"Unpresentable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... barked fiercely at the departing train which bore him away. Schwartz followed in humble pursuit of Lil, who, so far as I could understand affairs, had never forgiven him for intruding himself in so unpresentable a guise, and claiming acquaintance whilst she was engaged in conversation with a swell like Scraper. From that hour she had refused to hold the slightest communion with him, showing her teeth and growling in the cruellest way whenever he approached her. In ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... but I awakened about noon and managed to procure enough clothes to make myself not altogether unpresentable to the public eye. Charteris had gone already about his own affairs, and I did not regret it, for I meant, without delay, to follow up my adventure of ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... slowly, for indeed it was this action of words that was beginning to make clear to himself his own impression, so vague and so unpresentable before. As he thus traced it out, like a man following the blurred letters of an old inscription with the point of his stick, and gradually coming at their meaning, his excitement grew. He said, speaking with a rising emphasis ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... this involution of pain and pleasure in all deliberate forecast and volition, pain and pleasure are not the ultimate sources of value. A correct psychology and logic cannot allow that an eventual and, in strictness, unpresentable feeling, can determine any act or volition, but must insist that, on the contrary, all beliefs about future experience, with all premonition of its emotional quality, is based on actual impulse and feeling; so that the source of value is nothing but the inner fountain of life and imagination, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... have totally unpresentable wives," said Altiora, "totally!" and quoted instances, "and they WILL bring them. Or they won't come! Some of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their table manners. They just make holes in ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Cook and Housekeeper when the family were at home, and Housekeeper only when the family were away, completed the establishment. Mr Meagles regretted that the nature of the duties in which she was engaged, rendered Mrs Tickit unpresentable at present, but hoped to introduce her to the new visitor to-morrow. She was an important part of the Cottage, he said, and all his friends knew her. That was her picture up in the corner. When they went away, she always put on the silk-gown and ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... threw Millard off the track for a moment. The mention of people living narrowly brought to his mind his own early life in a farmhouse, and reminded him of his amiable but socially unpresentable aunt, whom he was wont faithfully to visit on one Sunday afternoon in every month. There was just a little cowardly feeling that should his relations with the family in Avenue C become known among his friends, his social position might become compromised. He did not ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with. I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic. The same discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if with less rigor, into all parts of life. The average spirit of the energetic class is good sense, acting under certain limitations ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that was visible from the front door of their apartment, for the fitting reception of his relatives. This preparation consisted largely in moving all presentable articles in all the rooms into these two, and banishing all unpresentable into the most remote of the other rooms, and shutting that door. The Lamb from Brookline inspected the pictures and photographs, straightening the first, retiring some of the second, and adding a few of both borrowed from ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... if at some future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on whom that lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be bestowed? This may happen,—how soon the future only knows. Think of this miserable man of coming political possibilities,—an unpresentable boor sucked into office by one of those eddies in the flow of popular sentiment which carry straws and chips into the public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of the monarchs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf of political oblivion! Think of him, I say, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... neglected. Every effort was concentrated, as in her mother's and sister's households, on keeping a maid presentable to open the door and to wait on the table, rather than to perform the heavier parts of the daily round. Those Lydia could do herself, or she could hire an unpresentable older scrubwoman to do them. She often thought that if she could but employ scrubwomen all the time, the problem would be half solved. But the achievement of each day was, according to Endbury standards, to keep or get somebody into ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... publisher of the Gentleman's Magazine, and there many a time has sat a journeyman author of his, by name Samuel Johnson, too often impransus. There it was that the said Samuel once had his dinner handed to him behind a screen, because of his unpresentable costume, when Cave was entertaining an aristocratic guest. In the course of the meal, the guest happened to speak with interest of something he had recently read by an obscure Mr. Johnson; whereat there was joy behind the screen, and probably increased appreciation of the unwonted dinner. After ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing |
