"Repellant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Our people consider ground oats as only fit for cattle, and it is never eaten by the human species in the United States. It is said that this oatmeal porridge was introduced to the British prisons by the Scotch influence, and we think that none but hogs and Scotchmen ought to eat it. A mess more repellant to a Yankee's stomach could not well be contrived. It is said, however, that the highlanders are very fond of it, and that the Scotch physicians extol it as a very wholesome and nutritious food, and ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... Perhaps the most harmful sinners are not those who send into the world of fiction the positively wicked and immoral, but those who make current the dull, the commonplace, and the socially vulgar. For most readers the wicked character is repellant; but the commonplace raises less protest, and is soon deemed harmless, while it is most demoralizing. An underbred book—that is, a book in which the underbred characters are the natural outcome of the author's own, mind and apprehension of life—is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... followed him with his eye, when an interval of peace and comparative happiness had set childhood's spirit free, and lent a degree of graceful gayety to all his motions,—I saw the brimming measure of the father's love. Could it be but his morbidly repellant pride, his jealous guarding of the domestic privacies, his vigilant pacing up and down forever before the close-drawn curtain of the heart?—was there no Bluebeard's chamber there? No! Pride was all the matter,—pride was the Spartan fox that tore the vitals of Pintal, while he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... an arrogance that turned his very claims to admiration into prejudices against him. Irascible, envious—bad enough, but not the worst, for these salient angles were all varnished over with a cold repellant cynicism, his passions vented themselves in sneers. There seemed to him no moral susceptibility; and, what was more remarkable in a proud nature, little or nothing of the true point of honor. He had, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... claimed, or may still be claimed, HAVE BEEN ENORMOUSLY OVER-ESTIMATED." And the final conclusion of this keen observer and lifelong student of medicine is this: "That experiments on animals, no matter with what prospective gain to humanity, are repellant to the ethical sense; and that those who persistently advocate them as beneficial to human or animal life MUST JUSTIFY THEIR CLAIMS BY RESULTS.... Even admitting that experiments on animals have contributed to the relief of human suffering, such measure of relief is infinitesimal compared ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... that your forehead was quite lost in your hair, and your great eyes were looking at me in such a funny, frightened way, and the corners of your mouth all coming down, I thought you were five-and-twenty at least, and wondered what I was to do with such a proud, repellant-looking young woman; but when you smiled I began ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... not, could not, let this prize escape him now. A wave of desire surged through his being. He took a step toward her, his trembling arms open to seize her lithe, seductive body. But she, retreating, held him away with repellant palms. ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... mosquitoes were not the least, but they did us some good. We had no fences to keep our cattle, and the mosquitoes drove the oxen and cow up to the smoke which we kept near the house in order to keep those little pests away. The cattle soon learned, as well as we, that smoke was a very powerful repellant of those little warriors. Many times, in walking those logs and going through the woods there would be a perfect cloud of mosquitoes around me. Sometimes I would run to get away from them, then stop and look behind me and there would be a great flock for two rods back ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... shock hair, which hung down like pieces of tarred rope, and with the lower part of the face veiled by a black, stringy beard, was thrust far enough within to show the shoulders. Directly behind appeared another face, placed on a shorter body, but none the less repellant in expression, and the two were forcing their way into the room, ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... Walter Tyrrel answered, grudgingly, in the tone of one who, against his will, admits an adverse point he sees no chance of gainsaying. "They're black, and repellant, and iron-bound, and dangerous, but they're certainly magnificent. I don't deny it. Come and see them, by all means. They're the only lions we have to show a stranger in this part of Cornwall, so you'd better make ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... gloomy apartment he had ever beheld in his life. It was all covered with black—walls, ceiling, and floor were draped in black, and reminded him forcibly of La Masque's chamber of horrors, only this was more repellant. It was lighted, or rather the gloom was troubled, by a few spectral tapers of black wax in ebony candlesticks, that seemed absolutely to turn black, and make the horrible place more horrible. There was no furniture—neither ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... used as the symbol of a woman, impulsively kind, yet in turn passionate and disdainful. The physical attributes of the mountain are ascribed to her, its spells of frosty coldness, its gloom and distance, its fickleness of weather, the repellant hirsuteness of the stunted vegetation that fringes the central swamp—these things are described as symbols of her temper, character, and physical make-up. The bloom and herbage of the wilderness, much pelted by the storm, are figures to represent her physical ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... from the common experience of life? Like Moses, he is slow of speech, and might be considered almost severe of countenance. The lineaments tell their story of childlike simplicity of character, and yet they are inspired by an expression of power, which at first seems repellant. Those large black eyes seem to pierce and read on every thought. I have referred to this family in a previous article,[D] but would now speak at more length of its paternal head. This man has but two pursuits, study and prayer. Of the ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... riot. prendre le mors aux dents [Fr.], take the bit between the teeth; sell one's life dearly, die hard, keep at bay; repel, repulse. Adj. resisting &c v.; resistive, resistant; refractory &c (disobedient) 742; recalcitrant, renitent; up in arms. repulsive, repellant. proof against; unconquerable &c (strong) 159; stubborn, unconquered; indomitable &c (persevering) 604.1; unyielding &c (obstinate) 606. Int. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... carving, the organ is grand, and the accommodations for Sunday-schools and lectures are of singular perfection. Few shrines in this country show better the modern movement of Methodism toward luxury and elegance, as compared with the repellant humiliations of Wesley's day. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... nervous tissue and brain, immediately about and above the eyebrow. You remember how effectually I dissipated your pictures by the simple application of iced eau-de-cologne. Few cases, however, can be treated exactly alike with anything like rapid success. Cold acts powerfully as a repellant of the nervous fluid. Long enough continued it will even produce that permanent insensibility which we call numbness, and a little longer, muscular ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... journey?... For a brief time, after they swept past the orbit of Mars, the great planets of Jupiter and Saturn were almost in a line ahead of the plunging, expanding globe. A monstrous thing now—with electronically charged gravity-plates so that it plunged onward by its own repellant force—the repellant force of the ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... remember it," I added, "our original ideas of magnetism were that it simply attracted. We knew the lodestone drew the steel, but only on better acquaintance did we learn of its alternating currents, attractive and repellant." ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... other thoughts, she had forgotten to do so, and now it was too late; so she received the two young ladies who were presently shown into the library. She greeted them in her usual manner, which was neither cordial, nor repellant, but which was entirely characteristic of this rather strange young woman. She understood perfectly well why they had called upon her at this time. They had not missed seeing that article in the one morning ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... rose. He had narrow eyes, shrewd and calculating and the sinuous motions of a contortionist. Linking his arm with Benito's, he smiled, disclosing small, discolored teeth. There was something ratlike about him, infinitely repellant. "Come, I'll tyke ye to ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... on his arm without the faintest movement. Now he took it in his, and pressed it softly. She frowned, and made a slight, repellant gesture. ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... that day at Lenox, when Bessie and I drove together in the afternoon, I tried to make her talk about you, to find out what you were to her. But she was so distant, so repellant, that I fancied there was nothing at all between you; or, rather, if you had cared for her at all, that she had been ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... harsh and his manner repellant only because Nature had served him the cruel turn of making them so. He was bitterly conscious as he spoke of having chosen the wrong words and uttered them with an appearance of relentless rigour which he would have made any ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... they seek and find. Surely, it is only the common sense of statesmanship to bring this country and those men together, in the near future, under conditions which are best for both, by making the Canadian Labrador an attractive land of life and not a hopelessly repellant ...
— Draft of a Plan for Beginning Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... ties, the potato and the tomato seemed to have no affinity for each other whatever. In many other instances it has also been found that two varieties which from a certain relation might naturally be expected to amalgamate easily have been repellant to each other and refused ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... whole length of the old house, would have seen it also disfigured in the same way. The huge deal cases stood on bare boards; the splendid staircase was carpetless. Nothing indeed could have been more repellant than the general aspect, the squalid disarray of Threlfall Tower, as seen from the inside, on ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stood in his way. He could not help being respectful and attentive to the old Chevalier, when their terms were, apparently at least, those of host and guest; and to a lady he COULD not be rude and repellant, though he could be reserved. So, when the kinsfolk met, no stranger would have discovered that one was a prisoner and the ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the mornings and evenings, and during the day giving off a beautiful white light, "The Smoky God,"—is seemingly suspended in the center of the great vacuum "within" the earth, and held to its place by the immutable law of gravitation, or a repellant atmospheric force, as the case may be. I refer to the known power that draws or repels with equal force in ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... and grim against the smiling morning. Its shuttered windows giving an expression of blindness or the repellant mask of death. A dead house, that was what it was. Its doors and windows closed on the tragedy that had been enacted within its massive stone walls. It seemed more like a fortress than a house where warm human faces had once looked forth, and where laughter ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... a deluge of corruption on a country miles in front, which they could not even discern. The infantry went over the top throwing bombs and piled themselves up into mounds of silence. Nations far away toiled day and night in factories—and all that they might achieve this repellant desolation. The innocence of the project made one smile—a handful of women sailing from America to reconstruct! To reconstruct will take ten times more effort than was required to destroy. More than eight ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... in life was at an end. He had not told Don Jorge of his experience with the leper in Maganguey. He was trying to forget it. But his hand ached cruelly; and the pain was always associated with loathsome and repellant thoughts of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... understand much that otherwise is inexplicable, but we may understand why so much and such resplendent poetry is lavished on incidents so bare, meagre, and commonplace, and why they present both poet and patron with frailties and faults naked and repellant; and we can the better palliate and forgive the weakness and subjection which the Sonnets indicate on the part of their author. With such a reading the Sonnets become a chronicle of the modes and feelings of their author, resembling ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... loud, rather exultant laugh that jarred on Jeanne. Why were these rough characteristics so repellant to her? She had lived with them all her short life. From whence came the other side of her nature that longed for refinement, cultivated speech, and manners? And people of real education, not merely the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... strong and picturesque personalities,—Clay, Adams, Calhoun, Jackson, and Webster. John Quincy Adams was a sort of exaggeration of the typical New Englander,—upright, austere, highly educated, devoted to the public service, ambitious, yet not to the sacrifice of conscience, but cold, angular, repellant. Says Carl Schurz in his Henry Clay—a book which gives an admirable resume of a half-century of politics: "He possessed in the highest degree that uprightness which leans backward. He had a horror of demagogy, and lest he should render ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... his club to dine was repellant to him. The story that Mrs. Hammond had let him read was not common property and, though none of his acquaintances would have had the bad taste to mention his connection with it, his appearance among them must revive its disagreeable details, at Hermia's ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... that the repellant nature of the Australian coast has had upon the southern progress of semi-civilisation is remarkably distinct. Each successive wave of improvement from the Asiatic continent seems to grow weaker and weaker as it travels south, until it breaks hopelessly on Australia. Nor ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc |
