"Unmentionable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... punishment was not long delayed, for the divorce proceedings made her notorious and started terrible rumors regarding her private life. These reports began to circulate at the time of the murder of Gandia and of her divorce from Sforza; the cause of both these events was stated to have been an unmentionable crime. According to a reliable witness of the day it was the lord of Pesaro himself, injured and exasperated, who first—and to the Duke of Milan—had openly uttered the suspicion which was being whispered about ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... civilized, the high, the low, the fierce, the gentle—all unite in the desire which finds its accomplishment in the reproduction of their kind. Who {202} shall quarrel with the Divinely implanted instinct, or declare it to be vulgar or unmentionable? It is during the period of the honeymoon that the intensity of this desire, coupled with the greatest curiosity, is at its height, and the unbridled license often given the passions at this time is attended with ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... country is evidently producing a most improving effect in many of the necessary and unmentionable comforts of this civilized age, which you find to predominate chiefly in those cities that have most direct intercourse with us; but as you go further west, these comforts are most disagreeably deficient. One point in which ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... is extremely pleasant, and one sleeps better thus than on a mattress. They are neat and clean in their persons, which is a natural consequence of their perpetual bathing; but some of their habits are unmentionable.... ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... always, in their brutal work, paying much regard to the presence of a lady. Some of the officers, when I complained rather angrily, laughed, and said it was spoiling the Egyptians; but I do think the Israelites spared their enemies those garments, which, perhaps, were not so unmentionable in those days ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... on talking easily; he soon put Jurgis on a friendly footing—he was evidently a man of the world, used to getting on, and not too proud to hold conversation with a mere laboring man. He drew Jurgis out, and heard all about his life all but the one unmentionable thing; and then he told stories about his own life. He was a great one for stories, not always of the choicest. Being sent to jail had apparently not disturbed his cheerfulness; he had "done time" twice before, it seemed, ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... Passes, fierce Chilcats, and Queen Charlotte Islanders. And the looks they cast upon her were black and frowning, save—and far worse—where the merrier souls leered patronizingly into her face and chuckled unmentionable things. ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... neither Delahaye, if he lives, nor any other person, will appeal to the law to force you to give the child up. This is the truth. I see you still hesitate. Listen! This also is truth. The child is in danger from Delahaye—hideous, unmentionable danger." ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the stud- and jewellery-cases had been opened and their contents stolen, and Madame de C.'s writing-table had also been forced open, and papers and the contents of the drawers scattered on the floor. Other unmentionable crimes had also ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... said the visitor with due solemnity, "I assure you that whatever else I may be, I am as free from the taint of this unmentionable attribute as a babe unborn. Isabel, you will ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... likely to be,' said Gabriel, coolly, as he rattled the money in his unmentionable pockets, and looked out ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... feast, which ushered in a period of indescribable revelry and licence. All distinctions of property were for the time being suspended. Men and women arrayed themselves in all manner of fantastic garbs, addressed one another in the foulest language, and practised unmentionable abominations openly in the public square of the town. The nearest relationships, even that of own brother and sister, seemed to be no bar to the general licence, the extent of which was indicated by the expressive phrase of an old Nandi chief, who said, "While ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... was that day he came home from a yachting cruise, and said that "everybody had been awfully sea-sick," meaning that he himself had been the principal sufferer. I don't mean that he has been particularly seedy either, certainly nothing beyond an unmentionable ache. We were both a little bit churned up for a day or two, and I believe it was owing to ice-cream. In the hot weather it was most tempting, and they give you a great plateful for 10 cents., none of the rascally little thimblefulls ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn
... He had known how to brace himself for that other authority—there had, at any rate, been consistency and even a kind of chiselled magnificence in that stiff brutality—now there was degradation, crawling devilry, things unmentionable.... ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... believe was originally built to the honor of Jesus Christ." "The blasphemies of Voltaire," he says, "pale into insignificance when compared with those of Marlowe;" he "deliberately accused Jesus Christ and his personal followers of crimes which are justly considered unmentionable in any civilised community," and "any monument which may be erected in honor of Christopher Marlowe will be a ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... was the mortal terror that was depicted on the blind man's face. It was as though he expected some cruel, crippling blow to follow; as though it were the last straw on the back of unmentionable former agonies. Hilary shuddered. It was not good to witness such animal fear. A dark shadow blotted out the brightness of the Earth-day for him. There was something wrong here, something that required a good deal ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... Pistols and rifles belonging to the pioneers, for example, often exhibit notches, each of which bears silent witness to the shedding of blood. The writer knew intimately a very mild, kindly old man who had a strop fashioned out of several thicknesses of Apache skins. The Apaches had inflicted unmentionable torments upon him and his, and the strop was his dearest possession. The men and women of the wilderness are primal in ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... my uncle. "Lord Baltimore has had his reasons for sending such a scoundrel—he knew what he was, you may be sure, father. His Lordship, sir, is the most abandoned rake in London, and that unmentionable crime of his but lately ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Ramsey, and while he ha-haed a cordial assent she asked: "Whereabouts below is he—Captain Courteney?" But the mate had turned away and she asked Hugh: "Where's your father? What's he doing?" Her thought was still on the unmentionable new case. ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... eternal verities to which eyes had been lifted for light when night and trouble were over dark. God was dethroned by science. One looked startled at humanity, seeing not the accustomed countenance, but, for a moment, glimpsing instead the baleful lidless stare of the evil of the slime, the unmentionable of a nightmare.... ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... her Uncle Tom's. Winifred had a small baby, born at the end of the summer. She had become strange and alien to Ursula. There was an unmentionable reserve between the two women. Tom Brangwen was an attentive father, a very domestic husband. But there was something spurious about his domesticity, Ursula did not like him any more. Something ugly, blatant in his nature ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... that if Man is to be saved, Man must save himself. There seems no compelling reason why he should be saved. He is by no means an ideal creature. At his present best many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain is often a good. Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... consists in this, that he has scarcely a moral virtue to his name, and yet he attracts us morally. We feel that some of the virtues have been dropped out in the lists made by all the saints and sages, and that Charles II. was pre-eminently successful in these wild and unmentionable virtues. The real truth of this matter and the real relation of Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... his address (as he used to put it himself) being "Post Office, Europe—to be left till called for." Twice over, he made up his mind to come back to England and see us; and twice over (saving your presence), some unmentionable woman stood in the way and stopped him. His third attempt succeeded, as you know already from what my lady told me. On Thursday the twenty-fifth of May, we were to see for the first time what our nice boy had grown to be as a man. He came of good blood; he had a high courage; and ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... the first I hear of what you allude to. I think you must be mistaken as to Mrs. Drayton Deane's having had any unmentioned, and still less any unmentionable, knowledge about Hugh Vereker. She would certainly have wished it—if it bore on ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... searched for words when occasion offered. I had carefully committed to memory the French equivalents for all the articles on our shopping list—a pot of honey, a bottle of Benedictine, a pair of unmentionable garments for Lawson, and a toothbrush—so that I walked across the main square with a proud mien ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... list of unmentionable ordures used in Germany near the end of the seventeenth century, see Lammert, Volksmedizin und medizinischer Aberglaube in Bayern, Wurzburg, 1869, p. 34, note. For the English prescription given, see Cockayne, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... wagon-roads, and between the tracks of the New York Central Railway. On the former, the greatest drawback to peaceful cycling is the towing-mule and his unwarrantable animosity toward the bicycle, and the awful, unmentionable profanity engendered thereby in the utterances of the boatmen. Sometimes the burden of this sulphurous profanity is aimed at me, sometimes at the inoffensive bicycle, or both of us collectively, but oftener is it directed ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... dry. Under other circumstances I might have estimated the time by the growth of hunger and thirst, but the rough treatment I had received made this impossible. There were other, unmentionable, ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... weather. A few days of calm would have brought unmentionable horrors on board that schooner, but with the help of land and sea breezes, in less than a week after clearing the Sunda Straits, he anchored off the Batu Kring mouth within a pistol-shot ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... odor of Whitechapel and St. Giles. The streets were noisy with match-pedlars, with vendors of cake and tripe and coke; there were touts there too, altars to unimportant divinities, lying Jews who dealt in old clothes, in obscene pictures and unmentionable wares; at the crossings there were thimbleriggers, clowns and jugglers, who made glass balls appear and disappear surprisingly; there were doorways decorated with curious invitations, gossipy barber shops, where, through the ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... a diplomat in behalf of his firm's future business with the Intermountain people; and this boob of a country judge, pompous, slow, egotistical, had been carrying a hatchet for one Jim Gollop ever since he had suffered through the peculiar likeness to this unmentionable candy drummer and—Jimmy suddenly grinned, buttoned his coat, cleared his throat and in ponderous dignity bent stiffly forward and said, "I am here! I am at your disposal! It will afford me great pleasure to express my views to such an attentive audience. Let ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... passion for the daughter of the slave wife. It must needs have been a mighty sentiment, for the conditions which Hurdeo Sing exacted were of a nature to try the strongest love. These were, that the nuptial banquet should be prepared by the unmentionable hands of the slave wife herself, and that the king and his court should partake of it—a proceeding which would involve the loss of their caste also. But the prince loved, and his love must have lent him extraordinary eloquence, for he prevailed on his royal father ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... school on that Friday evening. She was still wearing the blue serge school dress that she and her aunt had made for her high-school debut, also some coarse, faded brown stockings, and stout cheap shoes, not to mention an unmentionable hat of no style at all. She had taken that unfortunate joke of the trust company's president literally: she must not waste her substance upon clothes. Even without this inhibition she had scarcely the skill and the courage necessary to spend her two hundred dollars to advantage in ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... a tendency, I am sure, in books, to shirk the whole subject of fear, as though it were a thing disgraceful, shameful, almost unmentionable. The coward, the timid person, receives very little sympathy; he is rather like one tainted with a shocking disease, of which the less said the better. He is not viewed with any sympathy or commiseration, ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... extent of his guilt. On Sunday, December 2, 1917, at Dyersburg, immediately after the adjournment of services in the churches of the town, Lation Scott, guilty of criminal assault, was burned; his eyes were put out with red-hot irons, a hot poker was rammed down his throat, and he was mutilated in unmentionable ways. Two months later, on February 12, 1918, at Estill Springs, Jim McIlheron, who had shot and killed two young white men, was also burned at the stake. In Estill Springs it had for some time been the sport of young white men in the community to throw rocks at single Negroes and make them ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... and Wood, not half my size, and that thin scare-the-crows Allen; but no—the general wants me killed. Die soon enough in this infernal nest of centipedes without being shot in the chaparral! I wish the chaparral was—!" and again the major's unmentionable words came pouring forth ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... Louis, to whom, in return for his gold, he sacrificed the honour and interests of Britain. He was too lazy and sensual to delight in playing the part of a tyrant himself; but he never checked tyranny in others, save in one instance. He permitted beastly butchers to commit unmentionable horrors on the feeble, unarmed, and disunited Covenanters of Scotland, but checked them when they would fain have endeavoured to play the same game on the numerous, united, dogged, and warlike Independents of England. To show his filial piety, he bade the hangman ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... distance afoot, and return over the same route with her load of flour. Certainly comfort was not the ruling consideration in those days of our forefathers. A ten-mile walk through the snow for a bag of flour would be an unmentionable hardship to a ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and the business was presently disposed of. So far, things were not too seriously bad, and Prudence sighed in great relief. Then the Ladies took out their sewing, and began industriously working at many unmentionable articles, designed for the intimate clothing of a lot of young Methodists confined in an orphans' home in Chicago. And they talked together pleasantly and gaily. And Prudence and Fairy felt that the ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... a year and a half ago, came before him now with a creeping, all-possessing distinctness—that loathsome, dreadful room (long since renovated) which, with its unmentionable suggestion of horror, had held him spellbound on that morning when he had begun his career at the factory. It held him spellbound now, evilly, insidiously. He stood by that blackened, ashy hearth in the foul room, with its damp, mottled, rotting walls, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... well to any particular subject. It is not to be supposed, however, that in the delivery of such passages I was found at all deficient in the looking asquint—the showing my teeth—the working my knees—the shuffling my feet—or in any of those unmentionable graces which are now justly considered the characteristics of a popular performer. To be sure they spoke of confining me in a strait-jacket—but, good God! they never suspected me of having lost ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... intoxicating kisses, the delight and the balm of which such a person can never know; the horror of that dishonor of being pointed at, made fun of, driven away like unclean creatures that prostitute their sex, and make love vile by unmentionable rites; oh! the constant bitterness of seeing that the person we love makes fun of us, ill-uses us, and does not show us even the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... friends called his attention to the frown or the pout of her, Whenever he did anything which appeared to her to savour of an unmentionable place, He would say that "she would be a very decent old girl when all that nonsense was knocked out of her," And his method of knocking it out of her is one ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... any sex problem in a nickul librury. There were never any smutty words or questionable phrases. If a villain said "Curse you!" he was going pretty far. Any one of us might whet up our natural instincts for cruelty on Fore's Book of Martyrs, or read of all manner of unmentionable horrors in the Old Testament, but except surreptitiously we couldn't walk with Nick Carter, whose motives were ever pure and who never used the naughty word even in the passion of the death grapple with the top-booted forces ...
— A Plea for Old Cap Collier • Irvin S. Cobb
... means got a knowledge of this proceeding, or whether he only suspected some unmentionable design on her part, there is no sufficient means of determining. At any rate, when they met, an hour or two after these occurrences, he could not help noticing how easily she seemed to have got over her excitement. She was very pleasant with him,—too pleasant, Dick thought. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... Chamberlain then has his powers so adjusted that he is tyrannical just where it is important that he should be tolerant, and tolerant just where he could screw up the standard a little by being tyrannical. His plea that there are unmentionable depths to which managers and authors would descend if he did not prevent them is disproved by the plain fact that his indulgence goes as far as the police, and sometimes further than the public, will let it. If our judges had so little power there would be no law in England. If our ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... said that he was a terrible object which should remain in the background along with family skeletons and unmentionable diseases. He was like poverty and injustice,—present but ignored. And this being shunned and avoided, as if he were something which should go about in furtive obscurity, was rapidly driving Hollister to a ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... but he was captured by Lady Bracebridge and her daughter, and had to sit between them while they scandalised Clara. According to them she had run away from home and had led an unmentionable life in Paris, actually having been a member of a low company of French players; and she had married but had run away from her husband ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... foot on English soil as did his friends. He went ashore at an unmentionable port in a kit bag. In this he lay with the other bags, surrounded by a screen of men. "Jazz" was uncomfortable and said so in his goat way, but before he had uttered a full syllable his friends set up a cheer which ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... this the drollest world to live in that one could imagine, short of being in a fit of delirium tremens? Here is a fellow-creature of mine and yours who is asked to see all the glories of the firmament brought close to him, and he is too busy with a little unmentionable parasite that infests the bristly surface of a bee to spare an hour or two of a single evening for the splendors of the universe! I must get a peep through that microscope of his and see the pediculus which occupies a larger space in his mental vision ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... vocation conceivable for her was that of teaching, and she knew, without having tried it, that she abhorred teaching. Further, there was no economical reason why she should work. In 1878, unless pushed by necessity, no girl might dream of a vocation: the idea was monstrous; it was almost unmentionable. Still further, she had no wish to work for work's sake. Marriage remained. But she felt herself a child, ages short of marriage. And she never met a man. It was literally a fact that, except Mr. Skellorn, a few tradesmen, the vicar, the curate, and a sidesman or so, she never even spoke to a man ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... patents of nobility granted to my forefathers for daring and ingenious removals of pretenders to thrones, or occupants of them; stars, crosses and other decorations attesting services of the most secret and unmentionable character; miscellaneous gifts from the world's greatest conspirators, representing an intrinsic money value beyond computation. There were robes, jewels, swords of honor, and every kind of "testimonials of esteem"; a king's skull fashioned ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... are full of absurd nostrums. A century ago, Huxham gave messes to his patients containing more than four hundred ingredients. Remedies were ordered that must have been suggested by the imagination; things odious, abominable, unmentionable; flesh of vipers, powder of dead men's bones, and other horrors, best mused in expressive silence. Go to the little book of Robert Boyle,—wise man, philosopher, revered of cures for the most formidable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... suspenders,” a discovery of great importance (over three thousand patents have been taken out for this one necessity of the toilet!). This brace performs several tasks at the same time, such as holding unmentionable garments in place, keeping the wearer erect, and providing a night-key guard. It is also said to cure liver and kidney disease by means of an arrangement of pulleys which throw the strain according to the wearer’s position—I omit the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Dekkar's works which will be most likely to immortalize his name is that often-quoted one, taken from a play whose very name is unmentionable to prudish ears:— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... prowl? Have you observed how it contorts itself into arched but unnatural shapes, how it swells visibly to almost twice its normal size, how its hair stands up and its eyes flash, and the stream of unmentionable language that proceeds from its open mouth? If so, you will have a very good idea of the effect produced upon Hassan by this remark of mine. The fellow looked as though he were going to burst with rage. He rolled about, his bloodshot eyes seemed to protrude, he cursed us horribly, he put his ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... after voluminous correspondence, had found and offered him choice of two German princesses whose photographs said flattering things of them; and, when he declined both propositions, had looked at him very sadly indeed—had almost broached the unmentionable subject. "Oh, Max, what are we to do with you?" she sighed; for she was still keeping herself badly informed of his goings-on. "That woman is back again," she informed her husband; "I really think we ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... all, Macgregor. It is quite unmentionable,' she returned with a majestic wave. 'Robert, give Macgregor some ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... drew a picture of the feasts of Sodom and Gomorrah, the music, the lights, the flowers, the unmentionable orgies of lust and drunkenness, until the candles on the walls blushed at the shamelessness of the display and fired the palaces that sheltered such depravity. Suddenly there was a terrific explosion. The fire, approaching from either ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... fellow with white eyelashes. He looked as if he had known all the degradations and all the furies. He looked as if he had been cuffed, kicked, rolled in the mud; he looked as if he had been scratched, spat upon, pelted with unmentionable filth... and he smiled with a sense of security at the faces around. His ears were bending down under the weight of his battered felt hat. The torn tails of his black coat flapped in fringes about the calves of his legs. He unbuttoned the ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... off the formula, and immediately becomes an emperor of the elemental spirits. He gives them a horrible time. He summons and dismisses them alternately with the rapidity of a piston-rod working at high speed; he keeps them flying between the doctor's house and their own more unmentionable residences till they faint with rage and fatigue. There is all the best of the Middle Ages in that; the idea of the great levellers, luck and laughter; the idea of a sense of humour defying ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... I didn't wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a "secret" at Bly—a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement? I can't say how long I turned it over, or how long, in a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had my collision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness had quite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... of his origin had an undesirable reputation, for its inhabitants were loose-livers, and the scandal of the surrounding countryside. But even in this environment the monk's family had made themselves conspicuous by their low and unmentionable customs. The young Gregory, known by the diminutive of Gricha, began his exploits at a very tender age, and earned the sobriquet of Rasputin, which means "debauched." He was mixed up in all kinds of dubious affairs—for ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... hast done so; and mark thou this, Chia'gnosi, though to-day the king's face be black against thee, the people know what thou hast done; and henceforth thy name will be hlonipa among the Mashona." [Hlonipa means "unmentionable". To make a man's name hlonipa is the highest honour that the Kafirs can render the bearer; for it indicates that the name is regarded as too sacred, too highly venerated, to be spoken. Thus I subsequently learned ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... this subject of cosmetics, as every woman of sense will at last weary of the use of them. It is a lesson which is sure to come; but, in the lives of most fashionable ladies, it has small chance of being needed until that unmentionable time, when men shall cease to make baubles and playthings of them. It takes most women two-thirds of their lifetime to discover that men may be amused by, without respecting, them; and every woman may make up her mind that to be really respected she must possess merit; she must have accomplishments ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... and consternation at the earlier ravages of this scourge were pitiable in the extreme. The very name bestowed upon it is a combination of all that is horrid and unmentionable to a civilized being. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... self-defense demands it. On the other hand, solitary confinement came in with the second current of the classic school of criminology, when at the same time, in which Beccaria promulgated his ideas, John Howard traveled all over Europe describing the unmentionable horrors of mass imprisonment, which became a center of infection for society at large. Then the classic school went to the other extreme of solitary confinement, after the model of America, whence we adopted ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... that we veteran souls can rarely understand them,—they are never subtle, and though they are new, they are never Modern. You may tell them in your cynical way that to-day is the only real day, and that there is nothing more unmentionable than yesterday except the day before. They will admire your cleverness very much, but the next moment you will find the witch sobbing over Tennyson, or the wizard smiling at the quaint fancies of Sir Edwin Landseer. You cannot really stir up magic people with ordinary human ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... a Jewish tradesman and his light o' love, and now the man was debating with her as with himself, as to whether he should marry this woman, as to whether he should force on his respectable English mother a French daughter-in-law of unmentionable antecedents! Coxeter gathered that the liaison had lasted ten years—that it had begun, in fact, very soon after the man had first ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... of good English, less strange but even more surprising. The voice swore and cursed violently; it riddled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of abuse. It began by calling me Pig, and from that went crescendo into unmentionable adjectives—in English. The man up there raged aloud in two languages, and with a sincerity in his fury that almost convinced me I had, in some way, sinned against the harmony of the universe. I could hardly see him, but began to think he would work ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... expanse of quiet night, there was not a single flicker of light, and at that time not a sound to indicate that unmentionable numbers of our men were facing one another in parallel ditches across the ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... lavatory adjoining could be seen men washing their feet and doing oddities unmentionable ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... furnished with curtains, upon which my assumed name was painted in flaming capitals. The columns of the newspapers teemed with my advertisements, in which I was declared to be the only regular advertising physician—one who had successfully treated twenty-five millions of cases of delicate unmentionable complaints. Certificates of cure were also published by thousands, signed by people who never existed. Having procured an old medical diploma, I inserted my borrowed name, and exhibited it as an evidence of my trustworthiness ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... place for Pittsburg, in the "Good Intent line," professing to carry only six inside; but this excellent intention of the worthy proprietors must be consigned to the commissioners of pavement in a certain unmentionable place, since it was never fulfilled. We commenced our journey with seven, the book-keeper making it a favour that we should take in one gentleman who was greatly pressed for time. I perceived, as we started, another person get ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... pavement in the unmentionable place are barred in this connection," he continued gayly. "On my way to carry out these good intentions—at some one else's expense, remember, all the time—I was called to the bedside of a dying ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... ends. It was at once comical and sad to see this harmless old gentleman, with his naive, benevolent countenance, and his thin hair flaming up in a semicircle, like the footlights at a theatre, reveling in the intricacies of the unmentionable deed. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of mental prostitution. My books breed moral pestilence and spiritual disease. The unholy filth I write fouls the minds and pollutes the imaginations of my readers. I am an instigator of degrading immorality and unmentionable crimes. Work! No, young man, I don't work. Just now, I'm doing penance in this damned town. My rotten imaginings have proven too much—even for me—and the doctors sent ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... call people by their proper titles; name Old Nick at once, and the lady whose soubriquet is unmentionable, but who, report says, has a town residence ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... else we are sentenced to three years in the Palace of Corrective Detention. It is only the Old Ones who whisper about it in the evenings, in the Home of the Useless. They whisper many strange things, of the towers which rose to the sky, in those Unmentionable Times, and of the wagons which moved without horses, and of the lights which burned without flame. But those times were evil. And those times passed away, when men saw the Great Truth which is this: that all men are one and that there is no will save the will ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... unmentionable sor' of thing to say," he remarked. "An' if it wasn't for the sacred claims of hospitality, I'd make you explain just what you mean by that, and make you eat your words. Pologize, ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... constant, we use the word with reckless looseness, meaning a dozen different things by it, and yet always assuming that to a respectable man it can have only one meaning. The pious citizen, suspecting the Socialist (for example) of unmentionable things, and asking him heatedly whether he wishes to abolish marriage, is infuriated by a sense of unanswerable quibbling when the Socialist asks him what particular variety of marriage he means: English civil marriage, sacramental marriage, indissoluble Roman Catholic marriage, ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... to elbow his way to enter, and all around the door, even out into the middle court, contadini are kneeling. Besides this, the whole place reeks intolerably with garlic, which, mixed with whiff of incense from the church within and other unmentionable smells, makes such a compound that only a brave nose can stand it. But stand it we must, if we would see Domenichino's frescoes in the chapel within; and as they are among the best products of his cold and clever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... gazed for a long while. Amid that coterie of exquisites, wherein allusion to whatever might be ugly in the world was tacitly allowed to be unmentionable, Lady Honoria glitteringly went about the moment's mirthful business with lovely ardor. You saw now unmistakably that "Light Queen of Elfdom, dead Titania's heir" of whom Ufford writes in the fourth Satire. Honoria's prettiness, rouged, frail, and modishly ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... new lodging, and I put the questions that filled my mind. For answer he gave me the House of Commons Blue Book, which explained the charge hanging over him. Almost daily, for weeks, I heard him on his knees proclaim his innocence of the unmentionable crime with which he was charged. After some weeks of daily association, he ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... what Portugal has decreed shall not terminate in what she calls her African dominions for some years to come. In other words, it has been coolly decreed by that weakest of all the European nations, that slavery, murder, injustice, and every other conceivable and unmentionable vice and villainy shall still, for some considerable time, continue to be practised on the men, women, and children ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... chair, his sleepy languor dissipated; on his face the look that had come there when Lord Royallieu had dishonored his mother's name. In his code there was one shameless piece of utter and unmentionable degradation—it was to borrow ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... which he warns the spectators to be silent. Cain then enters with a plough and team, and quarrels with the boy for refusing to drive the team. Presently Abel comes in, and wishes Cain good-speed, who meets his kind word with an unmentionable request. The murder then proceeds, and is followed by the cursing of Cain; after which he calls the boy, and gives him a beating. Cain owns the murder, and the boy counsels flight, lest the bailiffs catch him. Next we have a course of buffoonery: Cain makes a mock proclamation in the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... across his features, for he knew, of course, that death was his only expectation, and he had greatly feared that his taking off would be accompanied by the most horrible tortures that could be devised by people who were not the least expert in the practice of the unmentionable cruelties of the age, "you, at least, are a ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... association of uncleanliness with these natural conditions becomes so overpowering that among civilized people (that is, people massed in the labyrinths of slums we call cities), half their bodily life becomes a guilty secret, unmentionable except to the doctor in emergencies; and Hedda Gabler shoots herself because maternity is so unladylike. In short, popular prudery is only a mere incident of popular squalor: the subjects which it taboos remain the most interesting and earnest of ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... time, or keenly observant of profane things—brought him before us to the life. In the corner-seat of the next pew, right before Burns, and not more than two feet off, sat the young lady on whom the poet saw that unmentionable parasite which he has immortalized in song. We were ungenerous enough to ask the lady's name, but the good woman could not tell it. This was the last thing which we saw in Dumfries worthy of record; and it ought to be noted that our guide refused some money which my companion offered ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... and your own trade,' I said sternly. Then I begged him to give up that unmentionable way ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Casanova's Memoirs occur to our memory. It seems easy to realise what they wrote about the dishevelled gaiety and lawless license of Chioggia in the days of powder, sword-knot, and soprani. Baffo walks beside us in hypocritical composure of bag-wig and senatorial dignity, whispering unmentionable sonnets in his dialect of Xe and Ga. Somehow or another that last dotage of S. Mark's decrepitude is more recoverable by our fancy than the heroism of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... imagined a blooded horse might, under dire insult. Jones's bay had gotten about a hundred paces the start. I lived to learn that Spot hated to be left behind; moreover, he would not be left behind; he was the swiftest horse on the range, and proud of the distinction. I cast one unmentionable word on the breeze toward the cabin and Frank, then put mind and muscle to the sore task of remaining with Spot. Jones was born on a saddle, and had been taking his meals in a saddle for about sixty-three years, ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... green-grocers' doors acquire a saline and a scaly look, as if they had been crossed with fish and seaweed. Down by the Docks, they 'board seamen' at the eating-houses, the public-houses, the slop-shops, the coffee-shops, the tally-shops, all kinds of shops mentionable and unmentionable—board them, as it were, in the piratical sense, making them bleed terribly, and giving no quarter. Down by the Docks, the seamen roam in mid-street and mid-day, their pockets inside out, and their heads no better. Down by ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... in matter itself is unmentionable and inexpressible,—it is neither a thing nor no-thing: and this is known even by children ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... the King of Olympus downward. Upon the whole, then, we must admit that Greek mythology indicates a barbarian social state, man-stealing, piracy, human sacrifice, polygamy, cannibalism, and crimes of revenge that are unmentionable. A personal interpretation, such as man in his infancy resorts to, is embodied in circumstances suitable to a savage time. It was not until a later period that allegorical phantasms, such as Death, and Sleep, and Dreams were introduced, and still ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... a long string of "sacre chien," "sacre diable," and still more unmentionable phrases. The effect-upon the dogs was magical; the cariole flew to the summit; the progress of the episcopal tour was undeniably expedited, and a-practical exposition was given of the poet's thought, "From ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... the very climax of it and told the story of those atrocious tortures to which the poor and ignorant and misguided peasants of India had been put, how they had had their fingers tied together and mashed with hammers, and other unmentionable things had been done to them, appealed to the parliament and said that if they should refuse justice those mashed and disabled hands, lifted high to Heaven in prayer, would call down the power of God for their deliverance. Is it not worse to mash and disable a mind and a soul than a hand? ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... audience—the men on one side of the chapel, and the women on the other—did not excite much interest. The men, especially, were among the worst hearers I had ever seen. I felt ashamed of my countrymen. The spitting was incessant, and attended with certain unmentionable circumstances which render it most disgusting and offensive. What a contrast to my own clean and comely congregation of black and coloured people in New Amsterdam! In about twenty minutes after the preacher had begun his sermon, one-half of the men had their heads ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... our trench was simply packed like sardines with various returning working parties which had all got congested here—working parties from various companies and regiments; there were some Irish amongst them. It was amusing to listen to the language: men shouting, with all kinds of unmentionable oaths, to each other to get a 'bloody move on for ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... its unnatural packing into little brick boxes of little parcels of humanity of ill-assorted ages, with the old scolding or beating the young for behaving like young people, and the young hating and thwarting the old for behaving like old people, and all the other ills, mentionable and unmentionable, that arise from excessive segregation. It sets these evils up as benefits and blessings representing the highest attainable degree of honour and virtue, whilst any criticism of or revolt against them is savagely persecuted as the extremity ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... maladies more deeply-seated. He saw almost everywhere signs of canker eating into the heart of the people themselves. "It is a wicked and detestable place, though wonderfully attractive; and there can be no better summary of it, after all, than Hogarth's unmentionable phrase." He sent me no letter that did not contribute something of observation or character. He went at first rather frequently to the Morgue, until shocked by something so repulsive that he had not courage for a long time to go back; and on that same occasion he had noticed ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... especially when you know your stwaps are too tight to admit of any such use of your unmentionable members," squeaked the dwarf, mockingly, who had sat unmoved within hearing distance of ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa |
