"Unreadable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon the harpsichord, she would come out to meet him. All she wanted was the adventure, though she did not understand this herself. If no one else in a bonnet came to Maam—and Young Islay was for reasons away in the Lowlands—this dreamer of the wild, with the unreadable but eloquent face and the mysterious moods would do very well. I will not deny that there might even be affection in her trysts. So far as she knew they were no different from trysts made by real lovers elsewhere since the start of time, for lovers ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... hand to him impulsively. There was an unfathomable, unreadable look in her dark eyes. As he gallantly lifted the cold fingers to his lips, she said, without taking her almost ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... leave, as it forms of itself a wide field for discussion; and, having fully occupied the space allotted to us, we must here bring to a close our sketch of a work which, notwithstanding the somewhat unreadable character of the central portion, has supplied to the public a valuable collection of recorded facts, expressed for the most part in clear, untechnical language. We have not entered into questions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... at once chastened and fired. Fresh in her memory was endless matter for meditation. And on the sofa, in a negligent attitude of repose, with shameless eyes gazing far into the caverns of the fire, and an unreadable faint smile on her face, she meditated. And she was the most seductive, tantalizing, self-contradictory object for study in the whole of Bursley. She had never been so interesting as in this brief period, and she might never be ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... of blessings which flow from it to the believing soul. Therefore do men cling to Him today as if it was but yesterday that He had died for them. When all other names carved on the world's records have become unreadable, like forgotten inscriptions on decaying grave-stones, His shall endure for ever, deep graven on the fleshly tables of the heart. His revelation of God is the highest truth. Till the end of time men will turn to His life for their clearest ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... corner immediately behind, which is the spectral throne of exiled rulers. He has the power of all strong natures of creating around him an atmosphere of uncertainty, apprehension, and fear. Of all the many problems of this Session of probably fierce personal conflict, this was the most unreadable sphinx. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... misery, some other deception of which that girl had been a victim? It seemed hardly probable. It was not even easy to imagine. What struck me most was her—I suppose I must call it—composure. One could not tell whether she understood what she had done. One wondered. She was not so much unreadable as blank; and I did not know whether to admire her for it or dismiss her from my thoughts as a passive butt of ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... continued Pembury; "it's rubbish, and unreadable; and though they condescend to let us see it, I don't suppose two fellows in the Form ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... concern, her pose languid, her eyes raised to him, but as unreadable as ever. He avoided looking into them for that very reason. He forgot himself in the contemplation of those passive arms, of these defenceless lips, and—yes, one had to go back to them—of these wide-open eyes. Something wild in their grey stare made him think of sea-birds ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... restricting its attention to the most important works of each quarter, it gave extensive critiques of only a few books in each number and thus avoided the multitude of perfunctory notices that had made previous reviews so dreary and unreadable. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... spite of the open enmity which existed between them, he could persuade the horse-dealer to enter into a new alliance with him. He therefore sent off one of his men to him with a letter, written in almost unreadable German, to the effect that if he would come to Altenburg and resume command of the band which had gathered there from the remnants of his former troops who had been dispersed, he, Nagelschmidt, was ready to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Newfoundland or a Collie and as innocent and winsome. They were wonderful eyes, soft and spring-like at times, glowing with a rich, human understanding which on the instant could harden and flash lightning. Deceptive eyes, unreadable, but alluring alike to men and to women in all walks and conditions ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... chiefly as representing the prejudices, as well as the interests, of the planters. The article in the Quarterly is valuable, as being an able and liberal digest of various narratives; some derived from Hayti itself. Rainsford's book is nearly unreadable, from the absurdity of its style; but it is truly respectable in my eyes, notwithstanding, from its high appreciation of L'Ouverture's character. It contains more information concerning Toussaint than can be found, I believe, anywhere else, except in the Biographie; and it has ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... in his. To him the content of a book matters not at all. He loves books because they are books, and discriminates them only by the irrelevant standard of their rarity. A rare book is not less dear to him because it is unreadable, even as to the snob a dull duke is as good as a bright one. Indeed, why should he bother about readableness? He doesn't want to read. 'Uncut edges' for him, when he can get them; and, even when he can't, the notion of reading a rare edition would seem ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... ready illustration, whether he concerns himself with diversities of early Christian belief, the course of country-dances in England, or the growth of mediaeval legends, he adds the grace of telling a tale and drawing a character. He has published nearly a hundred volumes, not one of them unreadable. But no one man may write with equal pen of German history, of comparative mythology and philology, of theological dissertations, and of the pleasures of English rural life, while he adds to these a long list ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and forthright style which imparts such an air of heightened verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the new journalism. "The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are 'not for an age, but for all time,'" says Bernard Shaw, "has his reward in being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes trying to knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare peopling that same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire hunts, Ibsen photographing the ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... go forth into the world without due acknowledgment being made to that worthy old Dominie, Richard Johnson, to whose erudite but somewhat unreadable work the author is so largely indebted. As he flourished at the end of the sixteenth century, and the commencement of the seventeenth, great allowances should be made for his style, which is certainly not suited to the taste of this generation. It is to be hoped that the present version, while ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... will reward the explorer of the Shepherd's country. Only let that explorer be prepared for pages on pages of the most unreadable stuff, the kind of stuff which hardly any educated man, however great a "gomeril" he might be, would ever dream of putting to paper, much less of sending to press. It is fair to repeat that the educated man who thus refrained would probably be a ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... common-sense of so high an assay that they might really be graded as wisdom—his analysis of men and women being particularly surprising. Those little twinkling, and sometimes sleepy, eyes of his, now that she began to study him the closer, reminded her of the unreadable eyes of an elephant she had once seen—eyes that presaged nothing but inertia, until whack went the trunk and over toppled the boy who had ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the comedies of Hardy, the court poet of Henry IV., had, in their turn, been consigned to oblivion, yet there was an increasing taste for the drama. The first comedy of Corneille, "Melite," was followed by many others, which, though now considered unreadable, were better than anything then known. The appearance of the "Cid," in 1635, a drama constructed on the foundation of the old Spanish romances, constituted an era in the dramatic history of France. Although not without great ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... man—and died a lawyer," seemed rather taken aback at the effect of the blow he'd launched. If he was after information, I can't think he learned much in the moment while Worth stood regarding him with an unreadable eye. ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... superficial eyes, and overlook all that are obvious to the vulgar part of mankind. Their art is the transmutation of styles. By happy alchemy of mind they convert dross into gold—and gold into tinsel. They see farther into a millstone than most others. If an author is utterly unreadable, they can read him for ever: his intricacies are their delight, his mysteries are their study. They prefer Sir Thomas Browne to the Rambler by Dr. Johnson, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy to all the writers of the Georgian ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... almost a castaway. 'For five years,' he told Bishop Burnet, when on his death-bed, 'I was never sober.' His reputation as a wit must rest, in the present day, chiefly upon productions which have long since been condemned as unreadable. Strange to say, when not under the influence of wine, he was a constant student of classical authors, perhaps the worst reading for a man of his tendency: all that was satirical and impure attracting him most. Boileau, among French writers, and Cowley among the English, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... care about the best things—but how am I to begin?" She wondered what books he would tell her to take up to her own room, and recalled the famous writers that she had either not looked into or had found the most unreadable, with a half-smiling wish that she could mischievously ask Deronda if they were not the books called "medicine for the mind." Then she repented of her sauciness, and when she was safe from observation carried up a miscellaneous selection—Descartes, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... their special contributions of error,—often the only portion of their writings that really belongs to themselves. Nor is it at all so easy to counteract as to confute them. A masterly confutation of the part of their works truly their own may, from its subject, be a very unreadable book: it can have but the insinuated poison to deal with, unmixed with the palatable pabulum in which the poison has been conveyed; and mere treatises on poisons, whether moral or medical, are rarely works of a very delectable order. It seems to be on this principle that there exists no confutation ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... shoulders and stared. "What a tirade!" he thought. The silence and immobility of Councillor Mikulin impressed him. The bearded bureaucrat sat at his post, mysteriously self-possessed like an idol with dim, unreadable eyes. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... which a few chairs had been uncovered, and a table cleared. A man rose from a chair beside the table, and he and Falloden shook hands. He was a round-faced and broad-shouldered person, with one of the unreadable faces developed by the life of a prominent solicitor, in contact with all sorts of clients and many varieties of business; and Falloden's sensitive pride had soon detected in his manner certain shades of expression to which the heir of ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... argue with biographers; they, at all events, are neither utilitarians nor opportunists, but idealists pure and simple. What is the good of reminding them, being so majestical, of Guizot's pertinent remark, 'that if a book is unreadable it will not be read,' or of the older saying, 'A great book is a great evil'? for all such observations they simply put on one side as being, perhaps, true for others, but not for them. Had Mr. Bradlaugh's Life been just half the size it would have had, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... and encircled in mystery, according to some writers who have been studying the Gipsy character. They have been a theme upon which a "bookworm" could gloat, a chest of secret drawers into which the curious delight to pry, a difficult problem in Euclid for the mathematician to solve; and an unreadable book for the author. A conglomeration of languages for the scholar, a puzzle for the historian, and a subject for the novelist. These are points which it is not the object of this book to attempt to clear up and settle; all it aims at, as in the case of my "Cry of the Children from the ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... other. "You gave the essence of the thing. That is a higher veracity than any literal reporting which would be dull and unreadable. I thought I recognized the fictional ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... sensibility: 'In contemplating the origin, rise, and fall of nations, the mind is alternately filled with a mixture of sacred pain and pleasure.' Would you read further? Then you will find Fauna and Flora, twin goddesses of ineptitude, flitting across the page, unreadable as a geographical treatise. His first masterpiece was translated into French, anno VI., and the translator apologises that war with England alone prevents the compilation of a suitable biography. Was ever thief treated with so grave ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... and rule—as according to Mr. Peter Vibart; it would be a scholarly book, of elaborate finish and care of detail, with no irregularities of style or anything else to break the monotonous harmony of the whole—indeed, sir, it would be a most unreadable book!" ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... then alive, and that he was regarded as greater than Alexander, Pompey, and Caesar. How many modern epics treat of a subject at once so popular, so historical in its basis, and so striking to the imagination? For us, it is true, the poem is unreadable. For other themes of the same kind the reader may be referred to the ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... in some foreign language. In the lower left-hand corner was what appeared to be the name of the maker but this was so blotted out as to be unreadable. ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... following this which are obliterated, defaced or unreadable. There are more to follow. In the future such gaps in the content ...
— The Issahar Artifacts • Jesse Franklin Bone
... An unreadable expression flitted briefly across the gambler's lean face. "I know what you mean. Let's just say that the laws of this planet discriminate slightly against Free Status people like yours truly. They require us to live in ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... Etruria Vendicata praises the murder of the abominable Alessandro de' Medici by his kinsman, Lorenzaccio. None of the satires, whether on kings, aristocrats, or people, have lent themselves easily to my perusal; the epigrams are signally unreadable, but some of the sonnets are very good. He seems to find in their limitations the same sort of strength that he finds in his restricted tragedies; and they are all in ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... need not detain us. It is unreadable, and to quote his own sensible words, 'It is useless to criticise what nobody reads.' It was indeed the expressed opinion of a contemporary called Pot that Irene was the finest tragedy of modern times; but on this judgment of Pot's being made known to ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the house of Messrs. Baring, has been greatly enriched by him. It is by his money that it has been enabled to do its work. In this library there is a certain number of thousands of volumes—a great many volumes, as there are in most public libraries. There are books of all classes, from ponderous unreadable folios, of which learned men know the title-pages, down to the lightest literature. Novels are by no means eschewed,—are rather, if I understood aright, considered as one of the staples of the library. From this library any book, excepting such rare volumes as in ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... with me about twenty-seven years old; and after thinking that I would write an essay on Man, it flashed on me that I could work in some "supplemental remarks on expression." After the horrid, tedious, dull work of my present huge and, I fear, unreadable book, I thought I would amuse myself with my hobby-horse. The subject is, I think, more curious and more amenable to scientific treatment than you seem willing to allow. I want, anyhow, to upset Sir C. Bell's view, given in his most interesting work, "The Anatomy of ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... a keen eye. He had studied the face of the big man from up north all during the scene, and he found the stern features unreadable. For one instant now he guessed that ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... congratulation to Prince Albert and the British public on the Great Exhibition of 1851, the apotheosis of trade and machinery. The "Architect" finds also—what may surprise the modern reader who has not noticed that many an able work has been thought unreadable on its first appearance—that he cannot understand the language ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... was the town authorities certainly did not know, neither could they apparently find out. His name, as written by himself, was unreadable. His notes told nothing; his son could tell little more—of consequence. A report, to be sure, did come from the village, far up the mountain, that such a man and boy had lived in a hut that was almost inaccessible; but even this did not help ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... There are books written by people who have spent the night in China, as it were, superficial and amusing, full of the tinkling of temple bells; and there are other books written by people who have spent years in China and who know it well,—ponderous books, full of absolute information, heavy and unreadable. Books of the first class get one nowhere. They are delightful and entertaining, but one feels their irresponsible authorship. Books of the second class get one nowhere, for one cannot read them; they are too didactic and dull. The only people who might read them ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... was my chessboard with my letters on it. I tried reading them downward, across, upward and diagonally, in the direction of the moves of different chess pieces—king, queen, rook and bishop. Nothing came of that, whatever I did; the thing was as unreadable as ever. But there remained one chess-move to try—the eccentric move of the knight; the move of one square forward, backward or sideways, and then one square diagonally, or, as it has sometimes been more concisely expressed, the move to the next square but one of a different colour from that ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... Andrews, I had to give it up as putting me out of all patience. I then spent another penny on an abridgement of Gulliver's Travels, and was enchanted by it. What is it that makes one book so readable and another so unreadable? Swift, from all I can make out, was a far more human and genuine person than he is generally represented, but I do not think I should have liked him, whereas Fielding, I am sure, must have been delightful. Why ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Mills to whom those that love reading Thro' all that's unreadable call very clever;— And whereas Mill Senior makes war on good breeding, Mill Junior makes war on ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... a registered letter with great dabs of sealing-wax all over it, and a handwriting so gentlemanly as to be almost unreadable. Every one crowded round the eldest son to see it opened—and out fell five ten-crown notes. "Mercy on us!" they cried in amazement, and "Can it be for us?" The next thing was to puzzle out what ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... to smooth the torn leaves when he reached her. It had been one of the old textbooks, printed on real paper, and it was fragile with age. She had been trusted by the librarian to take good care of it. Now, page after page was torn and unreadable.... ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... me, in that maddeningly unreadable cross-eyed expression of cold ferocity which the scars gave his ugly face. We had agreed on one-third each, the other two to split the other third between them. I was footing the bills, Jake was nearly broke. He had found the stuff, and tried to ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... Cook Room, Steerage and Cabbins, and some run between Decks. The French gave 'em Quarters, and put the Prisoners on board the Victoire, the Prize yielding nothing worth mention, except Liberty to about fifteen Christian Slaves; she was carried into and sold with the Prisoners at [text unreadable]. The Turks lost a great many Men, the French not less than 35 in boarding, for they lost very few by the great Shot, the Sally Men firing mostly at the Masts and Rigging, hoping by disabling to carry her. The limited ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... Jeffrey occasionally writing elegantly and impressively into Carlyle's proof-sheets is rather striking. Some of Jeffrey's other criticisms sound very curiously in our ear in these days. It is startling to find Mill's Logic described (1843) as a "great unreadable book, and its elaborate demonstration of axioms and truisms." A couple of years later Jeffrey admits, in speaking of Mr. Mill's paper on Guizot—"Though I have long thought very highly of his powers as a reasoner, I scarcely ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... the greatness of the "Divine Comedy." Voltaire called the "Inferno" revolting, the "Purgatorio" dull, and the "Paradiso" unreadable. The reason is because they are not rightly attuned for the acceptance of the great truths which the poem teaches, and because they look at it from a wholly mistaken standpoint. If anyone supposes that the "Inferno," for instance, is meant for a burning torture-chamber of endless ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Zulus and Kaffirs, interviewing witches and witch-finders, exploring the scenery of the interior, and accomplishing an expedition into the Bush, the result being a book of some 320 pages, in which not one is dull or unreadable. Of her lightness and firmness of touch we can give but one specimen, a sketch ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... the place. The ship would take him about, and show him the way people did things. It would open his eyes and his brains. Electrically, something self-protective within her added the further message: it would keep him out of the way for a time. Sally breathed deeply. An unreadable smile was upon her lips, and no smile at all was in her eyes. Afar off she scented change; but what manner of change she did not as yet recognise. It was her instinct at work, her instinct for turning life to her own advantage. It was an infallible instinct, ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... "It's the men who loaf, my dear," she replied. "When you undertake the transcription of an author's scrawl at ninepence the thousand words you have to work hard, especially when, as it is in this case, the thing's practically unreadable. Besides, the woman in it makes me lose my temper. If I'd had a man of the kind described to deal with I'd have ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... be expressed as 10/3.23.1." JULES RAULIN, Etudes chimiques sur la vegetation. Recherches sur le developpement d'une mucedinee dans un milieu artificiel, p. 192, Paris, 1870. We have seen in the case of yeast that this ratio may be as low as [Proofers note: unreadable symbol]] On the other hand, if we deprive the yeast of air entirely, or cause it to develop in a saccharine medium deprived of free oxygen, it will multiply just as if air were present, although with less activity, and under these circumstances its fermentative character will ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... Princeton College, was taken prisoner by the British during the war, and when the war was over engaged in journalism, as an ardent supporter of Jefferson and the Democrats. Freneau's patriotic verses and political lampoons are now unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet, by virtue of his Wild Honeysuckle, Indian Burying Ground, Indian Student, and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace and delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... shortly after the coronation of Charles VII. A manuscript copy of this poem exists in which Joan of Arc is compared to Deborah, Judith, and Queen Esther. These poems are curious and quaint in their old French expressions, but they are quite unreadable for any but French students well versed in the literature ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... of Divinity, and latterly Pres. of Yale. His works include, besides theological treatises and sermons, the following poems, America (1772), The Conquest of Canaan (1785), and The Triumph of Infidelity, a satire, admired in their day, but now unreadable. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... the most famous and the most unreadable in all Germany. Surely you have heard of his 'Treatise on Man?' A treatise on a subject in which everyone is interested, written in a style which no ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... young Terry Hollis?" interpreted Gainor, and his voice rose and rang over them. Those who had slipped past him on either side came back and faced him. In the distance Elizabeth had not stirred. Vance kept watching her face. It was cold as ice, unreadable. He could not believe that she was allowing this lynching party to organize under her own roof—a lynching party aimed at Terence. It began to grow in him that he had gained a ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... the bed, startled into wakefulness. Johnny put one dark, bony hand on her white shoulder, gently, reassuring. After a moment, finding herself, she turned away and lit a cigarette. Johnny finished pulling on his boots and stood, his hawk-like face unreadable in the cold gray light streaming ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... embellishment. Mere facts are frequently most unliterary, though they may be susceptible of a high literary polish. The sub-title "A True Story," which young writers think so valuable a part of the tale, is too often the trademark of an unreadable mess of conventional people, ordinary incidents and commonplace conversation. We find few genuinely true stories, and when we do find them we seldom care to read them through. I have read many stories which I knew to be literally ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... go?" Josephine asked unexpectedly, and looked straight at Ford. But though her glance was direct, it was unreadable, and Ford mentally threw up his hands after one good look at her, and tried not to betray the fact that this was what he had wanted, ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... scrap-book is: 1. One never has paste or gum tragacanth handy; 2. Mucilage won't stick, or stay, 4 weeks; 3. Mucilage sucks out the ink and makes the scraps unreadable; 4. To daub and paste 3 or 4 pages of scraps is tedious, slow, nasty and tiresome. My idea is this: Make a scrap-book with leaves veneered or coated with gum-stickum of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush, rag or tongue, and dab on your ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Thierry draw his intensely living, animated, dramatic, and yet thoroughly true "Stories of the Merovingian Times" from the colourless, diffuse, ill-composed history of Gregory of Tours? Did not Sauval's unreadable work become "Notre-Dame de Paris" in Victor Hugo's hands? Did not Walter Scott, by his novels, Shakespeare by his dramas, render the greatest services to history by giving life to dead chronicles, by putting into flesh and blood heroes on whom forgetfulness ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... deliberate fiendishness of the Inquisition. The massacre of St. Bartholomew, the fires of Smithfield, the immolation of the Moors, the extermination of the West Indians, the fantastic horrors of the Piedmontese persecution, which make unreadable the too truthful pages of Morland,—these were the spectres, which, not as now, dim and distant through the mist of centuries, but recent, bleeding from still gaping wounds, flitted before the eyes of every Englishman, and filled his brain and heart ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... fortified her to pursue her walk to the house and give battle for freedom. Willoughby appeared to her scarce human, unreadable, save by the key that she could supply. She determined to put faith in Colonel De Craye's marvellous divination of circumstances in the dark. Marvels are solid weapons when we are attacked by real prodigies of nature. Her countenance cleared. She conversed with De Craye of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Knox, the second in order of interest among the reformers, lies dead and buried in the works of the learned and unreadable M'Crie. It remains for some one to break the tomb and bring him forth, alive again and breathing, in a human book. With the best intentions in the world, I have only added two more flagstones, ponderous like their predecessors, to the mass of obstruction that buries the reformer from the world; ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... difficult of authors. Few can wade through the mingled solecisms in language and mistakes in science, the empty verbiage that dilates on a platitude in one place, and the jejune abstract that hurries over a knotty argument in another, without regretting that so unreadable a poet should have been ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... some other very rare occasions, he would trust himself to be driven in a low pony-phaeton. But in one respect he was altogether unlike his father. His whole time was spent among his books, and he was at this moment engaged in revising and editing a very long and altogether unreadable old English chronicle in rhyme, for publication by one of those learned societies which are rife in London. Of Robert of Gloucester, and William Langland, of Andrew of Wyntown and the Lady Juliana Berners, he could discourse, if not with eloquence, ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... note: unreadable text] about sunset that evening, and the command went into camp and I went to Jim's new log house. He had built one and had started in to build the second, having two carpenters ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... not they've taken their deaths. It shan't happen again, though. Give me that book—" And, snatching Mell's treasure from her hands, Mrs. Davis flung it into the fire. It flamed, shrivelled: the White Cat, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast,—all, all were turned in one moment into a heap of unreadable ashes! Mell gave one clutch, one scream; then she stood quite still, with a hard, vindictive look on her face, which so provoked her step-mother that she gave her a slap as she hurried the children upstairs. Mrs. Davis did not often slap Mell. "I punish my own children," she would ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... professionally curious. Before the public he would have liked to vindicate the efficiency of his department by establishing the identity of that man. He was a loyal servant. That, however, appeared impossible. The first term of the problem was unreadable—lacked all suggestion but that of ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... general). It is traditional for graphics printers, plotters, window systems, and the like to support a Feanorian typeface as one of their demo items. See also {elder days}. 2. By extension, any odd or unreadable typeface produced by a graphics device. 3. The typeface mundanely called ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... caballero of whom I shall sing." And Boca hummed a tune, gazing at Pete with unreadable eyes, half-smiling, half-sad. How young, smooth-cheeked, and boyish he was, as he glanced up and returned her smile. Yet how quickly his face changed as he turned his head toward the doorway, ever alert for a possible surprise. ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... gloom a shadow should spread to her work was unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with Dante, with Pascal. A novelist—for as a poet, after trying hard to think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable—as a novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut melancholy, of sombre ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... did fight it. I didn't really know you until to-night. You've been unreadable. Now I feel you are your real self. Not the daredevil who defied me and mocked me. Not the little meek mouse on the hearth. I love the woman ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... and watched the door. Half an hour passed—three-quarters, and then her brother re-entered alone. She went up to him at once, but his unreadable ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... in the Hohenzollern game, is an unusually interesting event. The joy over him, not in Berlin Palace only, but in Berlin City, and over the Prussian Nation, was very great and universal;—still testified in manifold dull, unreadable old pamphlets, records official and volunteer,—which were then all ablaze like the bonfires, and are now fallen dark enough, and hardly credible even to the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... absence of political unity seems due to want of interest in politics. It is often said that the history of India in pre-Mohammedan times is an unintelligible or, at least, unreadable, record of the complicated quarrels and varying frontiers of small states. Yet this is as true of the history of the Italian as of the Indian peninsula. The real reason why Indian history seems tedious and intricate is that large interests are involved only in the greatest struggles, such as the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... blue with a flowered pattern forms, with his shepherd's plaid trousers, his grey spats and patent-leather boots, a colour scheme of no mean order. Nor is it merely Mr. Smith's finely mottled face. The face, no doubt, is a notable one,—solemn, inexpressible, unreadable, the face of the heaven-born hotel keeper. It is more than that. It is the strange dominating personality of the man that somehow holds you captive. I know nothing in history to compare with the ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... fantastic; yet it was something to annex for the first time the ocean, with all its marvels, to the scenery of adventure. Gombauld, the Beau Tenebreux of the Hotel de Rambouillet, secured a reading for his unreadable Endymion by the supposed transparence of his allusions to living persons. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin relieved the amorous exaltations of his Ariane, a tale of the time of Nero, by excursions which touch the borders of comedy. These are books on ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Moses have been made quite unreadable by a most melancholy, most incomprehensible, revision. The course of the history is everywhere interrupted by the insertion of innumerable laws, with regard to the greater part of which it is impossible to see any reason for their being inserted where they are." The dislocation ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... alteration of perspectives will have gone so far that historians will be a little perplexed to explain the causes of the Great War. The militarist monomania of Germany will have become incomprehensible; her Welt Politik literature incredible and unreadable.... ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... rendered him the most redoubtable of antagonists. Many years afterwards, at the time when the Prelude was fresh from the press, he was maintaining against the opinion of a large and mixed society that the poem was unreadable. At last, overborne by the united indignation of so many of Wordsworth's admirers, he agreed that the question should be referred to the test of personal experience; and on inquiry it was discovered that the only individual present ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... popular hero—African traveller, war correspondent, writer of books. Polar explorer, and I don't know what besides, though you can't yet be anywhere near thirty-five. You've got the figure of a soldier, and just the sort of dark, unreadable face that women rave about. What does money matter with a chap like that? Nothing. I wonder you've managed to escape the matchmaking mammas so long. They're quite as keen on a celebrity, in my country at least, as they ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... fifteen letters, disguising our handwritings as much as we could. It was not easy. Oswald tried to write one of them with his left hand, but the consequences were almost totally unreadable. Besides, if any one could have read it, they would only have thought it was written in an asylum for the insane, the writing was so ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... Warlockian took the bowl from the elder who held it, stood for a long moment with it resting between her palms, fixing Shann with an unreadable stare. Then she came toward him. One of those at the table ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... signs were in foreign tongues; in some streets all Hebrew. On chance news-stands were displayed newspapers in Russian, Bohemian, Arabic, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, German-none in English. The theatre bills were in Hebrew or other unreadable type. The sidewalks and the streets swarmed with noisy dealers in every sort of second-hand merchandise—vegetables that had seen a better day, fish in shoals. It was not easy to make one's way through the stands and push-carts and the noisy dickering buyers and sellers, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the sack and picked it up, Waring reached out his arm. "Give it to me," he said quietly. Quigley laughed. Waring's eyes were unreadable. ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... pair were deep and thoughtful and sweet, and the brow one that promised passion and power? A thousand other eyes might have looked on either one of them, and forgotten; these two looked—and remembered. You cannot tell why; it is the old story; the hidden, unreadable affinity making itself known to its counterpart; the sign and countersign of nature. But it was only nature that gave and took; not ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... duplicate verbs, such as 'to whiten' and 'to blanch'; 'to soften' and 'to mollify'; 'to unload' and 'to exonerate'; 'to hide' and 'to conceal'; with many more. Duplicate adjectives also are numerous, as 'shady' and 'umbrageous'; 'unreadable' and 'illegible'; 'unfriendly' and 'inimical'; 'almighty' and 'omnipotent'; 'wholesome' and 'salubrious'; 'unshunnable' and 'inevitable.' Occasionally our modern English, not adopting the Latin substantive, has admitted duplicate adjectives; thus 'burden' has not merely ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... on the form and substance of ancient documents; but I have hardly ever introduced into it literal quotations; I believe that unless it possesses a certain unity of language a book is unreadable, and ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... was not exactly sobbing now; but strange, uncontrollable sounds not unlike the winding up of a clock proceeded from his throat; his face had flushed; there was a purposeful look in his usually unreadable eye; his fingers were fidgeting on the board in front of him, and he seemed to keep his ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... pass a hand over his face, as if his body were suddenly tired; but the next moment it tautened again and he swung around. His face was unreadable. A multitude of conflicting emotions struggled there. He strode to a group of several of the ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... under that lonely bank. Certainly they would not be found before the aasvogels had picked them clean, and these would be at work upon them now. And if they were found, the paper would have rotted or been blown away, or, at the worst, rendered so discoloured as to be unreadable. For the rest, there was nothing to connect him with the murder, now that his confederates were dead. Hendrik would prove an alibi for him. He was a useful man, Hendrik. Besides, who would believe that it was a murder? Two men were escorting an Englishman to the river; ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... hundred thousand copies of the work have been printed. The plates had become so worn as to render it unreadable, yet the sale kept on. In preparing this new edition, many of the author's fragmentary pieces, not contained in the old edition, have been added. The earliest of the author's writings, published in periodicals in 1862, are included, together ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... intent on his own instrument. I have been cut up beginning le Figaro up to la Revue des Deux Mondes, including la Gazette de France and le Constitutionnel. And THEY have not finished yet! Barbey d'Aurevilly has insulted me personally, and the good Saint-Rene Taillandier, who declares me "unreadable," attributes ridiculous words to me. So much for printing. As for speech, it is in accord. Saint-Victor (is it servility towards Michel Levy) rends me at the Brabant dinner, as does that excellent Charles Edmond, etc. On the other hand I am admired by the ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... every sentence broken by apology. I should have to write a dozen of letters before I could print a line, and the line, at last, would be only like a bit of any other botanical book—trustworthy, it might be, perhaps; but certainly unreadable. Whereas now, it will rather put things more forcibly in the reader's mind to have them retouched and corrected as we go on; and our natural and honest mistakes will often be suggestive of things we could not have discovered but ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... teaches something false or something evil; nor is that a first-rate book which, though it discover a completely new thing, or emphasize the most valuable department of morals, is so constructed as to be unreadable. Now it will not be denied that as far as these two factors are concerned—and I repeat they are almost always found in combination—the position of the Book has dwindled almost to nothingness. One ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... fickleness in our loves; an occasional flirting with other arts and sciences, in their turn—for we protest against the profligacy of making love to more than one at once! We string together fearful and unreadable lengths of iambics, and dactyles, and trochaics, and write sonnets to the bright queen of night, beginning "O thou!" and stick fast in the middle of sorely-laboured and at length baffling extempores to this, that, and t'other; and, wickeder still, then we din ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... collection, containing much the same matter as the Cabinet, and probably in Johnson's mind when he jotted down Prince Titi), quite barren. La Princesse Minon-Minette et le Prince Souci, Apranor et Bellanire, Grisdelin et Charmante, are none of them unreadable. The next volume, too, is better as a whole than any we have had for a long time. Mme. Fagnan's Minet Bleu et Louvette contains, in its fifteen pages, a good situation by no means ill-treated. The pair are under the same spell—that of being ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Richardson, or on the pseudo-Orientalists like Walpole and Lewis, or on the pseudo-mediaevalists like Mrs. Roche and Mrs. Radcliffe. This sort of work filled the few literary periodicals of the day, but was not read enough to make such publications profitable even then, and is pretty much all unreadable now. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various |
