"Unsatisfying" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where, if there were any solid result, it was accompanied with a very great flying about of chaff indeed. Society was nothing but whip syllabub, a mere conglomeration of bubbles, as hollow and as unsatisfying. And in lower departments of human life, as far as he knew, he saw evils yet more deplorable. The Church played at shuttlecock with men's credulousness; the law, with their purses; the medical profession, with their lives; the military, with ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of refuge, where men of noble birth, kings and queens and emperors, warriors and statesmen, retired to lay down their splendid cares, and end their days in peace. Those with whom the world had dealt hardly, or those whom it had surfeited with its unsatisfying pleasures, those who were disappointed with earth, and those who were filled with passionate aspirations after heaven, alike found a haven of rest in the quiet cloister. And, gradually, lands came to them, and wealth, and social dignity—all ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... to read and refer to, insensibly lost their charm,—she went reluctantly to her desk, and as reluctantly took up her pen,—what she had written already, appeared to her utterly worthless,—and what she attempted to write now was to her mind poor and unsatisfying. She was not moved by the knowledge, constantly pressed upon her, that she was steadily rising, despite herself, to the zenith of her career in such an incredibly swift and brilliant way as to be the envy of all her contemporaries,—she ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... picked up little by little in the woods, small as it was and unsatisfying to his youthful impatience, sufficed to sustain his hopes. The constant meeting after work-hours with slinking bohunks who always avoided him, convinced him that something within the law was afoot, and repeated glimpses of distant groups which dribbled away when he came within ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... of the open air has for the Young Lady, I doubt not, more sentiment and suggestion of love than a conservatory full of them in January. And this suggestion, leavened as it is with the inconstancy of nature, stimulated by the promises which are so often like the peach-blossom of the Judas-tree, unsatisfying by reason of its vague possibilities, differs so essentially from the more limited and attainable and home-like emotion born of quiet intercourse by the winter fireside, that I do not wonder the Young Lady feels as if some spell had been broken ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of cases it is said that the food eaten at the feasts was of an unsatisfying nature. This statement is usually made in the general descriptions given by contemporary writers; it is rarely found in the personal confessions. When it does so occur, it is worth noting that the witch is generally a young girl. If this were always the case, it would ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... and sugary cakes, green tea like bitter hot water, insipid and unsatisfying. It was a shock to see the girls' faces as they raised the tiny china teacups. Under the glaze of their powder they were ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... and cool in his. She made him feel very strong and protective. Nights, he dreamed of doing brave deeds for her, of saving her from terrible dangers. At first her vague, fleeting kisses thrilled him, but as the weeks went by and his passion grew, he found them strangely unsatisfying. ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... unsatisfying," he remarked after a sip, "but doubtless I shall get used to it. I shall have to get used to a devil of a lot of things, my son. As soon as the period of her widowhood has elapsed I hope to marry ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Musa had created, was pushing on in the direction of Lake Tanganyika. Though it was not true that he had been murdered, it was true that he was half-starved. The want of other food compelled him to subsist to a large extent on African maize, the most tasteless and unsatisfying of food. It never produced the feeling of sufficiency, and it would set him to dream of dinners he had once eaten, though dreaming was not his habit, except when he was ill. Against his will, the thought of delicious feasts would come upon him, making it all ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... of the world with which social life in London and elsewhere had infected me. The bitterest criticism which that work excited was based on the contention that the kind of life there analyzed was purely artificial, and unsatisfying for that very reason—that the book was addressed only to an idle class, and that from the conditions of this pampered minority no conclusions were deducible which had any meaning for the multitude of average men. Some such objection had been anticipated from the first ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... the whole of her brave, hard-working life, Penelope knew what it was to spend as she had seen other women spend, without being driven into choosing the second-best material or the less becoming frock for the unsatisfying reason that it was the cheaper. The two men had given Kitty carte blanche as regards expenditure and she proceeded to take full advantage of the fact, promptly quelling any tentative suggestions towards economy which Penelope, rather overwhelmed ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... the valleys. The snow mountains no longer look cold, hard, and austere. Their purity remains as true as ever. And they still possess their uplifting power. But they now speak of serenity and calm—not, indeed, of the unsatisfying ease of the slothful, but of the earned repose of high attainment. Great peace is about ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... anger, intolerance, personal feuds and sectarian bitterness, interminable discussions and weary controversies; while infinite Truth, for which I have been seeking, lies still beyond, or seen, if at all, only by transient and unsatisfying glimpses, obscured and darkened by ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... somewhere and follow us as the priest leads us round. There does not seem to be any one special shrine with a central figure for us to see; perhaps there is one, but it is not shown to foreigners. It is all vague and rather meaningless, and the carving and decoration are unsatisfying. After a while, as there does not seem to be anything more forthcoming, we drop a few coins into a bowl held out to us and prepare to go. Just as we reach the door another strange being in a peaked cap appears with tiny cups of clear amber-coloured tea on ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... give us; knowledge not put for us into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty, and touched with emotion by being so put; not thus put for us, and therefore, to the majority of mankind, after a certain while, unsatisfying, wearying. ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... entirely unworthy of the sacrifice you would be making; but, dear, we know each other pretty well by this, and I hope you can trust yourself to me. If you only knew how I have longed to tell you this through the last two years of our sweet, but to me unsatisfying, friendship you would not keep me in suspense any longer than you can help. You have been the one thought and object of my life ever since I came out, and I have lived in fear of some other ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... the mysteries of the war. News from that city was brief and unsatisfying in the main. Great things, however, were done there, and none greater than those accomplished by the British. Some of these accomplishments are told in the ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... on pop-corn, and as it was very light and unsatisfying, they had to eat a long time. They were all the after-noon dining. Right after dinner the King wrote out his royal decree that all the inhabitants should that year plant pop-corn instead of any other grain or any vegetable, and that as soon as the ships arrived they should ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... and finally "Finis," or "Finit," for even those nearest could not catch the word distinctly, as the devil, afraid doubtless of perpetrating a barbarism, spoke through the nun's closely clenched teeth. This being all decidedly unsatisfying, the magistrates insisted that the examination should continue, but the devils had again exhausted themselves, and refused to utter another word. The priest even tried touching the superior's head with the pyx, while prayers and ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a difficult question, and brought out a world of unsatisfying conjecture. Various men were mentioned as possibilities, but one by one they were discarded as not being eligible. No one but young Hillyer had been intimate with Flint Buckner; no one had really had a quarrel with him; he had affronted every man who had ...
— A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Mark Twain
... sex; the Trade Unionism of married women is not sex. Only the most insignificant fraction of the gallantries of married people produce any of the conventional results; and plays occupied wholly with the conventional results are therefore utterly unsatisfying as sex plays, however interesting they may be as plays ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw |
