"Unsavory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... neither age nor environment made this old place less grewsomely interesting: this ancient dwelling of a family whose unsavory annals were lost in the gloom of Tatar rule. The Gregorievs were closely bound to the gloomy stone pile; and would dwell there, in all probability, as long as their line continued. Michael, the present Prince, was loyal to his house. Yet its situation was one of the greatest of crosses ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... any suggestion of the original condition and quality of the house, except its size: whether the ordinary unsightly cabin of frontier "partners," or some sylvan cottage—there was nothing left but the usual ignoble and unsavory ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... orange, pommeloe, apple, citron, banana, rose-apple, pine-apple, custard-apple, pear, quince, guava, carambola, persimmon, loquat, pomegranate, grape, water-melon, musk-melon, peach, apricot, plum, mango, mulberry, date, cocoa-nut, olive, walnut, chestnut, lichi, and papaya, through the unsavory precincts of the "salt-fish market," and along a street the specialty of which is the manufacture from palm leaves of very serviceable rain cloaks, we arrived at the Ma T'au, a cul de sac resembling in shape, as its name imports, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... worn with work and anxieties, his nervous system shattered, Garcia was subject to fits of petulance which were ludicrous. In these rages he called everybody who would bear it pigs, dogs, and other more unsavory nicknames. Coronado bore it because thus he got his living, and got it ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... have been hopelessly soggy, dismal things compared to the brown discs Mike had turned out of the same oven. One was as bad as the other. Nothing seemed to work out right. Nothing ever tasted right. Only a healthy hunger enabled him to swallow the unsavory messes he concocted in the ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... if it had been an oyster, without any regard for the feelings of those inside. He pitched into the world in general, and all his neighbors past and present in particular. Even the babe unborn did not escape some unsavory epithets in the way of vaticination. I sat down, meaning to write you an essay on "The Right of Private Judgment as distinguished from the Right of Public Vituperation"; but I forbear. It may be that I do not understand the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... spared of all mankind!"—all of which are genuine epithets from the Quaker books of that period, and termed by Cotton Mather, who collected them, "quills of the porcupine." They surpass even Dr. Chauncy's catalogue of the unsavory epithets used by Whitefield and Tennent a century later; and it was not likely that they would be tolerated by a race whose reverence for men in authority was so comprehensive that they actually fined some one for remarking that Major Phillips's old mare ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... episode. At times I feel inclined to think that I was not worthy of her; at others, that I made an ass of myself over a girl like dozens of others. This irritates my vanity, and makes me feel angry with Aniela. One moment I feel an unsavory consciousness of guilt in regard to her, in another the offence appears to me futile and childish. Taken altogether, I do not approve of the part I played at Ploszow, nor do I approve of the part I am playing here. The division between right and wrong is becoming ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... say," says John Burroughs, "that there is a species of smilax with an unsavory name, that the bee does not visit, herbacea. The production of this plant is a curious freak of nature.... It would be a cruel joke to offer it to any person not acquainted with it, to smell. It is like the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... manual labor and found employment almost as hard to get. The few dollars he earned at casual jobs did not pay his board at the hotel where he lived in squalid discomfort, but matters got worse when he was forced to leave it and take refuge in a big tenement house, overcrowded with unsavory foreigners from eastern Europe. New York was then sweltering under a heat wave, and he came home, tired by heavy toil or sickened by disappointment, to pass nights of torment in ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... take any other sort of payment—and there had been more gold changing hands in order to secure the real thieves. And because he loved the gold Alaric had thus assisted both sides and received double pay. Also, he had left an unsavory memory of himself at San Leon as well as offended his Ute relatives; and White Feather not only prevented harm being done to his Mexican brother-in-law, but also used the occasion to make Alaric subject to himself. Thus it was that he had made the sheep herder take in the sick lad he had found ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... reputed a great fault to use figurative speeches foolishly and indiscreetly, so it is esteemed no less an imperfection in man's utterance, to have none use of figure at all, specially in our writing and speeches public, making them but as our ordinary talk, than which nothing can be more unsavory and far from all civility:—'I remember,' says he, 'in the first year of queen Mary's reign a knight of Yorkshire was chosen speaker of the parliament, a good gentleman and wise, in the affairs of his shire, and not unlearned in the laws ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... blood quickening in spite of himself, spurred his horse into a gallop and was soon in sight of the Shellfish Ranch, where Watson had lived for several years in unkempt, unsavory bachelorhood, for the reason that his wife had long since quit him, and only the roughest cowboys would tolerate the disorder of his bed and board. Privately, Hanscom was not much surprised at the rustler's death (although the manner of it seemed ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... a crevice in the rocks, from which he extends his rambling in all directions, preferring damp, thawy weather. He has very little discretion or cunning, and holds a trap in utter contempt, stepping into it as soon as beside it, relying implicitly for defence against all forms of danger upon the unsavory punishment he is capable of inflicting. He is quite indifferent to both man and beast, and will not hurry himself to get out of the way of either. Walking through the summer fields at twilight, I have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... the place will afford all the time absolutely necessary to visit and enjoy its most notable objects. A prepared luncheon basket should be taken from Madrid. This will obviate the necessity of encountering the dirt, unsavory food, and extortion of the fifth-rate hotels of Toledo. It has been said that banditti have been suppressed in Spain; perhaps so, on the public roads. It may be they have gone into the hotel business, as a safer and less conspicuous ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... not teache his schollers any unsavory and popishe aucthours which may eyther infecte the yonge wittes of his schollers with heriesies, or corrupte there lyfes ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... hope that when you return from school you will have lost the major portion of your unsavory vocabulary," he suggested. "That will be ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... husband's work cover him with the soot of the furnace or the odors of leather or soap factories, let not the wife be easily disgusted at the begrimed hands or unsavory aroma. Your gains are one, your interests are one, your losses are one; lay hold of the work of life with both hands. Four hands to fight the battles; four eyes to watch for the danger; four shoulders on which to carry ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... number of huge receptacles of bark, still filled with the last season's corn; while the fields around were covered with the growing crop, ripening in the July sun. There were hogs, too, in great number; for the Iroquois did not share the antipathy with which Indians are apt to regard that unsavory animal, and from which certain philosophers have argued ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... put it mildly, is a sensationalist despite his genius, and his business sense is large, as New Yorkers know ever since he wound up an artistic tour of America with a concert in a department store. When Nietszche was the talk of Germany we got "Also Sprach Zarathustra." Oscar Wilde's play, too unsavory for the France for which it was written, taboo in England because of its subject, has been joyously acclaimed in Germany, where there are many men who are theoretically licentious and practically uxorious; and Strauss was ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... house of two stories, with a wide front. It looked dilapidated and neglected, but except that it was in an unsavory neighborhood there was nothing to draw attention to it, or lead to the impression that it was the haunt of lawbreakers and ...
— Frank and Fearless - or The Fortunes of Jasper Kent • Horatio Alger Jr.
... moment these tomes of wisdom are inaccessible, as the library door is blocked up with unsightly mounds of earth, sewer-pipes, and certain workmen's implements. The fact is, the vicarage has been greatly disturbed of late, owing to a defect in the drainage—an unsavory circumstance which receives further and regretful explication in ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy
... whose family have felt the dignity of the home, now made a clerk and drudge in a huge establishment that, by its relentless use of millions, has undermined and overthrown all the independent stores of a large district, while his family are thrust into the unsavory communism of a tenement house, and lose all the delicate refinements of a quiet home. It is easy to say that this is but the natural law of trade. So to devour men is the natural law of tigers. But this truth will not reconcile us to the process. If ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... liberty of having a private investigator check into your background. It proved to be unsavory in some respects, as I implied before, but unlike the backgrounds of the other real-estate agents I had checked, it contained not the slightest hint of dishonesty. The nature of my business is such that I need someone of maximum integrity to contract it with. ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... the corner, with an unsavory heap of bed-clothing upon it, and a couple of chairs, both with wooden seats, and one with the ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... "many of the Reformed religion" in Maryland; and in 1683 an appeal from them to the Irish presbytery of Laggan had brought over to their aid that sturdy and fearless man of God, Francis Makemie, whose successful defense in 1707, when unlawfully imprisoned in New York by that unsavory defender of the Anglican faith, Lord Cornbury, gave assurance of religious liberty to his communion throughout the colonies. In 1705 he was moderator of the first presbytery in America, numbering six ministers. At the end of twelve years the number ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... at the time he sold out his steel business. To most people he would have left an unsavory memory, for though we should have considered him successful from the business standpoint, many of us would say that the means were not justified by the end. However, Mr. Carnegie has spent many years since in furthering the cause of the spread of knowledge ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... Hamilton observed, when I had the pleasure of exhibiting it to her, it is airy. I need scarcely add that it is the favorite haunt of those kindred spirits Ari-osto and Ary Scheffer. It is too high ever to be reached by any unsavory odors from the Back Bay. Cool in summer it is also, notwithstanding, remarkably warm in winter. My castle is quite too retired for any critics to intrude upon it. They cannot get at the plan of it even, unless in the event of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... on and screw off for the special behoof of college presidents and university professors. Why hold up Choricius to ridicule? He was no worse than others of his guild. It was not Choricius, it was another Byzantine historian who conveyed from Herodotus an unsavory retort, over which the unsuspecting Gibbon chuckles in the dark cellar of his notes, where he keeps so much of his high game. The Greek historian of the Roman Empire, the Roman historian of every date, are no better, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... an unsavory reputation even among the saffron-hued residents of Four-and-a-half Street, but its bland proprietor was regarded by the authorities as a particularly inoffensive and law-abiding specimen—his high standing at Bethany proving a very strong card. He was also the head of ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... forked stick; the dust that adhered to it was blown away, when it was dropped into the gourd, and in a short time the water was boiling. As soon as it ceased, another stone was put in, and in a little while a broth not unsavory, though so rudely cooked, was ready and ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... sommers Nightingale, Thy soveraigne Goddesses most deare delight, Why doe I send this rustick Madrigale, That may thy tunefull eare unseason quite? Thou onely fit this argument to write In whose high thoughts Pleasure hath built her bowre, And dainty Love learnd sweetly to endite. My rimes I know unsavory and sowre, To taste the streames, that, like a golden showre, Flow from thy fruitfull head, of thy Loves praise; Fitter perhaps to thunder martiall stowre, When so thee list thy loftie Muse to raise: Yet, till that thou thy poeme wilt make knowne, Let thy faire Cinthias praises be ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... days. We have not forgotten the days when mortgaged farmers prostituted their barns by selling advertising rights to Hood's Sarsaparilla and Carter's Little Liver Pills and to Lydia Pinkham, and when Bull Durham marred every green meadow from Boston to Washington. Billboards were an unsavory addition to the landscape then. But the modern art of bill posting is quite a different thing and in California it has reached its highest development. Segregated spots of color in the dun cities, surrounded by well ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... tannery—and on the following Monday morning he made his way into the long, low room where he had been told the skins were tanned. The room was a revelation, and a none too pleasant one at that! If he had thought the unloading and sorting department unsavory what should he say of this? The floor of the beamhouse was slippery with water, lime, and tanning solutions; unpleasant fumes of wet skins made heavy the air; revolving paddle-wheels suspended from the ceiling dripped upon the passer-by; and ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... horse's foam, woman's milk, laying a serpent on the afflicted part, urine of cows, bear fat, still recommended as a hair restorative, juice of boiled buck horn, etc. For colic, powdered horse's teeth, dung of swine, asses' kidneys, mice excretion made into a plaster, and other equally vile and unsavory compounds. Colds in the head were cured by kissing the nose of a mule. For sore throat, snail slime was a favorite prescription, and mouse flesh was considered excellent for disease of the lungs. Boiled snails and powdered bats were prescribed ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... probably fabricated by the author that it might serve as a warning. The sentence, if true, was too severe; the offspring who were innocent contributories to the crime deserved pity rather than punishment; the judgment passed on the real offenders was also unduly harsh. My object in citing this unsavory tale is to show the different views held in regard to incestuous marriage in China with its ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... which Folk presented in the prosecution of these scoundrels merely confirmed what had long been an unsavory rumor: that franchises and contracts were bought and sold like merchandise; that the buyers were men of eminence in the city's business affairs; and that the sellers were the people's representatives ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... devout lady shall so will, you may obtain from her liberality a shirt for this worthless tabernacle, and also a pair of hose; for I am unsavory to myself and to others, and of such luxuries none here has superfluity; for all live in holy poverty, except the fleas, who have that consolation in this world for which this unhappy nation, and those who labor among them, must wait till ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... more properly called, may be a troublesome visitor, but we invited him to come, and he is not to blame for some of his disagreeable ways. He is by no means useless, for he clears the gutters of quantities of unsavory and unsightly fragments which would decay and become a nuisance if not removed. The English sparrow eats also a great many of the army worms which have done so much harm in some parts of the country, and he has in many ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... overcome was a black-and-white, common, every-day, garden skunk. He treed this unexpected visitor on the wood-pile one famous moonlight night in Onteora. And he acknowledged his defeat at once, and like a man. He realized fully his own unsavory condition. He retired to a far corner of the small estate, and for a week, prompted only by his own instinct, he kept to ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... place is Waltham, in Massachusetts, and he invited me but a few days since to accompany him in a little visit thither. I cheerfully assented, and we took the cars in Boston, at the Worcester Depot, and after passing a range of unsavory back-yards and ill-favored houses, and winding beneath streets and by the side of kennels, we emerged upon the broad meadows and marshes from which rise in the distance the Roxbury and Brookline hills. The whole region is covered with bright, wooden houses. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that, as the harbor was so difficult of entry, the ships could beat in only when the wind was in a certain quarter, and that quarter was the nor'east. Hinc illae lacrimae! (Hence these weeps!) The colds were caused by the northeast wind of unsavory reputation! How often the wind got into the northeast without bringing a ship or colds ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... elbowing her way through the throng of applicants for places and servants. She paid no heed to the astonishment of a severe-looking, elderly lady, who, by her impetuous onset, has been rudely thrust back into the very arms of a fat, unsavory cook with whom she had a minute before been quite unwillingly set to confer by the high priestess ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... him coming, and in his anxiety to escape detection, contrived to lose his balance and fall to the floor. As he fell, he struck the table, on which a pan of sour milk had been placed, and it was overturned, deluging poor Pomp with the unsavory fluid. ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... is true," he said. "Yes; it has an unsavory odor, as M. de Treville used to say." And he fixed on M. Fouquet his intelligent and ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... compressed he next resolved to go to the very hotel where he had committed his crime, and from that starting-point fight his way up. He found the public room more than usually well filled with loungers, and could not help discovering, as he entered, that he was the subject of their loud and unsavory conversation. The "Evening Spy" had just been read, and all were very busy discussing the scandal. As the knowledge of his presence and identity was speedily conveyed to one and another in loud whispers, the noisy tongues ceased, and the young man found himself the centre of an embarrassing ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... at the diamond-quarries for two or three hundred thousand tons of wampum, and if she chooses to go joy-riding on a Diplodocus with a gentleman from the Circus, it is Zebulon Zebedee's business, not mine, and a newspaper that insisted upon dumping this unsavory mess on my breakfast-table every morning would sooner or later become an ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... steerage people were kind to her, she fell into bad hands by way of her tender sympathies. There were a man and woman with a family of small children, who were coming to America carrying an unsavory record. The woman fell ill, and Marie nursed her, and she fastened herself upon Marie with brutal tenacity. She took away a little silk shawl the child had inherited and was bringing over as a chief bit of finery. She had a delicate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... the boy he was in the alley pitching buttons with loafing urchins of his own kind—"alley rats" his father angrily called them—or leading a predatory gang of the same unsavory companions in raids on ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... Ditch, which is almost as much of a myth to our generation as the stream of black Cocytus itself, was an unsavory reality still in the London which George the First entered. It was a tributary of the Thames, which, rising somewhere among the gentle hills of Hampstead, sought out the river and found it at Blackfriars. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... bystander at some desperate recovery, he is slandered with it though he be guiltless; and this breeds his reputation, and that his practice, for his skill is merely opinion. Of all odours he likes best the smell of urine, and holds Vespasian's[13] rule, that no gain is unsavory. If you send this once to him you must resolve to be sick howsoever, for he will never leave examining your water, till he has shaked it into disease:[l4] then follows a writ to his drugger in a strange ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." All who entered His service would be expected to maintain their self-sacrificing devotion. He wanted no disciples who would become like salt that had spoiled, unsavory and useless. "He that hath ears to ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... filled with sounds, mutterings, babblings, little cries, the heavy whirr of the sewing machines, the splintering clatter of Tony, who was chopping his wares by the basement door—it seemed impregnated with odors, smudgy, burning, unsavory, smoky smells. ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... he is grown into a dislike of such preaching—if serious godliness, and what tends to it, are become distasteful to him—if discourses of God, and of Christ, of death and judgment, and of a holy life, are reckoned superflous and needless, are unsavory and disrelished—if he have learned to put disgraceful names upon things of this import, and the persons that most value them live accordingly—if he hath taken the seat of the scorner, and makes it his business ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... faded gentility. She wears an old shawl upon her head, but it is as nicely folded as an aristocratic mantilla; her feet are cased in the linen slippers worn by the poorer classes, but there are no unsavory rags and dirt about her. "That good walk of yours, friend," I thought, "does not look like starvation." Yet, if over there were a moment when one's heart should soften towards an imposing fellow-creature, it is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... disturbing the peace of the new English church"), and they plagued the colonists sorely. The very first shepherd of the wandering flock—Mr. Lyford, who preached to the planters in 1624—was, as Bradford says, "most unsavory salt," a most agonizing and unbearable thorn in the flesh and spirit of the poor homesick Pilgrims; and he was finally banished to Virginia, where it was supposed that he would find congenial and un-Puritanlike companions. Another bold-faced cheat preached ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... holding the vessel and the other stirring the porridge with all his might. This is the common mess of the country. Though hungry, we could just manage to swallow it with the aid of a little honey, which I shared with my men as long as it lasted. It is very unsavory (Scottice: wersh); and no matter how much one may eat, two hours afterward he is as hungry as ever. When less meal is employed, the mess is exactly like a basin of starch in the hands of a laundress; and if ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... inspection of the cakes and buns that beam upon you from a show-case—your nose meanwhile being pressed close against the glass for any slight blemish that might deflect your decision (for a currant in the dough often raises an unsavory suspicion and you'll squint to make the matter sure)—there will appear through a back door a little old man to minister unto you. You will give no great time to the naming of your drink—for the fires are hot in you—but will take ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... the house with bad smells and a subtile poison. Plaster to ceilings and walls is quickly damaged by wet, and if improper materials, such as road drift, be used in its composition, it may become most unsavory and injurious to health. The materials for plaster cannot be too carefully selected, for if organic matter be present, the result is the formation of nitrates and the like, which combine with lime and produce deliquescent ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... Medical treatment was poor and difficult to obtain. The women went to the limit in childbearing, and the burden of rearing their large families was awful. The art of cooking was little understood. They had no stoves or table forks. The food was served in a very unsavory fashion, and was very indigestible. The people therefore had frightful dreams, and dyspepsia was very prevalent. No carpet was seen here for a hundred years after the settlement. Communication with the outer world was slow, difficult and rare. On several occasions, ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... prayers while compounding medicaments. Some of the prescriptions given here are accompanied by exorcisms which were to be used at the same time. Many of the prescriptions could have had little but mental influence because the remedies recommended consisted of horrible mixtures of unsavory ingredients, the theory, if we can judge by the medicines, being that the more disgusting the dose the more efficacious the remedy; this is true from a ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... short, but it was long enough for certain newspapers of Chattanooga to give expression to their dislike to negro troops in general and to those in their proximity especially. The Washington Post, also, ever faithful to its unsavory trust, lent its influence to this work of defamation. The leading papers, however, both of Chattanooga and the South generally, spoke out in rather conciliatory and patronizing tones, and "sought to restrain the people of their section from compromising ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... see your ride has given you so poor an appetite," said the settler, with a look expressive of the savage delight he felt in annoying his visitor. "I reckon that's rather unsavory stuff you've got there, that you can't eat it without bread. I say young man"—addressing Grantham, "can't you find no appetite neither, that you sit there snorin', as if you ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... and resigning themselves to a large subtraction from their salvage, went to a late breakfast—a savory meal of smoking fried ham and potatoes, hot cakes and coffee served to sixteen in the cabin, and an unsavory meal of "hardtack-hash," with an infusion of burnt bread-crust, pease, beans, and leather, handed, but not served, to three ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... Aught unsavory or unclean Hath my insect never seen; But violets and bilberry bells, Maple-sap and daffodels, Grass with green flag half-mast high, Succory to match the sky, Columbine with horn of honey, Scented fern, and agrimony, Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue, And brier-roses, ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... so. They had no insignia of office. They were no richer than others; indeed, they were often poorer, spending their substance in largesses and bribes to strengthen their influence. They hunted and fished for subsistence; they were as foul, greasy, and unsavory as the rest; yet in them, withal, was often seen a native dignity of bearing, which ochre and bear's grease could not hide, and which comported well with their strong, symmetrical, and sometimes ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... usually do. While ashore you will keep your eyes open for glimpses of the Gortchky-Dalny plotters and their subordinates, whom you may find there. Admiral Timworth particularly desires to know whether any of that unsavory crew have reached Malta." ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... cannot sleep at night for the horrible melodies of some amateur, who chooses to serenade the moon, and display his terrible proficiency in execution on the clarionet, hautboy, or some other soft-toned instrument; nor can he leave the street door open, but his house is defiled by the unsavory visits of a troop of pug dogs, who even sometimes carry their loathsome ravages into the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... this point. It was beyond her to appeal to the artistic sense, so she appealed to the lower nature, and therein lay her fascination. Just consider who the men are to whom she appealed. A millionaire with an unsavory reputation. To two or three peers who, even by the wildest stretch of imagination, cannot be considered ornaments of their order. To some younger sons of the Nut description who are ready to pay anything to be seen with a popular actress, and to the kind of fools who are ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... with the object of working a threefold improvement over our present system. First, we should aim to exclude absolutely not only all persons who are known to be believers in anarchistic principles or members of anarchistic societies, but also all persons who are of a low moral tendency or of unsavory reputation. This means that we should require a more thorough system of inspection abroad and a more rigid system of examination at our immigration ports, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... have intelligence regarding myself, that will be by no means unsavory to you all. Father Finnerty and I had, about an hour before dinner this day, a long and tedious conversation, the substance of which was my future celebrity in the church. He has a claim on the Bishop, which he stated to me will be exercised in my favor, ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... eyes, wherewith to behold whatever was visible; and ears, to hear whatever was to be heard. For say, Aristodemus, to what purpose should odors be prepared, if the sense of smelling had been denied? Or why the distinctions of bitter and sweet, of savory and unsavory, unless a palate had been likewise given, conveniently placed, to arbitrate between them, and declare the difference? Is not that Providence, Aristodemus, in a most eminent manner conspicuous, which, because the eye of man is so delicate in its contexture, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... food, if the day is fine, it is my habit to shun the nearer places of refreshment. I take the air and stretch myself. Like Eve's serpent I go upright for a bit. Yet if time presses, there may be had next door a not unsavory stowage. A drinking bar is nearest to the street where its polished brasses catch the eye. It holds a gilded mirror to such red-faced nature as consorts within. Yet you pass the bar and come upon a range ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... be prevailed upon to take; he rejected all suggestions of the kind, as if priestly celibacy were one of his articles of church-discipline. Doomed by his own choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his unsavory morsel always at another's board, and endure the life-long chill which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself only at another's fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious, experienced, benevolent old ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and run away from the refining influences of his beautiful home. He took to the hills and landed way up on the north fork of the Kulanche where Liver-eating Johnson has a sheep ranch. Liver-eating, who is an unsavory character himself, had once heard Shelley address a small group of critics in front of the post office, and had wanted to adopt him right there. He still cherished the fondest memories of Shelley's flow of language, so he was tickled to death to have him ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... of anger against Patsy. I even told myself that had I come back with profits derived from peddling rum to the Indians, I might have found her more susceptible to my approach. Altogether I made rather a wicked game of viewing the poor girl in an unsavory light. ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... business to call him up. Julius opened the door and went out, down the rickety stairs and out through a narrow covered alleyway to the street, for the room which Jack Morgan and he occupied was in a rear tenement house. Several dirty and unsavory-looking children—they could not well be otherwise in such a locality—barefooted and bareheaded, were playing in the court. Julius passed them by, and sauntered along toward the City Hall Park. He met several acquaintances, newsboys and bootblacks, ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... highways, through woodland paths. They slept by day and journeyed by night. By reversing this program, the General as a rule avoided them. But not always, and when the little lad Derry had followed his strange quests, he had come now and then upon his father, telling stories to an unsavory circle, lord for the moment ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... beak the ordure of one of the helpless family. Flying away very slowly with head lowered and extended, as if anxious to hold the offensive object as far from its plumage as possible, the bird dropped the unsavory morsel in the course of a few yards, and, alighting on a tree, wiped its bill on the bark and moss. This seemed to be the order all day,—carrying in and carrying out. I watched the birds for an hour, while my companions were taking their turn in exploring ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... the long-dreaded disaster was at hand. In vain was the clever trick of nominating a popular, "clean" young reformer and opposing him with an unpopular regular of the most offensive type—more offensive even than a professional politician of unsavory record. At last victory was to reward the tactics of Victor Dorn, the slow, patient building which for several years now had been rasping the nerves ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... their vicious example, has been cherished as one of the essential qualities of genius. Of this style of character Mr. Leland has not the slightest degree of tolerance. Its manifestations are all abominable in his eyes, and unsavory in his nostrils. He cannot endure its presence; he regards its exercise as a nuisance: its permission in the plan of a kindly Providence ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Sabor proved unsavory eating even to Tarzan of the Apes, but hunger served as a most efficacious disguise to toughness and rank taste, and ere long, with well-filled stomach, the ape-man was ready to sleep again. First, however, he must remove the hide, for it was as much for this as for any other ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the heart. Boys caught the blood in earthen bowls as it gushed forth and handed it to various women hanging over the enclosing wall. The animal gave a few agonized bellows, a few kicks, and died. Each was quickly skinned and quartered, the more unsavory portions at once peddled along the wall, and bare-headed Indians carried a bleeding quarter on their black thick hair to the hooks on either side of pack horses which boys drove off to town as they were loaded. There the population bought strips ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... Fritz, polite and obsequious as if they were sitting near Society ladies, did slightly intimidate their neighbors; but Baron von Kelweingstein, let loose in his vice, was beaming; he cracked unsavory jokes, and with his crown of red hair, seemed to be on fire. He paid gallant compliments in his defective French of the Rhine, and his lewd nonsense, smacking of taverns, expectorated through the hole between his two broken teeth, reached the girls in the ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... the contents of any room in the house, and, if the doors, finish, etc., happen to be of iron, as they may be, no one in the house will suspect your bonfire, until the heap of charcoal and ashes is found. Dampness and decay, unsavory odors and impure air, chilly bedrooms and cold floors, will be unknown. The ears in the walls will be stopped, there will be no settlement from shrinking timbers, no jelly-like trembling of the whole fabric when the master puts his foot down. Finally, the dear old house will be ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... friends got it at once. Stone was looking for an assistant. He wanted a man who looked like a gentleman. To inspire confidence! I looked older than I was, and he took me on. It was a filthy business, but I was in a panic. I was with Stone eight months. Then I left him. It was too unsavory—even for me. ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... its little sail glaring white in the actinic sunlight: the morning air was hot and filled with the heavy odors of sea and shore. It was a fair spot, Davao, productive, peaceful.... He looked up the coast toward the north where Malababan had settled with his unsavory crew. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... for some years, my young enthusiasms were chained to an accountant's desk, was not without its romantic opportunities. Many of the mill-hands at Dunstable were Italians, and a foreign settlement had formed itself in that unsavory and unsanitary portion of the town known as the Point. The Point, like more aristocratic communities, had its residential and commercial districts, its church, its theatre and its restaurant. When the craving for local color was on me it was my habit to resort to the restaurant, a low-browed ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... Small partial payments were made for two years and then ceased. As the Improvement Company's bond holdings became the subject of a special arrangement, the bonded debt of the Republic was considered to be that held by the French and Belgian creditors. However unsavory the debts which gave origin to the bond issues, and however imprudent most of the bond issues themselves, the great majority of bonds had passed into the hands of small holders, innocent third parties who sustained great loss by ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... dozen of that sex who sat in the gloom of a corner. The young man was moderate in his sarcasm, and attempted to speak of national issues, but the crowd had small relish for that sort of thing. At eleven o'clock, when we got away from the unsavory room (more than half the candles had gone out), the orator was making slow headway against the refished blackguardism of the evening. The german was still "on" at the hotel when we ascended to our chamber, satisfied that ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... have the gift of divination. He read Bower's heart. By some means he became aware that the unsavory shed was loathsome to the fine ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... man who established a religion in this age of free debate, who was and is today accepted by hundreds of thousands as a direct emissary from the Most High—such a rare human being is not to be disposed of by pelting his memory with unsavory epithets. * * * The most vital questions Americans are asking each other today, have to deal with this man and what he has left us. * * * Joseph Smith, claiming to be an inspired teacher, faced adversity such ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... has been the subject of so much controversy, it may be an aid to clearness if the facts established by contemporary documents be first related, and the less trustworthy reports added later. The first indubitable item is trivial and unsavory enough. In April, 1552, a certain John Shakespeare, residing in Henley Street, Stratford-on-Avon, in the county of Warwick, was fined twelvepence for failing to remove a heap of filth from before his door. This John, who shared his surname ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... every variety of costume, are gathered in groups, enjoying a social gossip, or interchanging their various products and wares, and strawberries from Amak and fish from the Skager-Rack mingle their odors. In the second story of a dingy and dilapidated house, fronting one of these unsavory canals, a confused pile of dirty, shambling old tenements in the rear, and a curious medley of fish and fishermen, sloops and schooners, mud-scows and skiffs in front, lives the world-renowned author, Hans Christian Andersen. I say he lives there, but, properly ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... an exhibition of character as unlovely and repulsive as though the seven colors of the rainbow should concentrate in one, of livid hue, or pale blue, or sombre gray; as disagreeable as though the sweet melody of a harmonious choir were changed into a dull, monotonous bass; and as unsavory as a dish of meats seasoned only with ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... supply entirely gave out. The beginning of July reduced the besieged to the necessity of tasking their ingenuity to make palatable food of the hides of cattle, next of the skins of horses, dogs, and asses. The stock of even this unsavory material soon became exhausted; whereupon, not very unnaturally, parchment was turned to good account. Manuscripts a good century old were eaten with relish. Soaked for a couple of days in water, and ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... is talking of the class of books you keep, father," she said, lowering her voice: "I'm sure of it. They are as unsavory in his nostrils as to the reformers in the village. They'd all excommunicate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... An unsavory locality known as "Irish Row," about half a mile off, soon attracted her attention. The slatternliness, suffering, shiftlessness, dirt and raggedness, were inducements to one of her charitable temperament to visit its inhabitants, ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... who supported Holmes in debate, hammered the point that, although Holmes may have done something shady and unsavory during the three-year period in the late 1940's when he was out of government service, there was no evidence that he had ever misbehaved while ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... a very unsavory tenement-house—was built by John Tavers, innkeeper, in 1770, who planted in front of the door a tall post, from which swung the sign of the Earl of Halifax. Stavers had previously kept an inn of the same name on Queen, ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Langdons treat him as a friend—intimate one, too," he thought. "What if they should learn of Norton's questionable operations at the Capitol; of his connection with two unsavory 'deals,' one of which resulted in an amendment to the pure food law so that manufacturers of a valueless 'consumption cure' could continue to mislead the victims of the 'white plague'; Norton, who had uttered an epigram now celebrated in the tap-rooms of Washington, 'The paths of glory ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... appearance in any way belie his reputation, which was unsavory in the extreme. Indeed, if report spoke truly, "Black Brady," as he was commonly called, had on one occasion only escaped the gallows thanks to the evidence of a village girl—one who had loved him recklessly, to her own undoing. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... estimates of our poet's worth have been as diversified as they have been in the main unfair. Alternately lauded as a master dramatic craftsman and vilified as a scurrilous purveyor of unsavory humor, he has been buffeted from the top to the bottom of the dramatic scale. More recent writers have been approaching a saner evaluation of his true worth, but never, we believe, has his real position in that ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... door upon her and, mounting to the box, drove carefully away through the thronged streets, turning westward and leaving the neighborhood of legal offices to plunge into the somewhat unsavory precincts given over to markets and fruit venders, passing which, he gradually emerged into the less frequented lengths of avenue leading far out into the suburbs. It was a long and not too pleasant drive, but Joyce Lavillotte was ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... rather why Locke should have wasted the resources of his intelligence upon so feeble an opponent. The book of Hobbes lay ready to his hand; yet he almost ostentatiously refused to grapple with it. The answer doubtless lies in Hobbes' unsavory fame. The man who made the Church a mere department of the State and justified not less the title of Cromwell than of the Stuarts was not the opponent for one who had a very practical problem in hand. And Locke could answer that he was answering ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... the performance, Tavernake made his way to the stage-door and waited. The neighborhood was an unsavory one, and the building itself seemed crowded in among a row of shops of the worst order, fish stalls, and a glaring gin palace. Long before Beatrice came out, Tavernake could hear the professor's voice down the covered passage, the professor's voice ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Washington had unsavory reputations in their dealings with him. One of these was General Horatio Gates, who was known as ambitious to be made head of the American army in place of Washington. Gates won the Battle of Saratoga at which Burgoyne surrendered his British army. Washington at that ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... and Wood being of a rather reckless disposition would go to Indianapolis to see Jackson, and together they would have a big time in the city. Both being fond of ladies' company, they spent much of their time together in the company of women of loose moral character and were in several very unsavory escapades, escaping notoriety however under assumed names, which prevented their families and friends at Greencastle from hearing of them. With no knowledge of his former career and ignorant of his escapades while at college at Indianapolis, ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... bidding. She carefully measured out half a pint of the unsavory fluid—the dregs of the casks and the scourings ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... probability: they show us many clearly-developed sensual and mercenary scoundrels; they are all, very possibly, portraits from life; but they are all excessively crude in their likenesses and inexpressibly wearisome. It is a distasteful and unsavory world to which the author introduces us: if he wishes to show us consummate rascals we insist that he should wrap them in some veil of decency, if not of art, and not fill his pages with incidents and talk which properly belong ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... to the discipline of the home plantation, he was sent to a certain celebrated negro-breaker by the name of Edward Covey, one of the poorer whites who, as overseers and slave-catchers, and in similar unsavory capacities, earned a living as parasites on the system of slavery. Douglass spent a year under Coveys ministrations, and his life there may be summed up in his own words: "I had neither sufficient time in which to eat nor to sleep, except on Sundays. The overwork and the brutal chastisements of ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... sharp, stinging, rough, piquant, racy; biting, mordant; spicy; seasoned &c. v.; hot, hot as pepper; peppery, vellicating[obs3], escharotic[obs3], meracious|; acrid, acrimonious, bitter; rough &c. (sour) 397; unsavory &c. 395. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... political wire-pullers and office-seekers not to demand a plank, will thereby help to sell Kansas back into the hands of the whiskey power. Behind every anti-plank man's word, written or spoken, is his willingness to let Kansas return to saloon rule. Sugar coat it as they may, that is the unsavory pill in the motive of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... had learned definitely that Bill Holmes had manipulated the fake camera while the bank was being robbed, and that the man with him, who bad also driven the machine, was a certain chauffeur of colorless personality and an unsavory reputation among other drivers; and that the number of the automobile was a matter of conjecture, since three different men who were positive they remembered ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... the wolfish cold of the Labrador night had come, it found Trafford and Marjorie seated almost warmly on a bed of pine boughs between the sheltering dark rock behind and a big but well-husbanded fire in front, drinking a queer-tasting but not unsavory soup of lynx-flesh, which she had fortified with the remainder of the brandy. Then they tried roast lynx and ate a little, and finished with some scraps of cheese and deep draughts of ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... statesmanship," many of which, on analysis, are found to be imaginary and supposititious. Yes, and it would be better for the country if our literary men would describe the healthful life of the Nation's plain people, than tell unsavory stories of artificial careers and abnormal affections, and all that sort ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... ahead until he stood beneath a huge, unsavory bundle wrapped in roughly woven brown fibre, and wedged in a fork between two limbs. Judging from the ugly odor which overhung the grove, there could be no question about what the bundle contained. Nini and Ivana, glancing at the scores of similar bundles which burdened the trees ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... canal creeping between them—stand the buildings, dam and powerful pumps of the water service; ordinarily more than adequate for all uses. Usually, the water was pure and clear; but when heavy rains washed the river lands, the "noble Jeems" rushed by with an unsavory and dingy current, that might have shamed the yellow Tiber and rivaled the Nile itself. Sometimes the weary and worn patriot took his whisky and mud, thick enough to demand a fork; and ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... her comfort or her children's improvement nor for the cleanliness of anyone concerned. Another thing that prevents better houses in Chicago is the tentative attitude of the real estate men. Many unsavory conditions are allowed to continue which would be regarded with horror if they were considered permanent. Meanwhile, the wretched conditions persist until at least two generations of children have been born and reared in them. In every neighborhood where poorer people ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams |
