it; what can be more uninteresting than the plot of many of Handel's oratorios? We both believe the scheme of Italian opera to be a bad one; we think that music should never be combined with acting to a greater extent than is done, we will say, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... must be going now," chimed in Fidge, jumping up eagerly, for all this rigmarole had been very uninteresting to him. ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... best man often succeeds, as with few exceptions, perhaps, the long race, barring accidents, is usually won by the best horse. He left no writings behind him save a few letters, beautifully expressed, but mostly relating to family matters, and, therefore, uninteresting to the general reader, with the exception of five or six preserved by my mother, which I will give the reader ere I have ended this biographical sketch; and the few friends with whom he corresponded, and to whom, occasionally, he showed, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... practical life titanesqueness is a drawback, in literature, which is the nation's ideal life, it finds its most fruitful field. Hence the Russian writer may oft, indeed, be mistaken, frequently even totally wrong, but he is never uninteresting, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... train was running at high speed across the flat, uninteresting stretch of country which lies about thirty miles south of Rouen. Presently the Seine came in sight again, and for some miles we ran parallel with it. We had just rushed through a little wayside station beyond Mantes, the train oscillating so severely as it rattled over the ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... creatures; and yet I had rather read the worst of them, than be obliged to go through with this of Milton's, or the other's life of Boileau; where there is such a dull, heavy succession of long quotations of uninteresting passages, that it makes their method quite nauseous. But the verbose, tasteless Frenchman seems to lay it down as a principle, that every life must be a book,—and, what is worse, it seems a book without a life; for what do we know of Boileau ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... its renowned fortress of Ithome, the sacred Olympia, and the beautiful temple of Phigalia, and began our homeward journey. Passing over a mountain from which we had a wide and beautiful view, we rode through a barren and uninteresting plain to the lonely khan of Frankovrysi, and early the next day arrived at Tripolitza. We had had a clear sky at Megalopolis and Frankovrysi, but here, in the high table-land of Arcadia, we found the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... want to," she replied. "I wish I'd never seen your old house. I wish I'd never seen yourself. You are just as dull as your house is, and nearly as flat. It's a stupid, uninteresting, slow house, so it is, and you are a stupid, dissatisfied grump of a man, so you are. I'd sooner live in a cave with a hairy bear, so I ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... my troop, quite uninteresting. But what do you think? Something exploded not 100 yards away from Rinaldo. I was much farther off, dismounted. He didn't turn a hair, but only looked round and watched the smoke. Whereas, as you know, a little bit of paper blown across the road ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... bending forward confidentially, "isn't it awfully dry and uninteresting? There! I wouldn't dare lisp it before my husband, but isn't there a good deal of—of—well, humbug, ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... the having to repent your neglect hereafter, when, finding out too late what a pleasant study botany is, you search in vain for curious forms over which you trod every day in crossing flats which seemed to you utterly ugly and uninteresting, but which the good God was watching as carefully as He did the pleasant hills inland: perhaps even more carefully; for the uplands He has completed, and handed over to man, that he may dress and keep them: but the tide-flats below are still unfinished, dry land in the ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... encountered a few passers several blocks apart, was their habitual mood. He came promptly upon two objects which he would willingly have shunned: a 'denkmal' of the Franco-German war, not so furiously bad as most German monuments, but antipathetic and uninteresting, as all patriotic monuments are; and a woman-and-dog team. In the shock from this he was sensible that he had not seen any woman-and-dog teams for some time, and he wondered by what civic or ethnic influences their distribution was so controlled that they should have abounded in Hamburg, Leipsic, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... interpretation of the piece he is playing. He must, of course, spend years of hard thought and study in cultivating this ability to judge and produce the right touch, but the performer who is more concerned about the technical claims of a composition than its musical interpretation can only hope to give an uninteresting, uninspired, stilted performance that should rightly drive all intelligent hearers from his ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... theory in fragments up and down his work in the prefatory remarks with which he introduces the more striking animals or classes of animals. He never wastes evolutionary matter in the preface to an uninteresting animal; and the more interesting the animal, the more evolution will there be commonly found. When he comes to describe the animal more familiarly—and he generally begins a fresh chapter or half chapter when he does so—he writes no more about evolution, but gives an admirable ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... a little hard and uninteresting to you, but it is as well to try to master them. It looks as if we were going to hear a great deal about Austria this winter, and it will be so much easier for us to understand the events as they happen if we have mastered the peculiar form ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 55, November 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... at present to meddle nationally in any war; that we wished particularly to cultivate the friendship of Portugal, with whom we have an advantageous commerce. That yet a successful revolution in Brazil could not be uninteresting to us. That prospects of lucre might possibly draw numbers of individuals to their aid, and purer motives our officers, among whom are many excellent. That our citizens, being free to leave their own country individually, without the consent of their governments, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... actually attempting to tackle him upon the subject which he considered least suitable for discussion. They were sitting in his office, and the captain, in pursuance of a promise to Hartley, after two or three references to the weather, and a long account of an uninteresting conversation with a policeman, began to get on to ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... be looked for in corners and out-of-the-way places, and not in the broad acres—the scythe has taken them there. By the wayside on the banks of the lane, near the gateway—look, too, in uninteresting places behind incomplete buildings on the mounds cast up from abandoned foundations where speculation has been and gone. There weeds that would not have found resting-place elsewhere grow unchecked, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... was never brought to a glorious completion by the Madigans, even though they skipped uninteresting and difficult parts, and, like the early Elizabethans, permitted no intermission between acts. It was very often laughed to death. At times it became a saturnalia of extravagant action, and it frequently ended in a free fight, when the Rose and the ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... I was a gay young sport," laughed James Brown; "well, I'm sorry, for your sake, that I'm merely an uninteresting, middle-aged man, but, I doubt if your uncle would have let you send that note, if I had been a stranger to him. Take my advice, girls, for I know what I'm talking about, never write to an actor with whom you are not acquainted. It can never lead ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... to redeem it; and, above all, we may be sure that Pippa did not think in parentheses. The agility and (it were to follow an indulgent fashion to add) the "subtlety" of Browning's mind too often led him into like excesses: I deny the subtlety here, for these clauses are so wholly uninteresting in thought that even as examples I shall not cite them. But their crowning distastefulness is in the certitude we feel that, whatever they had been, they never would have occurred to this lyrical child. The stanza without them is the stanza as Pippa felt it. . . . In the ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... dismissing all the petitions that had been presented for patents and charters, and dissolving all the bubble companies. The following copy of their lordships' order, containing a list of all these nefarious projects, will not be deemed uninteresting at the present time, when, at periodic intervals, there is but too much tendency in the public mind to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... the mending when the weekly wash came back. Shirley set the table, sewed on jabots and did yards of tatting. Her "work" consisted of presiding over the reference room of a public library, telling shabby uninteresting young men where to find works on evolution and Assyrian temples and Charlemagne. This position was hers because her rich aunt's husband had political influence and her salary, together with the checks from Aunt Clara—not so big as the latter would have had David suppose but still not to ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... animals, with all their beauty of form, color, and movement, and peculiarly interesting from their singular modes of growth, remains comparatively unknown except to the professional naturalist. It may, therefore, be not uninteresting or useless to my readers, if I give some account of the appearance and habits of these animals, keeping in view, at the same time, my ultimate object, namely, to show that they are all founded on the same structural elements and have the same ideal significance. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... years, and, as he had been separated from him at the unimpressionable age of two, he may be said never to have seen him at all. He had no recollection of him, and the picture that he had painted was constructed out of monthly rather uninteresting letters concerned, for the most part, with the care and maintenance of New Zealand sheep, and such meagre details as his Aunt Clare and Uncle Garrett had bestowed on him from time to time. From the latter he gathered that ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the meadows along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door to the Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that Cambridge country is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patchworked with chalky fields bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard willows; it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top with ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... absence the coon got loose and set about a series of long-deferred exploring expeditions, beginning with the bachelor's bedroom. The first promising object was a writing desk. Mounting by a chair the coon examined several uninteresting books and papers, and then noticed higher up a large stone bottle. He had several times found pleasurable stuff in bottles, so he went for it. The cork was lightly in and easily disposed of, but the smell was far from inviting, for it was ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... thought, habit, or behaviour may result, as in the case of this unfortunate ellipse, which once presented such fair and promising proportions to the student's admiring gaze, in the 'sinister effacement of a man,' or the gradual absorption of a State into an uninteresting thing 'which lies evenly ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... yet deadly dull. Indeed, no candid critic can deny that this is the case with some of De Foe's narratives; as, for example, the latter part of 'Colonel Jack,' where the details of management of a plantation in Virginia are sufficiently uninteresting in spite of the minute financial details. One device, which he occasionally employs with great force, suggests an occasional source of interest. It is generally reckoned as one of his most skilful tricks that in telling a story he cunningly leaves a few stray ends, which ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... stupid, uninteresting, conceited and slow. He never, in all his life, wanted to have anything to do with girls. But Charlotte Le Page was another matter. She had, in the first place, become quite a tradition in the Cole family. She was the daughter of a wealthy landowner, who always spent ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... congenial pen and ink, and Mr. Sherwood insisted that Gussie should put her needle to more practical use. Now, while Gussie liked well enough to handle a needle and thread when something showy and fanciful was to be evolved thereby, she almost rebelled against the plain sewing, it was such dull, uninteresting work; it made so much difference if the sharp little instrument held Berlin wool, floss, etc., or the common cotton thread, which, though so useful, was too ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... The weather continued squally in the morning, and in the afternoon the rain was again torrential. We went towards 78 deg. over uninteresting and monotonous grey country with a chain of snowy peaks stretching from South-West to North-East. We waded through a fairly deep and very cold river, and subsequently rose over a pass 17,450 feet. A number of Hunyas, with flocks of several thousand sheep, ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... to say why most travellers are uninteresting. I do not think it is because they have been to wonderful places, but because the average man has not the power to assimilate or interpret what he has seen; and they enlarge on their own sensations with such a lack of humour and proportion, that you feel as ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... ludicrous with financial operations—with budgets, schemes of taxation, and national debts. In general, they are considered to assume a formidable aspect; and when that is not the case, their details are looked on as dry and uninteresting—they are universally voted a 'bore.' Yet we engage to shew, that there have been some financial projects which at the present day we can pronounce essentially ludicrous. And they are not the mere projects of enthusiasts and theoretic dreamers. They were put ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... MIRROR who have not witnessed an Isle of Wight Regatta, a description of that fete may not be uninteresting. From the days assigned to the nautical contest, we will select that on which his Majesty's Cup was sailed for, on Monday, the 13th of August, 1827, as the most copious illustration of the scene; beginning with Newport, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... garden then; my remembrance of it is none the less of an enchanted ground. But my uncle never walked in it. When he walked, it was always out on the moor he went, and what time he would return no one ever knew. His meals were uninteresting to him—no concern to any one but Martha, who never uttered a word of impatience, and seldom a word of anxiety. At whatever hour of the day he went, it was almost always night when he came home, often late night. In the house he ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... the train at Bonn for Cologne, in order to pass rapidly over a part of the Rhine scenery said to be comparatively uninteresting. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... new plan while old Hannah cleared the table, then out came the four little work baskets, and the needles flew as the girls made sheets for Aunt March. It was uninteresting sewing, but tonight no one grumbled. They adopted Jo's plan of dividing the long seams into four parts, and calling the quarters Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and in that way got on capitally, especially when ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... Mr. Arithmetic at Jericho!" cried Matty peevishly; "his goods are so heavy—so uninteresting; they make no show; I won't plague myself ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... clerks. In neither house did I hear any set speech. The voices of the Speaker and of the Clerks of the Houses were heard more frequently than those of the members; and the business seemed to be done in a dull, serviceable, methodical manner, likely to be useful to the country, and very uninteresting to the gentlemen engaged. Indeed at Washington also, in Congress, it seemed to me that there was much less of set speeches than in our House of Commons. With us there are certain men whom it seems impossible to put down, and by whom the time of Parliament is ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... climbed in straggling fashion up a sharp hill rising out of the plain at the back of the station, and was crowned by the twin towers of the ruined cathedral peeping over the summit. From the station itself it looked uninteresting and modern, but the fact was that the mediaeval position lay out of sight just beyond the crest. And once he reached the top and entered the old streets, he stepped clean out of modern life into a bygone century. The noise and bustle ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... very important to inquire whether the lot of the third estate was getting better or worse during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. In either case there was a great load of wrong and tyranny to be thrown off. But the question is not uninteresting in itself. As there are diametrically opposite answers to it, both in the testimony of contemporaries and in the opinion of modern scholars, it is perhaps incapable of being answered. In some districts, and in some respects, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... out upon mankind with a degree of lustre that promised a triumph over all his difficulties. The life of Savage was admired, as a beautiful and instructive piece of biography. The two imitations of Juvenal were thought to rival even the excellence of Pope; and the tragedy of Irene, though uninteresting on the stage, was universally admired in the closet, for the propriety of the sentiments, the richness of the language, and the general harmony of the whole composition. His fame was widely diffused; and he had made his agreement with the booksellers for his English dictionary ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... he had no society of admiring friends to encourage him. Reardon understood the merit of the workmanship, but frankly owned that the book was repulsive to him. To the public it would be worse than repulsive—tedious, utterly uninteresting. No matter; ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... mile the Su-chen crept along, and the low, flat, uninteresting banks slipped gradually astern. A few junks were passed, but they were all too far away for Frobisher to communicate with them, as they were well in under the land, while the gunboat was obliged, on account of her draught, ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... literature, and the worst romance is not so corrupting as false history, false philosophy, or false political essays. But the best romance becomes dangerous, if, by its excitement it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting, and increases the morbid thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes in which we shall never be ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... all so different, you see, to what I had been doing all my life, particularly for the year before, and it almost seemed as if I couldn't be the man who had been going into the City every day in the morning and coming back from it every evening after writing a lot of uninteresting letters. It was like being pitched all of a sudden from one world into another. Well, I found my way back somehow or other, and as I went along I made up my mind how I'd spend my holiday. I said to myself, "I'll have a walking tour as well as Ferrars, only mine is to be a tour of London and ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... After a time, though, that seemed rather an uninteresting purchase. All her money would be gone at once, and almost before she had realised that she had got it. She next decided to get a large piece of bacon, two sacks of coal, and a sack of corn for the fowls; ...
— Dick and Brownie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... appear to have had enough of most things,—perhaps too much. If your countrymen are uninteresting, you may possibly wish to meet some of your countrywomen. I've been abroad enough to know that you have ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... him that would cause any passer-by to glance at Schrank twice. And his face is the most uninteresting part of him. ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... the space seemed when she had gone—dull and unspeakably uninteresting. He became impatient with the slowness of the waiters, who had seemed to hurry unnecessarily the night before. But at last his meal ended, and he went out under the trees. The sky was so full of stars it hardly seemed dark. The ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... hands. Nevertheless, at first sight of her Douglas was attracted, and for good reason—the face of the girl, once seen, was not soon forgotten. During the time he had been in Scotland it had seemed to him that the Scotch women were hard-featured, uninteresting, and altogether unlovely; but this girl was different. There was something of the savage in her, and yet she possessed a charm which fascinated the young man. Her black hair hung in curling and tangled tresses over her shoulders; her eyes were almost ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... she cooked, she soothed the warrior upon his return from killing of man or beast, and she brought up her boys to be warriors and her girls to serve them. There you have Nature and her original plan, a bald and uninteresting plan, but eminently practical for the mere purpose (which is all that concerns her) of keeping the world going. And so it would be to-day, even in the civilized core, if man had been clever enough to take the cue Nature flung in his face and kept woman where to-day he so ingenuously ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... thought much about it," Stephen had to confess, fearing she would consider such indifference uninteresting. He did not add what remained of the truth, that he had thought of Algiers as a refuge from what had become disagreeable, rather than as a beautiful place which he wished to see for its own sake. "I'd made no picture in my mind. You know a lot more about it all than I do, though ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Cincinnati in February, 1828, and I speak of the town as it was then; several small churches have been built since, whose towers agreeably relieve its uninteresting mass of buildings. At that time I think Main street, which is the principal avenue, (and runs through the whole town, answering to the High street of our old cities), was the only one entirely paved. The troittoir is of brick, tolerably well laid, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... that," she stammered. "I am sure you are very nice indeed, and we are going to be good friends, aren't we? But I am such a dunce myself that I am afraid of real clever people. They are so superior. And so uninteresting, and—oh, I do not mean that either." Then Prudence laughed at her predicament. "I may as well give it up. What I really mean is that you are so nice and friendly and interesting, that I can hardly believe you are so clever. You are the nicest smart ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... not give a hoot for Scallywattamus. At five hundred yards three or four of them awoke with a start, stared at us a minute, and moved slowly away. They told all the zebra they happened upon that the three idiots approaching were at once uninteresting and dangerous. At four hundred and fifty yards a half dozen more made off at a trot. At three hundred and fifty yards the rest plunged away at a canter-all but one. He remained to stare, but his tail was up, and we knew he only stayed because ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... has many advantages. In spite of the numerical preponderance of books published in Germany, it is doubtful if the German reader has quite such a catholic feast before him as the reader of French. There is a mass of German fiction probably as uninteresting to a foreigner as popular English and American romance. And German compared with French is an unattractive language; unmelodious, unwieldy, and cursed with a hideous and blinding lettering that the German is too patriotic to sacrifice. There has been in Germany ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... close-fisted, slapping senators on the back and keeping a sharp eye on the coppers; taxing the latrinae, and declaring that money had no smell; yet still, in comparison with Claud and Nero, almost the ideal; absolutely uninteresting also, yet doing what good he could; effacing at once the traces of the civil war, rebuilding the Capitol, calming the people, protecting the provinces, restoring to Rome the gardens of Nero, clipping the wings of the Palace of Gold, throwing open again the Via Sacra, ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... grey. Alas, I thought compassionately, for Uncle Dick's dreams! What a shock the change to her must have given him! Could this be the woman on whom he had lavished such a life-wealth of love and reverence? I tried to talk to her, but I found her shy and timid. She seemed to me uninteresting and commonplace. And this was Uncle Dick's Rose ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... instruction, and the lessons bore moderately good effect—the moderation being due to a not unnatural disinclination on the pupil's part to walk where she had been accustomed to run, and to a fixed loathing to practice. As the latter necessary, if uninteresting, pursuit was left entirely to her own discretion—for no one ever dreamed of ordering Norah to the piano—it is small wonder if it suffered beside the superior attractions of riding Bobs, rat trapping, "shinning up" trees, fishing in the lagoon and generally disporting herself ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... be made to do, does not concern the Filipino in the least. If he needs money irresistibly, he can spend one day at work up in the mountains, making enough to last him for some time. If he can spend his money so as to create a display, he takes delight in doing so. But paying debts is as uninteresting as it is unpopular. The outward signs of elegance are much respected by the Filipino. The American, to live up to his part, must always be attended by a servant. Sometimes, when we would forget this adjunct, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... thrilling a spectacle as this—probably the grandest and most impressive which the Arctic regions can exhibit—it is perhaps not to be wondered at that even the beauties of the glacier itself appeared somewhat tame and uninteresting to the voyagers. But their interest was once more awakened when, having at length coasted along the face of the glacier for a distance of not less than sixty miles, they reached its northern extremity ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... and Martin appeared. It was by no means an uninteresting face, that which the earl now scanned, but quite unlike the features of Hubert—a round face, contrasting with the oval outlines of the other—with twinkling eyes and curling hair; a face which ought to be lit up with ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... to be the owls, sir, a bird very frequent in this locality. They make a sort of harsh, hooting howl, sir. I have sometimes wondered," said Webster, pursuing a not uninteresting train of thought, "whether that might be the reason of ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... up the stairs; and, the question whether Christopher were gone or not being an uninteresting one to the majority, the talking went on upon other matters. When Joey crept down again a minute later, Picotee was sitting aloof and silent, and he accordingly singled her ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... hotel was in accord with Mr. Gingham's general conception of his business. No man had ever grasped the true principles of undertaking more thoroughly than Mr. Gingham. I have often heard him explain that to associate with the living, uninteresting though they appear, is the only way to secure the custom of ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... I am not," said Major Flint. "Perhaps a hundred years hence—the date I have named in my will for their publication—someone may think them not so uninteresting. But all this toasting and buttering and grilling and frying your friends, and serving them up hot for all the old cats at a tea-table to ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... to the next, of course. After eight or nine children become quite uninteresting, except to themselves. I shouldnt know my two eldest if ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... of her, blackening the dusk, a vague darkness in which she could at first distinguish nothing but an occasional white plume and a bald head. But her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and above the uninteresting backs of middle-aged men she recognised his thin sharp shoulders. She had been compelled to look up from her prayers, and she wondered if he had been thinking of her. If so, it was very wrong of him to interrupt her at her prayers. But a sensation of pleasure arose spontaneously in ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... northerly haunts had been found represented at the Beach by a telegram instead; increasingly bored by the desolate air of the all but empty hostelry. "When's the next train out of this hell-hole?"—such was Mr. Canning's last recorded remark up to this not uninteresting moment. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... they but opened their mouths wide and boldly, they would have been pleasantly drowned together; but as it was, they lacked the requisite courage, and were fain to content themselves with an occasional frantic struggle to the surface, where they gasped a few words of uninteresting air, and ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... determined. If strange exploits are sometimes recited, the author has simply to say that he has been veracious in all of his statements, and that all the stories are "true bird stories." The author modestly believes that it will not be found uninteresting to ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser |
