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More "Uninteresting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this long and very uninteresting explanation, not at all because I have wished by giving the conditions under which this little book was written, to make excuse for any repetitions or lack of literary perfection, for these things matter very little; but, because (and this matters very much) it might lead to misconception on ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... my youngest boy will have a genius for sculpture. I miss you more than usual to-day. You could help me with some copying, and there is positively nothing interesting to see out of the window; what there is of uninteresting twirls itself about. We shall soon be reaching the mountains, in fact, I have just caught my first glimpse of them beyond these great plains. I must really have some one to write for me next year, but this winter we keep holiday, you and ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... dog-cart alongside of a man who you know cannot drive; the tortures, both mental and physical, of a long walk down dusty roads and over clayey fields to see that old Elizabethan house "only a mile off;" or the loathing induced by a pic-nic among mouldering and utterly uninteresting ruins. All this I swallowed with the equanimity and patience born of many seasons of country-house visiting; I even interviewed the old family and old-fashioned cook, on the subject of a few new dishes, and I helped to entertain some of those strange aboriginal creatures ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... northern distance the boys saw two wagons. Evidently they had come from Jimtown. Wagons are as interesting sights on a prairie as they are uninteresting in a city, so the boys shifted their course slightly that they might investigate. And these were the rarest wagons that crawled across the plains, for they ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... north of Climping, there is nothing to say, except that popular rumour has it that its minute and uninteresting church (the antithesis of Climping) was found one day by accident in a bed ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... methodological concepts of science, by which we pass from fact to fact and from past perception to future, did not attract Augustine's attention. He admitted, it is true, that there was a subordinate, and to him apparently uninteresting, region governed by "certissima ratione vel experientia," and he even wished science to be allowed a free hand within that empirical and logical sphere. A mystic and allegorical interpretation of Scripture was to be invoked to avoid the puerilities into which any ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... you don't take it," cautioned Miss Mattie. The first part of his answer was obscure, but she was not one to pause over an uninteresting detail. ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... uninteresting to watch the Epeira at dinner. I light upon one, the Banded Epeira, at the moment, about three o'clock in the afternoon, when she has captured a Locust. Planted in the centre of the web, on her resting-floor, she attacks the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... among meadows on each side of the rivulet which runs through the village. One of the outlying houses is "Styles Hill," inhabited by one family of the Sheppards, all of whom soon became dear friends of the Dean. Another was the "Pear-tree" Cottage, an uninteresting red brick house, where Mr. Rogers provided a residence for the young curate. The incumbent of the parish, when Ramsay went there, was the Rev. John Methwen Rogers of Berkley, who was non-resident. The duties of Rodden were ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... timidity, or to refine the bluntness, may lead to a licentious impetuosity, or an ostentatious minuteness. Every man's manner has this kind of relation to some defect in his physical powers or modes of thought; so that in the greatest work there is no manner visible. It is at first uninteresting from its quietness; the majesty of restrained power only dawns gradually upon us, as ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... natural history, traditions, and arts of this country may, certainly, furnish subjects on which my communications might, perhaps, be not uninteresting; but to offer anything deserving of attention would require a season of leisure to collect and digest information. Engaged in public and busy scenes, my mind is wholly engrossed by the cares and duties of my station; in vain I seek, for relaxation's sake, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... interiors so well; and gives the atmosphere of French Society before and during the Revolution in a most fascinating way. She always thinks the worst, of course; but a writer of memoirs who always thought the best would be as painfully uninteresting as Froude is when he describes the character of Henry VIII. But ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... upturned to the moon in another and yet more bitter war, aftermath of this with Mexico. The tall stock was still in evidence at that time, and the ruffled shirts gave something of a formal and old-fashioned touch to the assembly. Such as they were, in their somewhat varied but not uninteresting attire, the best of Washington were present. Invitation was wholly by card. Some said that Mrs. Polk wrote these invitations in her own hand, though this we may be permitted ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... was not uninteresting. Her respectability incased her like armor plate, and she never laughed without putting three fingers to her lips. She told them that she had at one time been ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... because they rejoice in its force, and when they draw it inactive, it is because they rejoice in its repose. But Michael Angelo and Raphael invent for it ingenious mechanical motion, because they think it uninteresting when it is quiet, and cannot, in their pictures, endure any person's being simple-minded enough to stand upon both his legs at once, nor venture to imagine anyone's being clear enough in his language to make ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... after a night of soft rain which brought up a warm steam from the Schwarzwald valleys, and caused the young tufts and grasses to swell visibly in a few hours. After the Baden slopes the flat thoroughfares of 'Charles's Rest' seemed somewhat uninteresting, though a busy fair which was proceeding in the streets created a quaint and unexpected liveliness. On reaching the old-fashioned inn in the Lange-Strasse that they had fixed on, the women of the party betook themselves to their rooms and ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Turks have been more successful than the French in their military operations against the Arab tribes, it may not be altogether uninteresting to inquire by what means these inferior soldiers have accomplished ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... funeral customs, or the ancient Egyptian method of tarring a mummy, or the reasons for believing that some of the peoples who existed before the flood did not approve of cats. These are not unpleasant subjects; they are not uninteresting subjects; they are even exciting subjects —until one of these massive scientists gets hold of them. He soon convinces you that even these matters can be handled in such a way as to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... house did I hear any set speech. The voices of the Speaker and of the Clerks of the Houses were heard more frequently than those of the members; and the business seemed to be done in a dull, serviceable, methodical manner, likely to be useful to the country, and very uninteresting to the gentlemen engaged. Indeed at Washington also, in Congress, it seemed to me that there was much less of set speeches than in our House of Commons. With us there are certain men whom it seems impossible to put down, and by whom the time of Parliament is occupied from night to ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... have just been speaking to the accused. An uninteresting story. He just keeps on denying—that's all. He agreed to be interrogated without me. [Laughing] I won't hide from you that I advised him to persist in his method. Well, then, au revoir. If he wants an advocate later on, let me know—I'll send you ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... would be fun," Peace commented candidly, still holding the unopened volume in her hand, thinking it was another uninteresting story-book. "I don't like writing any better than ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... by with but slight notice; to him they were absolutely valueless and uninteresting. Betty Bruce had certainly caught his attention by her public punishment, and he had been taken aback by that sharp little pinch of hers. Hitherto he had had nothing to do with girls but he supposed immediately that that was their ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... man, I should say about sixty years old, a most uninteresting age, and a homely, weather-beaten fellow too, when you stopped to look at him. His suit was pepper-and-salt, and he was just like his suit. Good as gold, I have no doubt, a roomer of whom his landlady could say: "He comes and he goes and is never a ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... delectable—none more suitable. While charming the sense, they have awakened imagination and developed poetic fancy in thousands who otherwise might have blundered into old age proving stolid and uninteresting men and women. They are, for this reason, part and parcel of every properly-balanced life, and the healthy and happy mind ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... was rather uninteresting. Owing to the dense French colonization there the natives have nearly all disappeared or become quite degenerate. We spent our time in visits to the different French planters and then sailed for Malekula, anchoring in ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... Rossetti was drawing and painting all his life, and yet, as has now become clear, it is only in language, verse and prose alike, that he is a supreme master. Fromentin was a painter for his contemporaries, yet his paintings are now quite uninteresting, while the few books he wrote belong to great literature, to linger over with perpetual delight. Poetry seemed to play but a small part in the life of Michelangelo, yet his sonnets stand to-day by the side of his drawings and his marbles. Rodin has all his life been passionately ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... work of memorizing is so uninteresting and even injurious, why is it made so prominent? There are probably numerous reasons; but only three ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... discover what they wish to see. And yet it must be admitted that, of all the towns on the route, Kazan is the most interesting. Though not Oriental, it has a peculiar character of its own, whilst all the others—Simbirsk, Samara, Saratof—are as uninteresting as Russian provincial towns commonly are. The full force and solemnity of that expression will be explained ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... round and rosy, all were conveyed in the same smooth, pat, and proper phrases, so absolutely empty of any glimpse of the child's personality that after the first few months it was like reading about a somewhat uninteresting infant in a book. I was sure Cecily was not uninteresting, but her chroniclers were. We used to wade through the long, thin sheets and saw how much more satisfactory it would be when Cecily could write to us herself. Meanwhile we noted her weekly progress with much the feeling one ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Pericles that memorable day; if there had not been an oblique slant to Calypso's eyes as Ulysses passed her way; if the eager Delilah had not offered favorable comment on Samson's ringlets; in fact, if all the women in history and romance had gone about their affairs as they should have done, what uninteresting reading history would ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... years in London I ran over to Ireland to see my parents. On my return I seemed to miss the charming companion of my journey over the same ground three years previously. Two uninteresting men were in the carriage: a typical German professor on tour, and communicative; and a typical English gentleman, uncommunicative. As the journey was a long one the German smoked, ate and drank himself to sleep, and after some hours the other man and I exchanged a word. The fact is I thought ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... from the very peculiar character of its readings. "The text of this codex," says Bleek (Introduc. to New Test., sec. 270), "presents much that is peculiar—many additions and alterations that have even an apocryphal character, but are yet not uninteresting. Its native country is the West, and more definitely the south of Gaul." See ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... The staff passed quickly, however, and riding on about a mile forded the tributary stream of the Jandol, and reached the camp at Kotkai about noon. Thence we proceeded on the following day to Ghosam, but as the road is uninteresting, and I am beginning to think the reader will readily excuse further description, we need not toil along it in the dust and the heat. The narration of the daily movements of troops, unmarked by variety of incident, is dull and wearying. Yet he who would ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... Bezobiedoff, with whom he appeared to be very much taken up. Bezobiedoff was a small, slight fellow, with a face pitted over with smallpox, freckled, effeminate hands, and a huge flaxen moustache much in need of the comb. He was invariably dirty, shabby, uncouth, and uninteresting. To me, Dimitri's relations with him were as unintelligible as his relations with Lubov Sergievna, and the only reason he could have had for choosing such a man for his associate was that in the whole University there was no worse-looking ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... that she had been in a great measure confined to the nursery all her life; and not being nearly so winning and attractive as Stella, she had never been so great a favourite with her brothers and sisters, who, never having taken the trouble of drawing her out, considered her rather uninteresting. The death of a fine little boy, a little older than Amy, had strangely had the effect upon her mother of making her turn away, almost with a feeling of impatience, from the unattractive, ailing child that had been spared, while her ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... bourgeois mahogany. A buxom mahogany chiffonier, a large square dining-table, a black marble clock with two dials, one being a barometer, three large oil landscapes of exceedingly umbrageous trees and glassy lakes, inoffensively uninteresting, more Atlantic liners, and a large bookcase, apparently filled with serried lines of bound magazines, and an excellent Brussels carpet of quiet pattern, were mainly responsible for a general effect of middle-class ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... for her on the pavement outside the grimy little office. Mr. Debenham was there, and a clerk he had brought with him as witness. The ceremony was brief and uninteresting; she became Mrs. Doughton before she quite realized what ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... long walk back to the Belden House. The snow had turned to slush, and Betty sank into it at every step. The raw wind blew her hair into her eyes. The world looked dull and uninteresting all of a sudden. When she reached home, Helen was getting ready ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... approached it by water from Puerto; but I was in a tub of a steamer, there was a heavy sea on and a heavy mist out, and perhaps I was qualmish. Not for its booksellers' shops, for its demolished convent, or for its vulgar Atlantic did this Puerto, which the guide-books pass curtly by as "uninteresting," impress me as interesting, but for two features that no seasoned traveller could, would, or should overlook; its female population is the most attractive in Andalusia, and it is the seat of an agreeable English colony. I happened on the latter in a manner that is ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... lifted her eyes and looked at him the change in his face frightened her, his breath came hard and noisily as if he had been running. Was it possible he could feel like that—this quiet, inoffensive, uninteresting, middle-aged boarder, who had never appeared to feel anything particularly ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... pretty, as it runs under the chalky downs, and there are a multiplicity of locks, and the turf of the sheep-walks comes up to the towing path; but in the close neighbourhood of the town the canal is straight and uninteresting; the ground is level, and there is a scattered community of small, straight-built light-brick houses, which are in themselves so ugly that they are incompatible with anything that is pretty ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... "Lord Mauleverer is one whom I think pleasing without fascination, and amusing without brilliancy. He is evidently accomplished in mind and graceful in manner, and withal the most uninteresting person I ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... unpatriotic comparisons because there were weedy little sign-board advertisements by the rail side instead of the broad hoardings that deface the landscape in our land. But the north of France is really uninteresting country, and after a time Fanny reverted to Hare's Walks and Helen initiated lunch. Miss Winchelsea awoke out of a happy reverie; she had been trying to realise, she said, that she was actually going to Rome, but she perceived at Helen's suggestion that she was hungry, and they ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... with ultimate result that the bridegroom turns out to be no poor clerk, but the original heir, who, of course, is not dead, and is the inheritor of thousands; subsidiary groups of characters, of course, one which I think rather uninteresting, of some brand-new people called the Veneerings and their acquaintances, for they have no friends; and some fine sketches of the river-side population; striking and amusing characters too—Silas Wegg, the scoundrelly ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... unjust sentence," I replied, "that is all of any importance, excepting a history which he confided to me; it would be uninteresting to you, however." ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... kind of charm you seem to find In womankind— Some source of unexplained delight (Unless you're jesting), But what attracts you, I confess, I cannot guess, To me a woman's face is quite Uninteresting! If from my sister I were torn, It could be borne— I should, no doubt, be horrified, But I could bear it;— But Marco's quite another thing— He is my King, He has my heart and none beside Shall ever share it! Ah me, you men will never ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... reader, that I may not surfeit you with an uninteresting detail, you may allow nearly two years to pass away before I recommence my narrative. The events of that time I shall sum up in one or two pages. The Dominie continued the even tenor of his way—blew his nose and handled his rod with as much effect as ever. I seldom passed a ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... anything of that kind. But please don't let us talk about my work. I am sure it's very uninteresting except to me. I feel very grateful to you for your kind and delightful offer, but I can't accept it, unfortunately ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... he talked to them in German. Though this evening went off well enough, it is clear that nothing would be more insupportable than to live at this Court; the dulness must be excessive, and the people who compose his habitual society are the most insipid and uninteresting that can be found. As for Lady Conyngham, she looks bored to death, and she never speaks, never appears to have one word to say to the King, who, however, talks himself without ceasing. Canning came the day I went away, and was very well received by his Majesty; he looked dreadfully ill. The only ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... following in the past," she returned breathlessly. "Look among your married friends. How many ideally happy couples can you count? Very, very few. And why are there so few? One reason is, because the man finds, after the novelty is worn off, that his wife is uninteresting, has nothing to talk about; and so his love cools to a good-natured, passive tolerance of her. Most married men, when alone with their wives, sit in stupid silence. But see how the husband livens up if a man joins them! This man has ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... your means might have failed, how far you might have been ill-advised, or ill-informed, or unduly influenced, are questions, which, though not uninteresting to you, are now of little ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... to which they led. Dull stairs destined to be mounted by dull people: how many thousands of insignificant figures were going up and down such stairs all over the world at that very moment—figures as shabby and uninteresting as that of the middle-aged lady in limp black who descended Gerty's flight ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... highlands or along the seacoast; grows in almost any soil, but thrives best in sandy or gravelly moist loams; valuable among other trees for color-effects and occasional picturesqueness of outline; mostly uninteresting and of uncertain habit; subject to the loss of the lower limbs, and not readily transplanted; very seldom offered in quantity by nurserymen; obtainable from collectors, but collected plants are seldom successful. ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... think that study is laborious and uninteresting, a nuisance and a bore. Nothing of that sort is true of the study of Shakespeare, because for every effort there is a present reward, there is no waiting to see results. Of course there are right ways and wrong ways to study, just as there are right ways and wrong ways ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the next day and the day following. The afternoon of the second day promised to be dull and uninteresting, but grew suddenly pregnant with possibilities when the Comte d'Herouville addressed the vicomte with these words: "Monsieur, I should like to speak to the Chevalier du Cevennes. Will you take upon yourself the responsibility of conducting ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... boast; it was chiefly the work of Buonaparte, who was satisfied to lodge these gentlemen in a palace, provided they did not interfere in the government of their country. I was not gratified in proportion to the trouble I had in getting into the hall, by the short and uninteresting debate which ensued. This House was occupied during the greatest part of my stay in Paris in discussing the forms proper to be observed when the king meets the peers ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... the lake-steamboats may not he uninteresting. They are taken from Mr. Barton's letter, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... Calvert, having none of that adaptability possessed in so large a share by Mr. Morris, he felt himself out of his element, uninterested and therefore uninteresting, and he listened with inward irritation to the loose anecdotes, the piquant allusions, the coarse gossip, so freely bandied about. It was with something akin to a feeling of relief that he heard ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... deceitful, now calm, and after all pitiful, human face, he suddenly ceased to respect himself and his work. Not that he was seized with a feeling of repentance, but he simply stopped appreciating himself. He became uninteresting to himself, unimportant, a dull stranger. But being a man of strong, unbroken will-power, he did not leave the organization. He remained outwardly the same as before, only there was something cold, yet painful in his eyes. He never spoke to anyone ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... very long succession of uninteresting loamy and fertile flats, a very easy country for the construction of railways, and propitious for the laying-down of these direct level lines so dear to ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... our stay in Chicago as a whole would be uninteresting, and I would not weary the reader with them. Hal improved so rapidly that on the fourth day after our arrival, he was carried in comparative comfort to Mr. Hanson's residence, and placed for a few days in ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... true that Baldy was unmistakably ill at ease in his new quarters, and did not feel at home; for he was accustomed neither to the luxuries nor to the restrictions that surrounded him. His early experiences had been distinctly plebeian and uninteresting, but they had been ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... alone in the Cathedral as calmly as if he had been in the upper cloister, quite accustomed to the grave-like silence. In order not to sleep, he read by the light of his lantern any books he could get in the Claverias, uninteresting treatises on history in which Providence played the principal role; lives of the saints, amusing from their simple credulity, bordering on the grotesque; and that family Quixote of the Lunas', that he had so often ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... killed in a railroad accident, and the only reason she wasn't killed was because they had just left her in a hospital to get an abscess cut out of her throat. She comes from good common American stock, irreproachable and uninteresting in every way. She's a washed-out, spiritless, whiney little thing. The doctor has been pouring her full of his favorite cod-liver oil and spinach, but he can't get ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... sail in his little boat, the party which he left behind him lived on in an uneventful, uninteresting manner, which, gradually, day by day, threw a shadow over the spirits ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... seventy miles before reaching Mazaro, the scenery is tame and uninteresting. On either hand is a dreary uninhabited expanse, of the same level grassy plains, with merely a few trees to relieve the painful monotony. The round green top of the stately palm-tree looks at a distance, when its grey trunk cannot be seen, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... week before the Lhari ship went into warp-drive, and all that time Bart stayed in his cabin, not daring to go to the observation Lounge or dining hall. He got tired of eating synthetics (oh, they were nourishing enough, but they were altogether uninteresting) and tired of listening to the tapes the room steward got him from the ship's library. By the time they had been in space a week, he was so bored with his own company that even the Mentorian medic was a welcome sight when he came in to ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... his gratitude by a continued correspondence, and by a close attendance to the interests of the absent officer. These letters are full of details of Roman politics, too intricate for such a work as this—perhaps I might almost say too uninteresting, as they refer specially to Lentulus himself. In one of them he tells his friend that he has at last been able to secure the friendship of Pompey for him. It was, after all, but a show of friendship. He has supped ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... its size, really more suggestive of Genoa or Naples. In the general ensemble of the city, the Loire is an attraction of itself, when viewed from across that wonderful stone bridge, the first public work endowed by Louis XV. But even then, the awkward and uninteresting cathedral does not enter into the view with that liveliness and impressiveness which we are wont to associate with such an environment. In short, it must be set down that in the lack of pleasing qualities in its cathedral, is found Blois' ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... the horses plunged into grass as high as their flanks—a flat, uninteresting tract of land, bare of trees except where here and there a single palm tree arose. But beyond that the ground rose suddenly from the banks of this bend of the river. On the summit of a high bank, luxuriantly ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... among those who hear them of the peculiarities of the persons whom they mock. When we read one of them now, we are almost inclined to wonder how such a reputation for humour could be gained. Wit is of the present; preserved for posterity it is as uninteresting as a faded flower, nor can it recall to us memories sunny or sad. But Selwyn was a man who while filling a conspicuous place in the fashionable life of the age was also so intimate with statesmen and politicians, and so thoroughly lives in his correspondence, that in following his life we find ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... of modern life? The sense of freedom. That naive, rough sense of freedom, which supposes man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again. The attempt to represent it in art would have so little verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninteresting. The chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mind concerning itself is the intricacy, the universality of natural law, even in the moral order. For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... lady had but an inattentive ear for Sylvia's statement that, yes, lately Father had begun to give her lessons on the piano. With the smoothly working imagination coming from a lifetime of devotion to the subject, Mrs. Hubert was stripping off Sylvia's trite little blue coat and uninteresting dark hat, and was arraying her in scarlet serge with a green velvet collar—"with those eyes and that coloring she could carry off striking 'color combinations—and a big white felt hat with a soft pompon of silk on one side—no, a long, stiff, scarlet ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... we be friends? I want one sadly, and so do you, unless your looks deceive me. We both seem to be alone in the world, to have had trouble, and to like one another. I won't annoy you by any impertinent curiosity, nor burden you with uninteresting confidences; I only want to feel that you like me a little and don't mind my liking you a great deal. Will you be my friend, and let ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... that promised a triumph over all his difficulties. The life of Savage was admired, as a beautiful and instructive piece of biography. The two imitations of Juvenal were thought to rival even the excellence of Pope; and the tragedy of Irene, though uninteresting on the stage, was universally admired in the closet, for the propriety of the sentiments, the richness of the language, and the general harmony of the whole composition. His fame was widely diffused; and ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... a great deal of uninteresting labor, secure the following pieces of stock, surfaced on four sides ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part 3 • H. H. Windsor
... malignant feeling he had excited in this, to him, very unimportant and uninteresting black girl, tied his horse and went into the house. As he passed the open door of the parlor he saw a lady reading by a window in the farthest corner. Hanging up his hat, he entered, hoping that the reader, whose form was partially concealed by the back of the large rocking chair in which she was ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... an uncomfortable and an uneasy spirit abroad in the school. Susan Drummond, who was certainly one of the most uninteresting girls in Lavender House, was often seen walking with and talking to Miss Forest. Sometimes Annie shook her pretty head over Susan's remarks; sometimes she listened to her; sometimes she laughed and spoke eagerly for a moment or two, and appeared to acquiesce ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... wondered vaguely what the future Lady Mayo would be like, but she did not expend much pity on her. American girls as a rule were well able to care for themselves. She stroked her horse with a little smile. Aubrey and his possible wife seemed singularly uninteresting beside the vivid interest of the moment. A caravan that had been visible for a long time coming towards them drew nearer, and Diana reined in to watch the long line of slow, lurching camels passing. The great beasts, with ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... flourishing seaport of Northumberland, on the Tyne, near the mouth, 8 m. NE. of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and lying within the municipal borough of Tynemouth (47); is of quite modern growth, and of a plain, uninteresting appearance; has a theatre, free library, Mariners' Home, fine park, &c.; the docks cover 79 acres, and a large export trade ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... unlike, what I have just taken the trouble of running over, the Daphnis of Gessner. It neither on the one hand leaves behind it the laws of criticism, and mixes together the different stages of civilization; nor on the other will it perhaps be found frigid, uninteresting, and insipid. The prevailing opinion of Pastoral seems to have been, that it is a species of composition admirably fitted for the size of an eclogue, but that either its nature will not be preserved, or its simplicity ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... remarks on the concertos run counter to those made by W. von Lenz. The F minor Concerto he holds to be an uninteresting work, immature and fragmentary in plan, and, excepting some delicate ornamentation, without originality. Nay, he goes even so far as to say that the passage-work is of the usual kind met with in the compositions of Hummel and his successors, and that the cantilena in the larghetto is ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... sitting-room. We hastened into the carriage and rattled off through the streets of Salisbury, and were soon after ascending at a slow pace the hill that lies on the west side of the town. After a few hours of uninteresting driving along the high road, we turned into a lane which brought us at once into a new kind of scenery, quite different from any that I had yet been acquainted with. On either side of us rose, in gentle acclivities, a boundless extent of down, diversified by large patches of gorse, tall clumps of ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... not in luck. The weather continued squally in the morning, and in the afternoon the rain was again torrential. We went over uninteresting and monotonous gray country. A chain of snowy peaks stretched from south-west to north-east. We waded through a fairly deep and cold river, and afterward climbed over a pass 17,450 feet high. A number of Tibetans with flocks of several ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... example of the extent to which adulterated articles of food may be unconsciously diffused, and of the consequent difficulty of detecting the real fabricators of them, it may not be uninteresting to relate to your readers, the various steps by which the fraud of a poisonous adulteration of cheese was traced to ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... happy dreams of youth. On the right may be a young man who is trembling on the brink of the great temptation of his life, and on the left another who is reeking from some orgy of secret sin. There is endless variety; yet none are uninteresting; and probably there is no one but, if you could meet him exactly where he stands, would respond to the influence which you bring. It arrests men when you are able to show such a knowledge of the human heart that they feel themselves discovered; and ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... in the common method of explaining language, and grammar has long been considered a dry, uninteresting, and tedious study, by nearly all the teachers and scholars in the land. But it is to be presumed that the fault in this case, if there is any, is to be sought for in the manner of teaching, rather than in the science itself; for it would be unreasonable to suppose that a ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... do wish you would be a little bit melodramatic—this is deadly uninteresting. I would have loved to write ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... over a level, uninteresting stretch of ground followed the departure of the train from Chicago, and had not Archie found some interesting persons to talk with he would have been very weary long before reaching Denver. As it was, he managed to pass the ...
— The Adventures of a Boy Reporter • Harry Steele Morrison
... bye, now you have confessed yourself ignorant of my existence, what did bring you down to this uninteresting village?" All this ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... was accomplished at first in a humdrum and tentative way. About seventy years ago children's books were very uninteresting. In the little stories manufactured for children, the good boy ended in a Coach-and-four, and the bad boy in a ride to Tyburn. The good boys must have been a set of little snobs and prigs, and I could scarcely imagine that they could ever have lived as they were represented in these goody books. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... propound a connected scheme of evolution or descent with modification, but scattered his theory in fragments up and down his work in the prefatory remarks with which he introduces the more striking animals or classes of animals. He never wastes evolutionary matter in the preface to an uninteresting animal; and the more interesting the animal, the more evolution will there be commonly found. When he comes to describe the animal more familiarly—and he generally begins a fresh chapter or half chapter when he does so—he writes no more about evolution, but gives an admirable ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... from pot-house dissipation and schoolboy cruelty in point of size. And this of a truth is the Nemesis of evil. After a time, mere tyrannous caprice must become commonplace and cloying, tedious to the tyrant, and uninteresting to the student of humanity: nor can I believe that Caligula failed to perceive this ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... that it may not be uninteresting to many of my readers, to become acquainted with ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... inappropriate to the occasion, or altogether uninteresting,' said Mr Toots with a delighted face, 'to observe that my wife is a most extraordinary woman, and would do this much better than myself—allow my friend ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... much for Fraulein Sonnenthal?" she was often asked. "She seems uninteresting and dull ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... Canseau the landscape becomes flat and uninteresting; but distant ranges of mountains rise up against the evening sky, and as we travel on towards their bases they attract the eye more and more. Ear-rings is not very communicative. He does not know the names of any of them. Does not know how high they are, but has heard ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... compelled, however, to create a fresh existence for myself in this world so little adapted for me. I need not trouble you with an account of these complications, which would be as uninteresting to you as they were painful to myself. You may picture me spending whole days in going from one person to another. I was ashamed of myself, but necessity knows no law. Man does not live by bread alone; but he cannot live without bread. But through ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... is heavy, cheap, and uninteresting, and coming down to the latest productions of Ingenieros, Manuel Ugarte, Ricardo Rojas and Contreras, this ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... emerged from the cloud. She looked away down the aisle at Mrs. Lovejoy, who was patting the uninteresting baby to sleep. ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... where the writer cannot know the exact words, or where the exact words are unimportant, or lengthy and uninteresting, the Third Person is preferable.* Thus, where Essex is asking Sir Robert Cecil that Francis Bacon may be appointed Attorney-General, the dialogue is (as it almost always is in Lord Macaulay's writings) in the First Person, except where it becomes tedious and uninteresting so as to require ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... him were descended the grandfather and father of the emperor Galba. The grandfather was more celebrated for his application to study, than (402) for any figure he made in the government. For he rose no higher than the praetorship, but published a large and not uninteresting history. His father attained to the consulship [647]: he was a short man and hump-backed, but a tolerable orator, and an industrious pleader. He was twice married: the first of his wives was Mummia Achaica, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... it appear as if Smith chose the latter subject of his own motion, in accordance with a rule of the society whereby the chairman of one meeting selected the subject for debate at the next meeting; and it would have been a not uninteresting circumstance if it were true, for it would show the line his ideas were taking at that early period of his career; but as a matter of fact the rule in question was not adopted for some time after the second meeting, and it is distinctly mentioned in the minutes that on this ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Epi was rather uninteresting. Owing to the dense French colonization there the natives have nearly all disappeared or become quite degenerate. We spent our time in visits to the different French planters and then sailed for ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... historians, especially those who think it necessary to say everything they can,—to give minute details of all events. These small details, appropriate enough in works written for specialists, are commonly dry and uninteresting; they are wearisome to the general reader, and are properly soon forgotten, as mere lumber which confuses rather than instructs. No historian can go successfully into minute details unless he has the genius of Macaulay. On this rock Freeman, with all his accuracy, was wrecked; as an historian ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... still more displeasing theories about them, vague portents of perversity on Nick's part and a strange eagerness on Peter's, learned apparently in Paris, to discuss, with a person who had a tone she never had been exposed to, topics irrelevant and uninteresting, almost disgusting, the practical effect of which was to make light of her presence. "Let us leave this—let us leave this!" she grimly said. The party moved together toward the door of departure, and her ruffled spirit ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... interested. She could not rejoice over a new gasoline engine that was to do all the work, when Sandy and Neil were to be made part of the cruel engine of war. And for the first time Wallace found her uninterested and consequently uninteresting. ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... started to prove God," she said earnestly. "Won't you begin now—to-day? Haven't you yet learned that evil is the very stupidest, dullest, most uninteresting thing in the world? It is, really. Won't you turn from your material endeavors now, and take time to learn to really live? You've got plenty of time, you know, for you aren't obliged to work ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... consequences of corruption, and might be promulgated, therefore, without attaching any reproach to our rulers; but they are so accustomed to the mystery adherent to tyranny, that even the most unimportant lawsuit, uninteresting intrigue, elopement, or divorce, are never allowed to be mentioned in our journals, without a previous permission from the prefect of police, who ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... spirit and endurance. From these districts Darius collected large bodies of admirable infantry; and the countries of the modern Kurds and Turkomans supplied, as they do now, squadrons of horsemen, strong, skilful, bold, and trained to a life of constant activity and warfare. It is not uninteresting to notice that the ancestors of our own late enemies, the Sikhs, served as allies of Darius against the Macedonians. They are spoken of in Arrian as Indians who dwelt near Bactria. They were attached to the troops of that satrapy, and their cavalry was one of the most formidable forces in ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... arrived at the catenary,—when we have lost the spring of the fall, and arrived at the plunge of it, that we begin really to feel its weight and wildness. Where water takes its first leap from the top, it is cool, and collected, and uninteresting, and mathematical, but it is when it finds that it has got into a scrape, and has farther to go than it thought for, that its character comes out; it is then that it begins to writhe, and twist, and sweep out zone after zone in wilder stretching as it falls, and to send ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... the Captain was uninteresting and seemed to be beside the purpose of the visit. Hyacinth shifted his chair and fidgeted, uncertain what ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... as well as wiser to be practical, to discourage wild dreaming, she tried to direct her thoughts to insignificant details. Yet even here that rare golden light penetrated to the innermost recesses of her mind; and each drab uninteresting fact glittered with a fresh interest and charm. "I forgot to order that cretonne for the porch," she thought disconnectedly, in an endeavour to conciliate the Fates by pretending that life was as commonplace as it had always been. "That black background with the blue larkspur is pretty—and I ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... tried to face the question of her disappointment. Was it possible to feel any real interest in a man who preferred a Government post to the army at such a time, and who had brought his golf clubs out to America? Her imagination for a moment revolved around the problem of his apparently uninteresting and yet, in some respects, contradictory personality. Was it really her fancy or had she, every now and then, detected behind that flamboyant manner traces of something deeper and more serious, something which seemed to indicate ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... closely examine the notion of God, who serves as its basis? Doubt generally arises either from indolence, weakness, indifference, or incapacity. With many people, to doubt is to fear the trouble of examining things, which are thought uninteresting. But religion being presented to men as their most important concern in this and the future world, skepticism and doubt on this subject must occasion perpetual anxiety and must really constitute a bed of thorns. Every man who has not courage to contemplate, without ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... designed. If it shall have any effect in calming the perturbation which has been lately excited, and which still subsists in the minds of the lower classes of the community, I shall not be ashamed of having given to the world a composition in every other light uninteresting. I will take this opportunity of adding, with the same intention, a few reflections on the present circumstances of our own and of a ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... from what I was told by others personally concerned, and from a paper of information which Rasay was so good as to send me, at my desire, I have compiled the following abstract, which, as it contains some curious anecdotes, will, I imagine not be uninteresting to my readers, and even, perhaps, be of ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... which the crews of these vessels were situated, being such as had never before occurred, it cannot be uninteresting to know in what manner they passed their time during three months of nearly total darkness, and in the ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... than dungeons, rags, and bread and water; when, moreover, the prisoner claimed no pity, but rather congratulation on his badge of merit, improved Sunday dinner, and promotion to the carpenter's shop, so as absolutely to excite a sense of wasted commiseration and uninteresting prosperity. Conversation constrained both by the grating and the presence of the warder, and Aubrey, more tenderly sensitive than his brother, and devoid of his father's experienced tact, was too much embarrassed to take the initiative, was afraid of giving pain by dwelling on his present occupations ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for one moment to reflect on the character of these new deities of whom I have been speaking: Hercules, Castor, Minerva, Diana. It must be confessed that, as compared with the great deities of the calendar, they are uninteresting; with the exception, perhaps, of Hercules, they do not seem to have any real religious significance. They are local deities brought in from outside, and have no root in the mind of the Roman people as we have so far been studying it. They seem to indicate the growth of a population in ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... in the High Street there was Chuffles, the grocer, a small, hairy, silently intent polygamist, who was given rough music by the youth of the neighbourhood because of a scandal about his wife's sister, and who was nevertheless totally uninteresting, and Tonks, the second grocer, an old man with an older, very enfeebled wife, both submerged by piety. Tonks went bankrupt, and was succeeded by a branch of the National Provision Company, with a young manager exactly like a ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... how much address my cousin avoids adding, and 'very uninteresting, and very ugly, and very disagreeable, and very much unsought,' and fifty other things she might add with such perfect truth and modesty! But is it true, that the theatre was open only one ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... should have been unable to appreciate, or even to discover the hidden happiness of her quiet cloistered home. No wonder that the days should have seemed long the observances wearisome, the duties monotonous, and uninteresting. But, oh! the wondrous power of prayer which draws down grace from heaven to refresh the soul, as the mountains attract the moisture-laden clouds to fertilize the earth! Separated in person from the object of her holy affection, but closely united to her in God, ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... care not to fling ourselves into something far more infuriating to a normal human being—and that is boredom. The prospect of a carefully inspected sanitary life, tethered to some light, little, uninteresting daily job, six or eight hours of it, seems to me—and I am sure I write here for most normal, healthy, active people—more awful than hunger and death. It is far more in the quality of the human spirit, and still more what we all in our hearts want the human spirit ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... strike the half-hour after five, and to see Henry opening the door to show Mrs. Chepstow into his consulting-room. A woman who had lived her life and won her renown—or infamy—could scarcely be uninteresting. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... that the following old letter, from a retired lawyer of the seventeenth century to his future son-in-law, might not be altogether uninteresting to your readers, as referring to the value of land and money at the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... and Almagro, at which the writer was present. It is told with much spirit; and is altogether so curious, from the light it throws on the characters of the parties, that I have thought the following translation, which has been prepared for me, might not be uninteresting to ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... yet been opened to the public, we cannot but feel that the history of the first ten years of the reign of George the Third is but imperfectly known to us. Nevertheless, we are inclined to think that we are in a condition to lay before our readers a narrative neither uninstructive nor uninteresting. We therefore return with pleasure ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that we sought our rest together or at the same time, but one night, after a week's fruitless seeking, I came to our door at a late hour to find Dave there before me, and not yet asleep. He began to talk while watching me lay aside the rather uninteresting disguise I ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Pa." Mrs. Monroe was serving an uninteresting meal on heavy plates decorated in toneless brown. Soda crackers and sliced bread were on the table, and a thin slice of butter on a blue china plate. The teaspoons stood erect in a tumbler of red pressed glass. The younger girls had ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... face, though it was far from apparent that she was painted. Her hair, at all events, was her own and was not dyed. And yet, though she possessed an abundance of it, such as many a girl might have envied, it remained utterly uninteresting and commonplace, for its faded straw-like colour was not attractive to the eye, and it grew so awkwardly and so straight as to put its possessor to much trouble in the arrangement of the youthful ringlets she thought ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... in choice of subject. He must be named among the painters who have studied with industry, and have made themselves great by doing so; but having obtained a consummate method of execution, he has thrown it away on subjects either altogether uninteresting, or above his powers, or unfit for pictorial representation. "The Cherry Woman," exhibited in 1850, may be named as an example of the first kind; the "Burchell and Sophia" of the second (the character of Sir William ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... intolerant bigotry, they kept the kingdom in constant turmoils, even to the verge of revolution, gradually pushing the king into impolitic measures, against his will and his better judgment, and creating a reaction to all liberal movements. These turmoils, which are uninteresting to us, formed no inconsiderable part of the history of the times. The only great event of the reign was the war in Spain to suppress revolutionary ideas in that miserable country, ground down by priests and royal despotism, and a prey to every ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... from the Greek islands. He married her, barely delaying his marriage long enough to write me that he was bringing home a bride. She was young, hardly more than a child, indeed, and marvellously beautiful"—Keith moved impatiently; he found these family details tedious and uninteresting—"a radiant soulless creature, whose only law was her own selfish enjoyment, and whose coming brought pain and bitterness to La Glorieuse. These were her rooms. She chose them because of the rose garden, for she had a sensuous ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... indeed, which is sixteen miles from Benares, and Mirzapore, which is thirty miles distant, there is a great extent of low hill-country. These districts we visited several times. The most of our journeys were in the wide open plains of the North-West. The country, though level, is by no means uninteresting. You receive as you travel a very favourable impression of the productiveness of the land and the industry of the people. In the cold weather you see, as far as the eye can reach, a sweep of growing corn, wheat and other grains, which give the hope of an early and abundant harvest. Towns ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... he cut, translated into an epic poem, by the side of Achilles? Clarissa, the divine Clarissa, is too interesting by half. She is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles—she is interesting in all that is uninteresting. Such things, however intensely they may be brought home to us, are not conductors to the imagination. There is infinite truth and feeling in Richardson; but it is extracted from a caput mortuum of circumstances; it does not evaporate ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the stream. John, there, will perhaps tell you how she was spoken to on one occasion, by an over-bold, over-inquisitive islander, curious to know whose shroud she was preparing; and how she more than satisfied his curiosity, by telling him it was his own. It is a not uninteresting fact," added the minister, "that my poor people, since they have become more earnest about their religion, think very little about ghosts and spectres: their faith in the realities of the unseen world seems to have banished from their minds much of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... know every particular respecting me; and in my fear of omitting the least circumstance which may induce you to think favourably of your Sister and myself, I may possibly relate many which you may think uninteresting. ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... the eye could reach, the castaways saw no signs of life, not a sail, not a smoke, not a gull, not even the ripple of a wave; nothing but gaudy, motionless markings from one flat horizon to the other, dead traceries that swiftly became uninteresting, then monotonous, then disagreeable, then maddening in the aching eyes ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... the pack has been comparatively uninteresting from the zoologist's point of view, as we have seen so little of the rarer species of animals or of birds in exceptional plumage. We passed dozens of crab-eaters, but have seen no Ross seals nor have we been able to kill a sea leopard. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... live a barren and narrow life without ideals. This emphasis of sex is expressed not merely in immorality and illegitimacy, but also in a precocious interest in sex and in a precocious courtship. Early marriage, therefore, often represents the reaction from an uninteresting and empty environment and, however fortunate in itself, certainly does not demonstrate ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... is a pity that I know so little about it all as to be unable to explain to you his many expedients. Folk call him a wizard, for he produces so much. Nevertheless, personally I find what he does uninteresting." ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... of the long and uninteresting fight which followed it may be said that the most remarkable feature of the battle of the Yalu was that it took place between two nations which, had the war broken out forty years earlier, would have done their fighting ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... on one stalk," said Lumley, gayly: "by the by, it is not a complimentary simile. What young lady would be like a cherry?—such an uninteresting, common, charity-boy sort of fruit. For my part, I always associate cherries with the image of a young gentleman in corduroys and a skeleton jacket, with one pocket full of marbles, and the other full of worms for fishing, with three-halfpence in the left ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... story! And we remember so well what it used to be like to have to learn dull things we did not wish to know. So we said to ourselves, as we looked over our spectacles at each other, "No, they sha'n't be told a single uninteresting fact; they sha'n't be dull, poor dears, as we were so long ago, before we put on spectacles and began ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... say that we must like everybody. That is a physical, mental and moral impossibility. But we may do others the justice of seeing their good traits as well as the bad. And sometimes when we find a chance acquaintance drearily uninteresting, it is because we do not take the trouble to find out what ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... district of the Kong Mountains, which are of a tabular form, and rise on both sides to between 2000 or 2500 feet. The change of prospect was most grateful to those who had spent two months in a flat, marshy, and uninteresting country. These mountains lie in the direction of W.N.W. and E.S.E., where they are intersected by the Niger. Their outlines are extremely bold, and they appear to be chiefly composed of granite. The navigation of ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... way, may be made to serve a variety of useful purposes of a dramatic or semi-dramatic nature. They may safely be cast for the unpleasant or uninteresting characters of the nursery drama. They form convenient targets for the development of their brothers' marksmanship; and they make excellent horses for their brothers to drive, and, it may be added, for their brothers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... to-day arriving at Rome by rail drives to his hotel through the uninteresting streets of a modern town, and thence finds his way to the Forum and the Palatine, where his attention is speedily absorbed by excavations which he finds it difficult to understand. It is as likely as not that he may leave Rome without once finding an opportunity of surveying the whole site ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... the reader to my book, "Alps and Sanctuaries." {9} I propose to confine myself here to the ten or a dozen chapels containing life-sized terra-cotta figures, painted up to nature, that form one of the main features of the place. At a first glance, perhaps, all these chapels will seem uninteresting; I venture to think, however, that some, if not most of them, though falling a good deal short of the best work at Varallo and Crea, are still in their own way of considerable importance. The first chapel with which we need concern ourselves is numbered 4, and shows the Conception of the Virgin ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... for a distinct not to be mistaken vibration was clearly felt by all hands. This part of the anchorage is much exposed to the sea; and, in the event of a blow from the northward, we are in a position to encounter its full fury. Chefoo, notwithstanding its uninteresting appearance, seems to be a pretty regular port of call for men-of-war, several of which are lying at ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... musician? no!' and like all mere 'talents' Frank failed in his songs to give them just what is of most value—just that which separates an artistic performance from the vast region of well-meaning, respectable, but uninteresting commonplace. There was a curious lack in him also of correspondence between his music and the rest of himself. As music is expression, it might be supposed that something which it serves to express would always lie behind it; but this was not the case with him, although he was ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... historical sense at all. They had no notion of certain psychological facts about art which are now familiar to every educated man. They did not know that art cannot be good unless it expresses the character of the people who produce it; that characterless art, however accomplished, is uninteresting; that there may be more life and so more beauty in the idol of an African savage than ...
— Progress and History • Various
... beautiful and retired spots. Nobody but a person fond of Natural History can imagine the pleasure of strolling under cocoa-nuts in a thicket of bananas and coffee-plants, and an endless number of wild flowers. And this island, that has given me so much instruction and delight, is reckoned the most uninteresting place that we perhaps shall touch at during our voyage. It certainly is generally very barren, but the valleys are more exquisitely beautiful, from the very contrast. It is utterly useless to say anything ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the beauty of many of the beginnings of the airs, but this beauty is not maintained, in every case the air tails off into something that is much too near being tiresome. The plot, of course, is stupid to a degree, but plot has very little to do with it; what can be more uninteresting than the plot of many of Handel's oratorios? We both believe the scheme of Italian opera to be a bad one; we think that music should never be combined with acting to a greater extent than is done, we will say, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... must be going now," chimed in Fidge, jumping up eagerly, for all this rigmarole had been very uninteresting to him. ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... best man often succeeds, as with few exceptions, perhaps, the long race, barring accidents, is usually won by the best horse. He left no writings behind him save a few letters, beautifully expressed, but mostly relating to family matters, and, therefore, uninteresting to the general reader, with the exception of five or six preserved by my mother, which I will give the reader ere I have ended this biographical sketch; and the few friends with whom he corresponded, and to whom, occasionally, he showed, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... practical life titanesqueness is a drawback, in literature, which is the nation's ideal life, it finds its most fruitful field. Hence the Russian writer may oft, indeed, be mistaken, frequently even totally wrong, but he is never uninteresting, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... train was running at high speed across the flat, uninteresting stretch of country which lies about thirty miles south of Rouen. Presently the Seine came in sight again, and for some miles we ran parallel with it. We had just rushed through a little wayside station beyond Mantes, the train oscillating so severely as it rattled over the ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... creatures; and yet I had rather read the worst of them, than be obliged to go through with this of Milton's, or the other's life of Boileau; where there is such a dull, heavy succession of long quotations of uninteresting passages, that it makes their method quite nauseous. But the verbose, tasteless Frenchman seems to lay it down as a principle, that every life must be a book,—and, what is worse, it seems a book without a life; for what do we know of Boileau ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... its renowned fortress of Ithome, the sacred Olympia, and the beautiful temple of Phigalia, and began our homeward journey. Passing over a mountain from which we had a wide and beautiful view, we rode through a barren and uninteresting plain to the lonely khan of Frankovrysi, and early the next day arrived at Tripolitza. We had had a clear sky at Megalopolis and Frankovrysi, but here, in the high table-land of Arcadia, we found the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... want to," she replied. "I wish I'd never seen your old house. I wish I'd never seen yourself. You are just as dull as your house is, and nearly as flat. It's a stupid, uninteresting, slow house, so it is, and you are a stupid, dissatisfied grump of a man, so you are. I'd sooner live in a cave with a hairy bear, so I ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... my troop, quite uninteresting. But what do you think? Something exploded not 100 yards away from Rinaldo. I was much farther off, dismounted. He didn't turn a hair, but only looked round and watched the smoke. Whereas, as you know, a little bit of paper blown across the road ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... bending forward confidentially, "isn't it awfully dry and uninteresting? There! I wouldn't dare lisp it before my husband, but isn't there a good deal of—of—well, humbug, ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... the having to repent your neglect hereafter, when, finding out too late what a pleasant study botany is, you search in vain for curious forms over which you trod every day in crossing flats which seemed to you utterly ugly and uninteresting, but which the good God was watching as carefully as He did the pleasant hills inland: perhaps even more carefully; for the uplands He has completed, and handed over to man, that he may dress and keep them: but the tide-flats below are still unfinished, dry land in the ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... encountered a few passers several blocks apart, was their habitual mood. He came promptly upon two objects which he would willingly have shunned: a 'denkmal' of the Franco-German war, not so furiously bad as most German monuments, but antipathetic and uninteresting, as all patriotic monuments are; and a woman-and-dog team. In the shock from this he was sensible that he had not seen any woman-and-dog teams for some time, and he wondered by what civic or ethnic influences their distribution was so controlled that they should have abounded in Hamburg, Leipsic, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... interpretation of the piece he is playing. He must, of course, spend years of hard thought and study in cultivating this ability to judge and produce the right touch, but the performer who is more concerned about the technical claims of a composition than its musical interpretation can only hope to give an uninteresting, uninspired, stilted performance that should rightly drive all intelligent hearers from his ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... theory in fragments up and down his work in the prefatory remarks with which he introduces the more striking animals or classes of animals. He never wastes evolutionary matter in the preface to an uninteresting animal; and the more interesting the animal, the more evolution will there be commonly found. When he comes to describe the animal more familiarly—and he generally begins a fresh chapter or half chapter when he does so—he writes no more about evolution, but gives an admirable ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... a little hard and uninteresting to you, but it is as well to try to master them. It looks as if we were going to hear a great deal about Austria this winter, and it will be so much easier for us to understand the events as they happen if we have mastered the peculiar form ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 55, November 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... at present to meddle nationally in any war; that we wished particularly to cultivate the friendship of Portugal, with whom we have an advantageous commerce. That yet a successful revolution in Brazil could not be uninteresting to us. That prospects of lucre might possibly draw numbers of individuals to their aid, and purer motives our officers, among whom are many excellent. That our citizens, being free to leave their own country individually, without the consent of their governments, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... actually attempting to tackle him upon the subject which he considered least suitable for discussion. They were sitting in his office, and the captain, in pursuance of a promise to Hartley, after two or three references to the weather, and a long account of an uninteresting conversation with a policeman, began to get on to ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... be looked for in corners and out-of-the-way places, and not in the broad acres—the scythe has taken them there. By the wayside on the banks of the lane, near the gateway—look, too, in uninteresting places behind incomplete buildings on the mounds cast up from abandoned foundations where speculation has been and gone. There weeds that would not have found resting-place elsewhere grow unchecked, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... was never brought to a glorious completion by the Madigans, even though they skipped uninteresting and difficult parts, and, like the early Elizabethans, permitted no intermission between acts. It was very often laughed to death. At times it became a saturnalia of extravagant action, and it frequently ended in a free fight, when the Rose and the ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... I was a gay young sport," laughed James Brown; "well, I'm sorry, for your sake, that I'm merely an uninteresting, middle-aged man, but, I doubt if your uncle would have let you send that note, if I had been a stranger to him. Take my advice, girls, for I know what I'm talking about, never write to an actor with whom you are not acquainted. It can never lead ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... to redeem it; and, above all, we may be sure that Pippa did not think in parentheses. The agility and (it were to follow an indulgent fashion to add) the "subtlety" of Browning's mind too often led him into like excesses: I deny the subtlety here, for these clauses are so wholly uninteresting in thought that even as examples I shall not cite them. But their crowning distastefulness is in the certitude we feel that, whatever they had been, they never would have occurred to this lyrical child. The stanza without them is the stanza as Pippa felt it. . . . In the ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... dismissing all the petitions that had been presented for patents and charters, and dissolving all the bubble companies. The following copy of their lordships' order, containing a list of all these nefarious projects, will not be deemed uninteresting at the present time, when, at periodic intervals, there is but too much tendency in the public mind to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... the mending when the weekly wash came back. Shirley set the table, sewed on jabots and did yards of tatting. Her "work" consisted of presiding over the reference room of a public library, telling shabby uninteresting young men where to find works on evolution and Assyrian temples and Charlemagne. This position was hers because her rich aunt's husband had political influence and her salary, together with the checks from Aunt Clara—not so big as the latter would have had David suppose but still not to ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... animals, with all their beauty of form, color, and movement, and peculiarly interesting from their singular modes of growth, remains comparatively unknown except to the professional naturalist. It may, therefore, be not uninteresting or useless to my readers, if I give some account of the appearance and habits of these animals, keeping in view, at the same time, my ultimate object, namely, to show that they are all founded on the same structural elements and have the same ideal significance. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... years, and, as he had been separated from him at the unimpressionable age of two, he may be said never to have seen him at all. He had no recollection of him, and the picture that he had painted was constructed out of monthly rather uninteresting letters concerned, for the most part, with the care and maintenance of New Zealand sheep, and such meagre details as his Aunt Clare and Uncle Garrett had bestowed on him from time to time. From the latter he gathered that ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the meadows along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door to the Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that Cambridge country is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patchworked with chalky fields bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard willows; it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top with ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... absence the coon got loose and set about a series of long-deferred exploring expeditions, beginning with the bachelor's bedroom. The first promising object was a writing desk. Mounting by a chair the coon examined several uninteresting books and papers, and then noticed higher up a large stone bottle. He had several times found pleasurable stuff in bottles, so he went for it. The cork was lightly in and easily disposed of, but the smell was far from inviting, for it was ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... thought, habit, or behaviour may result, as in the case of this unfortunate ellipse, which once presented such fair and promising proportions to the student's admiring gaze, in the 'sinister effacement of a man,' or the gradual absorption of a State into an uninteresting thing 'which lies evenly ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... yet deadly dull. Indeed, no candid critic can deny that this is the case with some of De Foe's narratives; as, for example, the latter part of 'Colonel Jack,' where the details of management of a plantation in Virginia are sufficiently uninteresting in spite of the minute financial details. One device, which he occasionally employs with great force, suggests an occasional source of interest. It is generally reckoned as one of his most skilful tricks that in telling a story he cunningly leaves a few stray ends, which ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... stupid, uninteresting, conceited and slow. He never, in all his life, wanted to have anything to do with girls. But Charlotte Le Page was another matter. She had, in the first place, become quite a tradition in the Cole family. She was the daughter of a wealthy landowner, who always spent ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... congenial pen and ink, and Mr. Sherwood insisted that Gussie should put her needle to more practical use. Now, while Gussie liked well enough to handle a needle and thread when something showy and fanciful was to be evolved thereby, she almost rebelled against the plain sewing, it was such dull, uninteresting work; it made so much difference if the sharp little instrument held Berlin wool, floss, etc., or the common cotton thread, which, though so useful, was too ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... The weather continued squally in the morning, and in the afternoon the rain was again torrential. We went towards 78 deg. over uninteresting and monotonous grey country with a chain of snowy peaks stretching from South-West to North-East. We waded through a fairly deep and very cold river, and subsequently rose over a pass 17,450 feet. A number of Hunyas, with flocks of several thousand sheep, ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... to say why most travellers are uninteresting. I do not think it is because they have been to wonderful places, but because the average man has not the power to assimilate or interpret what he has seen; and they enlarge on their own sensations with such a lack of humour and proportion, that you feel as ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... ludicrous with financial operations—with budgets, schemes of taxation, and national debts. In general, they are considered to assume a formidable aspect; and when that is not the case, their details are looked on as dry and uninteresting—they are universally voted a 'bore.' Yet we engage to shew, that there have been some financial projects which at the present day we can pronounce essentially ludicrous. And they are not the mere projects of enthusiasts and theoretic dreamers. They were put ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... MIRROR who have not witnessed an Isle of Wight Regatta, a description of that fete may not be uninteresting. From the days assigned to the nautical contest, we will select that on which his Majesty's Cup was sailed for, on Monday, the 13th of August, 1827, as the most copious illustration of the scene; beginning with Newport, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... garden then; my remembrance of it is none the less of an enchanted ground. But my uncle never walked in it. When he walked, it was always out on the moor he went, and what time he would return no one ever knew. His meals were uninteresting to him—no concern to any one but Martha, who never uttered a word of impatience, and seldom a word of anxiety. At whatever hour of the day he went, it was almost always night when he came home, often late night. In the house he ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... the train at Bonn for Cologne, in order to pass rapidly over a part of the Rhine scenery said to be comparatively uninteresting. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... new plan while old Hannah cleared the table, then out came the four little work baskets, and the needles flew as the girls made sheets for Aunt March. It was uninteresting sewing, but tonight no one grumbled. They adopted Jo's plan of dividing the long seams into four parts, and calling the quarters Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and in that way got on capitally, especially when ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... Mr. Arithmetic at Jericho!" cried Matty peevishly; "his goods are so heavy—so uninteresting; they make no show; I won't plague myself ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... clerks. In neither house did I hear any set speech. The voices of the Speaker and of the Clerks of the Houses were heard more frequently than those of the members; and the business seemed to be done in a dull, serviceable, methodical manner, likely to be useful to the country, and very uninteresting to the gentlemen engaged. Indeed at Washington also, in Congress, it seemed to me that there was much less of set speeches than in our House of Commons. With us there are certain men whom it seems impossible to put down, and by whom the time of Parliament is ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... climbed in straggling fashion up a sharp hill rising out of the plain at the back of the station, and was crowned by the twin towers of the ruined cathedral peeping over the summit. From the station itself it looked uninteresting and modern, but the fact was that the mediaeval position lay out of sight just beyond the crest. And once he reached the top and entered the old streets, he stepped clean out of modern life into a bygone century. The noise and bustle ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... very important to inquire whether the lot of the third estate was getting better or worse during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. In either case there was a great load of wrong and tyranny to be thrown off. But the question is not uninteresting in itself. As there are diametrically opposite answers to it, both in the testimony of contemporaries and in the opinion of modern scholars, it is perhaps incapable of being answered. In some districts, and in some respects, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... out upon mankind with a degree of lustre that promised a triumph over all his difficulties. The life of Savage was admired, as a beautiful and instructive piece of biography. The two imitations of Juvenal were thought to rival even the excellence of Pope; and the tragedy of Irene, though uninteresting on the stage, was universally admired in the closet, for the propriety of the sentiments, the richness of the language, and the general harmony of the whole composition. His fame was widely diffused; and he had made his agreement with the booksellers for his English dictionary ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... he had no society of admiring friends to encourage him. Reardon understood the merit of the workmanship, but frankly owned that the book was repulsive to him. To the public it would be worse than repulsive—tedious, utterly uninteresting. No matter; ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... mile the Su-chen crept along, and the low, flat, uninteresting banks slipped gradually astern. A few junks were passed, but they were all too far away for Frobisher to communicate with them, as they were well in under the land, while the gunboat was obliged, on account of her draught, ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... literature, and the worst romance is not so corrupting as false history, false philosophy, or false political essays. But the best romance becomes dangerous, if, by its excitement it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting, and increases the morbid thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes in which we shall never be ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... all so different, you see, to what I had been doing all my life, particularly for the year before, and it almost seemed as if I couldn't be the man who had been going into the City every day in the morning and coming back from it every evening after writing a lot of uninteresting letters. It was like being pitched all of a sudden from one world into another. Well, I found my way back somehow or other, and as I went along I made up my mind how I'd spend my holiday. I said to myself, "I'll have a walking tour as well as Ferrars, only mine is to be a tour of London and ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... After a time, though, that seemed rather an uninteresting purchase. All her money would be gone at once, and almost before she had realised that she had got it. She next decided to get a large piece of bacon, two sacks of coal, and a sack of corn for the fowls; ...
— Dick and Brownie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... appear to have had enough of most things,—perhaps too much. If your countrymen are uninteresting, you may possibly wish to meet some of your countrywomen. I've been abroad enough to know that you have ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... him that would cause any passer-by to glance at Schrank twice. And his face is the most uninteresting part of him. ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... the space seemed when she had gone—dull and unspeakably uninteresting. He became impatient with the slowness of the waiters, who had seemed to hurry unnecessarily the night before. But at last his meal ended, and he went out under the trees. The sky was so full of stars it hardly seemed dark. The ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... hands. Nevertheless, at first sight of her Douglas was attracted, and for good reason—the face of the girl, once seen, was not soon forgotten. During the time he had been in Scotland it had seemed to him that the Scotch women were hard-featured, uninteresting, and altogether unlovely; but this girl was different. There was something of the savage in her, and yet she possessed a charm which fascinated the young man. Her black hair hung in curling and tangled tresses over her shoulders; her eyes were almost ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... she cooked, she soothed the warrior upon his return from killing of man or beast, and she brought up her boys to be warriors and her girls to serve them. There you have Nature and her original plan, a bald and uninteresting plan, but eminently practical for the mere purpose (which is all that concerns her) of keeping the world going. And so it would be to-day, even in the civilized core, if man had been clever enough to take the cue Nature flung in his face and kept woman where to-day he so ingenuously ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... thought much about it," Stephen had to confess, fearing she would consider such indifference uninteresting. He did not add what remained of the truth, that he had thought of Algiers as a refuge from what had become disagreeable, rather than as a beautiful place which he wished to see for its own sake. "I'd made no picture in my mind. You know a lot more about it all than I do, though ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Cincinnati in February, 1828, and I speak of the town as it was then; several small churches have been built since, whose towers agreeably relieve its uninteresting mass of buildings. At that time I think Main street, which is the principal avenue, (and runs through the whole town, answering to the High street of our old cities), was the only one entirely paved. The troittoir is of brick, tolerably well laid, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... that," she stammered. "I am sure you are very nice indeed, and we are going to be good friends, aren't we? But I am such a dunce myself that I am afraid of real clever people. They are so superior. And so uninteresting, and—oh, I do not mean that either." Then Prudence laughed at her predicament. "I may as well give it up. What I really mean is that you are so nice and friendly and interesting, that I can hardly believe you are so clever. You are the nicest smart ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... not give a hoot for Scallywattamus. At five hundred yards three or four of them awoke with a start, stared at us a minute, and moved slowly away. They told all the zebra they happened upon that the three idiots approaching were at once uninteresting and dangerous. At four hundred and fifty yards a half dozen more made off at a trot. At three hundred and fifty yards the rest plunged away at a canter-all but one. He remained to stare, but his tail was up, and we knew he only stayed because ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... has many advantages. In spite of the numerical preponderance of books published in Germany, it is doubtful if the German reader has quite such a catholic feast before him as the reader of French. There is a mass of German fiction probably as uninteresting to a foreigner as popular English and American romance. And German compared with French is an unattractive language; unmelodious, unwieldy, and cursed with a hideous and blinding lettering that the German is too patriotic to sacrifice. There has been in Germany ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... close-fisted, slapping senators on the back and keeping a sharp eye on the coppers; taxing the latrinae, and declaring that money had no smell; yet still, in comparison with Claud and Nero, almost the ideal; absolutely uninteresting also, yet doing what good he could; effacing at once the traces of the civil war, rebuilding the Capitol, calming the people, protecting the provinces, restoring to Rome the gardens of Nero, clipping the wings of the Palace of Gold, throwing open again the Via Sacra, ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... grey. Alas, I thought compassionately, for Uncle Dick's dreams! What a shock the change to her must have given him! Could this be the woman on whom he had lavished such a life-wealth of love and reverence? I tried to talk to her, but I found her shy and timid. She seemed to me uninteresting and commonplace. And this was Uncle Dick's Rose ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... instruction, and the lessons bore moderately good effect—the moderation being due to a not unnatural disinclination on the pupil's part to walk where she had been accustomed to run, and to a fixed loathing to practice. As the latter necessary, if uninteresting, pursuit was left entirely to her own discretion—for no one ever dreamed of ordering Norah to the piano—it is small wonder if it suffered beside the superior attractions of riding Bobs, rat trapping, "shinning up" trees, fishing in the lagoon and generally disporting herself ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... be made to do, does not concern the Filipino in the least. If he needs money irresistibly, he can spend one day at work up in the mountains, making enough to last him for some time. If he can spend his money so as to create a display, he takes delight in doing so. But paying debts is as uninteresting as it is unpopular. The outward signs of elegance are much respected by the Filipino. The American, to live up to his part, must always be attended by a servant. Sometimes, when we would forget this adjunct, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... thrilling a spectacle as this—probably the grandest and most impressive which the Arctic regions can exhibit—it is perhaps not to be wondered at that even the beauties of the glacier itself appeared somewhat tame and uninteresting to the voyagers. But their interest was once more awakened when, having at length coasted along the face of the glacier for a distance of not less than sixty miles, they reached its northern extremity ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... and Martin appeared. It was by no means an uninteresting face, that which the earl now scanned, but quite unlike the features of Hubert—a round face, contrasting with the oval outlines of the other—with twinkling eyes and curling hair; a face which ought to be lit up with ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... to be the owls, sir, a bird very frequent in this locality. They make a sort of harsh, hooting howl, sir. I have sometimes wondered," said Webster, pursuing a not uninteresting train of thought, "whether that might be the reason of ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... up the stairs; and, the question whether Christopher were gone or not being an uninteresting one to the majority, the talking went on upon other matters. When Joey crept down again a minute later, Picotee was sitting aloof and silent, and he accordingly singled her ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... hotel was in accord with Mr. Gingham's general conception of his business. No man had ever grasped the true principles of undertaking more thoroughly than Mr. Gingham. I have often heard him explain that to associate with the living, uninteresting though they appear, is the only way to secure the custom of ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... I am not," said Major Flint. "Perhaps a hundred years hence—the date I have named in my will for their publication—someone may think them not so uninteresting. But all this toasting and buttering and grilling and frying your friends, and serving them up hot for all the old cats at a tea-table to ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... to the next, of course. After eight or nine children become quite uninteresting, except to themselves. I shouldnt know my two eldest if ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... of her, blackening the dusk, a vague darkness in which she could at first distinguish nothing but an occasional white plume and a bald head. But her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and above the uninteresting backs of middle-aged men she recognised his thin sharp shoulders. She had been compelled to look up from her prayers, and she wondered if he had been thinking of her. If so, it was very wrong of him to interrupt her at her prayers. But a sensation of pleasure arose spontaneously in ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... northerly haunts had been found represented at the Beach by a telegram instead; increasingly bored by the desolate air of the all but empty hostelry. "When's the next train out of this hell-hole?"—such was Mr. Canning's last recorded remark up to this not uninteresting moment. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... they but opened their mouths wide and boldly, they would have been pleasantly drowned together; but as it was, they lacked the requisite courage, and were fain to content themselves with an occasional frantic struggle to the surface, where they gasped a few words of uninteresting air, and ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... determined. If strange exploits are sometimes recited, the author has simply to say that he has been veracious in all of his statements, and that all the stories are "true bird stories." The author modestly believes that it will not be found uninteresting to ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... very uninteresting to read about wicked people. I do not feel the least inclination to give you any account of Tarquin and Tullia. On the contrary, I quite enjoyed talking of the good Numa ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... is seen in this light; and how much this must lessen that affectionate regard to the learners which alone can sweeten the bitter labor of instruction, and convert the whole business into unwelcome and uninteresting task-work, many preceptors that I have conversed with on the subject are ready, with a sad heart, to acknowledge. From this inconvenience the settled salaries of the masters of this school in great measure exempt them; while the happy custom of choosing masters (indeed every officer of the establishment) ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... spent the nights alone in the Cathedral as calmly as if he had been in the upper cloister, quite accustomed to the grave-like silence. In order not to sleep, he read by the light of his lantern any books he could get in the Claverias, uninteresting treatises on history in which Providence played the principal role; lives of the saints, amusing from their simple credulity, bordering on the grotesque; and that family Quixote of the Lunas', that he had so often spelt out when ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... as a specimen of the games of chance played by the Romans at cards. Of the more innocent games, Briscola, Tresette, and Scaraccoccia are the favorites among the common people. And the first of these may not be uninteresting, as being, perhaps, the most popular of all. It is played by either two or four persons. The Fante (or Knave) counts as two; the Carallo (equal to our Queen) as three; the Re (King) as four; the Three-spot as ten; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... cackling, struggling fowls, who tried to leap over each other's backs. Wilfred seemed busy at some hutches where some rabbits twitched their noses at cabbage leaves. Mysie proceeded to minister to some black and rust-coloured guinea- pigs, which Dolores thought very ugly, uninteresting, ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... person, and a disgrace to our sex," said Hoffland. "To tell a young lady that the manner in which she proposes appearing at a ball is uninteresting, sounds like Ernest." ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... or Dolly Pettingill, were two eight year-olds. Dolly stuttered badly, but was gradually getting over it, for no one was allowed to mock him and Mr. Bhaer tried to cure it, by making him talk slowly. Dolly was a good little lad, quite uninteresting and ordinary, but he flourished here, and went through his daily duties and pleasures ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... school, but I hadn't the brains, so I toiled away in the store from early morning until late at night. Teaching school was easier. He used to say that if the sluggard did actually go to the ant he would probably find him a most uninteresting creature to talk to. I guess Hendry was right. I do know that he had little of the virtue of the ant, but he was one of the most interesting men I ever heard talk. When I was behind the counter it was my main pleasure to listen to him, perched on a chair in front ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... on the following day, and the Address was moved and seconded; but there was no debate. There was not even a full House. The same ceremony had taken place so short a time previously, that the whole affair was flat and uninteresting. It was understood that nothing would in fact be done. Mr. Gresham, as leader of his side of the House, confined himself to asserting that he should give his firmest opposition to the proposed measure, which was, ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... knowledge of the difficulty of my task. My honest and neglected friend, Ingulphus, has furnished me with many a valuable hint; but the light afforded by the Monk of Croydon, and Geoffrey de Vinsauff, is dimmed by such a conglomeration of uninteresting and unintelligible matter, that we gladly fly for relief to the delightful pages of the gallant Froissart, although he flourished at a period so much more remote from the date of my history. If, therefore, my dear friend, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... bald skull. The situation of this hill is not precisely known. It was certainly on the north or northwest of the city, in the high, irregular plain which extends between the walls and the two valleys of Kedron and Hinnom,[2] a rather uninteresting region, and made still worse by the objectionable circumstances arising from the neighborhood of a great city. It is difficult to identify Golgotha as the precise place which, since Constantine, has been ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... spite of yourself and of them, you become interested in uninteresting people, annoyed at their follies, and sympathetic with their trifling sorrows and joys. This is Mrs. ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... earliest days were passed; scenes from which I departed when I was a child, and which I did not revisit until I was a man. This is no uncommon chance, but one that befalls some of us any day; perhaps it may not be quite uninteresting to compare notes with the reader respecting an experience so familiar and a ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... carelessness that brings errors in construction and an entire lack of clearness and elegance in expression. Even the older pupils can learn more from writing upon simple subjects where the material is easily obtained and is in itself interesting than from the usual difficult and uninteresting subjects. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... bonhomie which so endeared Sir John Macdonald to the multitude. I do not think that Sir John's pre-eminence in that direction ever gave Sir Alexander much concern. My impression is that he regarded the multitude as an assemblage of more or less uninteresting persons, necessary only at election times; and if Sir John could succeed in obtaining their votes, he was quite welcome to any incidental advantages that he might extract from the process. It was alleged by Sir Richard Cartwright that in the year 1864 a movement was started in the Conservative ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless. To read a dull book; to listen to a tedious play or prosy sermon or lecture; to stare at uninteresting pictures or ugly buildings: nothing, short of disease, is more dreadful than this. The violence done to our souls by it leaves injuries and produces subtle maladies which have never been properly studied by psycho-pathologists. Yet we are so inured to it in school, where practically all the ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... her travelling companion from San Francisco, having proved to be talkative and uninteresting, Elsie Marley was more than content to find herself alone after the change had been made and her train pulled out of Chicago. It was characteristic of the girl that she did not even look out of the window to see the last of Mrs. Bennet, who, having waited on the platform until the ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... is Mrs. Grant. She is a sweet old thing; but she never says anything but good of anybody and so she is a very uninteresting conversationalist. ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... was a conscientious man, but he was getting old, and the disputations of obstinate or foolish clients were becoming troublesome to him. Moreover, the case concerning which his clerk was prosing along in the style of a chapel demagogue engaged in extemporary prayer, was an extremely uninteresting one, and he thought hazily of his lunch. The hour for that meal was approaching,—a fact for which he was devoutly thankful. For after lunch, he gave himself his own release from work for the rest of the day. He left it all to his subordinates, and ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... a long and intensely uninteresting conversation about the maladies to which chickens are subject. He was verbose and reminiscent. He took me over his farm, pointing out as he went Dorkings and Cochin Chinas which he had cured of diseases generally fatal, with, as far as I could ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... stones, a moss-grown roof, and blank window spaces, whence both glass and sash had long departed. It was ruined, but not a ruin—a typical Californian substitute for what are known to guide-bookers abroad as "monuments of the past." With scarcely a glance at this uninteresting structure Jaralson moved on into the ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... happened to the world, not because of men and women and the priests and pundits, but in spite of them. Part of the reason can be given by him who knows history enough, and commands almost unlimited leisure and page; but that would only be the uninteresting part that we could easily dispense with. The college girl has happened to the world, as ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... pleasant chat. She was charming. At first she was apt to touch on James a shade too frequently, but before long I succeeded in diverting our conversation into less uninteresting topics. ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... a rough deal burial case stood upon two stools; tapers were flickering upon the floor; the fumes of burning punk freighted the air and clouded the vision; the place was clean enough, for it was perfectly bare, but it was eminently uninteresting. Close at hand stood a second burial case, an empty one, with the cover standing against the wall; a few hours more and it would find a tenant—he who was dying in rags and filth in the room adjoining. This was the native hospital of the quarter, and the mother of the child ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... they take the lead of the Periodical Works of our day, (and some of these are extremely beautiful,) while their literary worth is even of superior order. Although they are matter-of-fact works—as in history and biography—they are not mere compilations of dry details and uninteresting lives; but they are so interspersed with new views, and the facts are so often re-written, that the whole have the appearance of original works. Excellent principles, and economy of cost are, likewise, two important points of their recommendations; for many works which have already appeared ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... expected of prisoners themselves; and so, with the funds furnished me from the British Government, the camp captain was compelled to pay a number of the poorer prisoners to perform this work. Secretaries Ruddock and Kirk of our Embassy undertook the uninteresting and arduous work of superintending these payments as well as of our other financial affairs. This work was most trying and they deserve great credit for their self-denial. By arrangement with the British Government, I was also enabled to pay the poorer ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... Yankee cast a damper on his enthusiasm by exclaiming, in a pet, "Oh! dumn your singing! keep quiet, and pull away!" This we now did, in the most uninteresting silence; until, with a jerk that made every elbow hum, the root dragged out; and most inelegantly, we all landed upon the ground. The doctor, quite exhausted, stayed there; and, deluded into believing that, after so doughty a performance, we would be allowed ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... numerical preponderance of books published in Germany, it is doubtful if the German reader has quite such a catholic feast before him as the reader of French. There is a mass of German fiction probably as uninteresting to a foreigner as popular English and American romance. And German compared with French is an unattractive language; unmelodious, unwieldy, and cursed with a hideous and blinding lettering that the German is too patriotic to sacrifice. There has been in Germany a more powerful ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... against it altogether. This is a true index to the whole man. When the question was raised, in 1846, he was in a blustering hurry to take ground for it. He sought to be in advance, and to avoid the uninteresting position of a mere follower. But soon he began to see glimpses of the great Democratic ox-gad waving in his face, and to hear indistinctly a voice saying, 'Back! Back, sir! Back a little!' He shakes ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... females in the bloom of youth, whose well-proportioned limbs and symmetry of figure might have formed a model for the sculptor's chisel. In personal appearance the females are, except in early youth, very far inferior to the men. When young, however, they are not uninteresting. The jet black eyes, shaded by their long dark lashes, and the delicate and scarcely formed features of incipient womanhood give a soft and pleasing expression to a countenance that might often be called ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of peasants in lively-coloured costumes, giving a brilliancy and life to the scene, which is not found in the other parts of the remarkably dull town of Louis XIV. Rochefort is the third important port in France; but as nothing can be so uninteresting to me, who do not understand these details, as to look on fortifications, and the bustle of a port when there is no sea to repay one—and Rochefort is only on the Charente, four leagues from the sea—I did not attempt ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... her fellow-passengers and judged them uninteresting, she divided her attention between the fleeting landscape at her side, a box of fruit creams, which she was consuming with grave perseverance, and the contents of a pocket-portfolio, which she appeared to be slowly sorting and weeding out. To everything ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... possessed no beauty of scenery, though the country around it was in truth as uninteresting as any country could be, it had many delights of its own. The house itself was as excellent a residence for a country gentleman of small means as taste and skill together could construct. I doubt whether prettier rooms were ever seen than the drawing-room, ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... from porch to stairway. He went up to the first landing, not knowing why, then roamed aimlessly through, wandering from room to room, idly, looking on familiar things as though they were strange—strange, but uninteresting. ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... a lady of about fifty; she had been with them now for nearly a year, and what she paid for the drawing-room and best bedroom behind it, quite covered the rent of the shabby little house. Miss Mitchell was Charlotte Home's grand standby; she was a very uninteresting person, neither giving nor looking for sympathy, never concerning herself about the family in whose house she lived. But then, on the other hand, she was easily pleased; she never grumbled, she paid her rent like clockwork. She now startled Lottie by coming instantly forward and telling ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... were uninteresting, and Grace stayed in-doors a great deal. She became quite a student, reading more than she had done since her marriage But her seclusion was always broken for the periodical visit to Winterborne's grave with Marty, which was kept up with pious strictness, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... any importance, I will let you know them. I am much mortified by receiving half a dozen Irish papers together this morning without a word from you, as the speculations on your side of the water are by no means indifferent, or uninteresting here. ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... gave the stenographer. What we made for the paper is entirely uninteresting and need not ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... listless eyes had sparkled with roguish merriment, when the shrivelled, tight-drawn lips had pouted temptingly; but spinsterhood does not sweeten the juices of a woman, and strong country air, though, like old ale, it is good when taken occasionally, dulls the brain if lived upon. A narrow, uninteresting woman I found her, troubled with a shyness that sat ludicrously upon her age, and that yet failed to save her from the landlady's customary failing of loquacity concerning "better days," together with an irritating, if ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... the unfamiliar sheets—they seemed to him to be smaller, more numerous, and different in type from the papers of the times before—and he found himself confronted with innumerable pictures about things so strange as to be uninteresting, and with tall columns of printed matter whose headings, for the most part, were as unmeaning as though they had been written in a foreign tongue—"Great Speech by Mr. Caterham"; "The ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... not writing anything of that kind. But please don't let us talk about my work. I am sure it's very uninteresting except to me. I feel very grateful to you for your kind and delightful offer, but I can't accept ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... I ran over to Ireland to see my parents. On my return I seemed to miss the charming companion of my journey over the same ground three years previously. Two uninteresting men were in the carriage: a typical German professor on tour, and communicative; and a typical English gentleman, uncommunicative. As the journey was a long one the German smoked, ate and drank himself to ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... intended to come to maturity. Under this artificial, though necessary system, the trees lose all individuality, and they never regain it because they are all more or less controlled when growing, and so become uninteresting copies ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... You notice how uninteresting Terence and Kathleen's conversation was getting. They kept on with it, however, dull as it was. They turned and went up over the hill to the blockhouse, and then down the steep path on the other side and back along the north end of the Park. "Do you come ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... and uninteresting. On the veranda of the Rose villa Corrie was waiting to meet the returning two, upon the ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... one moment to reflect on the character of these new deities of whom I have been speaking: Hercules, Castor, Minerva, Diana. It must be confessed that, as compared with the great deities of the calendar, they are uninteresting; with the exception, perhaps, of Hercules, they do not seem to have any real religious significance. They are local deities brought in from outside, and have no root in the mind of the Roman people as we have so far ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... case was decided at the Privy Council on Saturday last, and was not uninteresting. The Chancellor, Lord President, Graham, John Russell and Grant, Sir Edward East, the Master of Rolls, Vice-Chancellor, Lord Amherst, and Lord Wellesley were present (the latter not the last day). Lushington was for the appeal, and Home and Starkie against. The former made two very able ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... rather uninteresting. Owing to the dense French colonization there the natives have nearly all disappeared or become quite degenerate. We spent our time in visits to the different French planters and then sailed for ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... after a certain time, or beyond a certain degree, becomes either uninteresting or intolerable, and the musician is obliged to break it in one or two ways: either while the air or passage is perpetually repeated, its notes are variously enriched and harmonized; or else, after a certain number of repeated passages, an entirely new passage is introduced, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... that history repeats itself, that the pineal body was a useless, wastefully space consuming vestige of a once important structure. That was the view in that century of grandly inaccurate assertions, the nineteenth. Not that they relegated it with that statement to the limbo of the dull and the uninteresting. Quite the contrary. They conferred upon it a distinguished romance and mystery by identifying it as the last heir and vestigial remnant of a third eye, situated in the back of the head, which may still be observed in certain reptiles. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... peace;" but contained in addition several provisions respecting the manner of election, and the duration of parliament and the composition of the magistracy, which may not be uninteresting to the reader even at the present day. It proposed that a parliament should meet every year, to sit not less than a certain number of days, nor more than another certain number, each of which should be fixed ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... doctor went on quietly and deliberately, "that everything in this world is insignificant and uninteresting except the higher spiritual manifestations of the human mind. Intellect draws a sharp line between the animals and man, suggests the divinity of the latter, and to some extent even takes the place of the immortality ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... she said presently. 'Oh yes, I was saying that you were not tiresome although you are engaged to be married. You are not even quite uninteresting, although you are healthy and happy! All the same, I am going to try and persuade you and Peter to have the ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... might flash into anger now and then and do something rash—something that I should be sorry for later on, but which in my secret heart I should be glad I had done. Oh, I get so tired of being just a plain, goody-goody little woman who will always do the right thing in the most uninteresting way; a woman about whom there is no delightful uncertainty; a woman on whom you can always reckon just as you would on the figure 4 or 6 or any other number in mathematics. I am like such a figure—a fixed quantity, and that is why I, Charlotte Grayson, am just a ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... of our stay in Chicago as a whole would be uninteresting, and I would not weary the reader with them. Hal improved so rapidly that on the fourth day after our arrival, he was carried in comparative comfort to Mr. Hanson's residence, and placed for a few days in a pleasant chamber to gather strength for our journey home. One little ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... of travel to describe this part of the journey somewhat as follows: "Skirting the low and uninteresting shores of Africa we at length reached," etc. Low and uninteresting shores! Through the glasses we made out distant mountains far beyond nearer hills. The latter were green-covered with dense forests whence rose mysterious smokes. Along the shore we saw an occasional cocoanut plantation ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... iron beds, two chiffoniers, two chairs, a trunk bearing the initials "J. A. B." and a washstand. The floor was bare save for three rugs, one beside each bed and one in front of the washstand. The two windows had white muslin curtains and a couple of uninteresting pictures hung on the walls. He dropped the curtain at the door, placed his suit case on a chair and opened it. For the next few minutes he was busy distributing its contents. To do this it was necessary to light the gas in the bedroom and as it flared up, its ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the little quay while my father and the crew were hoisting sail. For a moment I questioned if I should not be happier in the bow of the Curlew, than tramping half a score of miles over rough uninteresting moorland on the chance of capturing a seal; but in the end I was satisfied in keeping to the plan arranged by my companions. I waited only to see the boat bend over in the fresh breeze as she sailed outward to the ships; then, armed with my harpoon and a knobbed ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... to observe the aesthetic demoralisation into which I now fell through having daily to deal with such a work. I gradually lost my dislike for this shallow and exceedingly uninteresting composition (a dislike I shared with many German musicians) in the growing interest which I was compelled to take in its interpretation; and thus it happened that the insipidness and affectation of the commonplace melodies ceased to concern me save from the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the morning, Mary dusted other rooms in which all the furniture seemed dead or asleep and, therefore, quite uninteresting. ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo
... fill up the number of human consumers or producers; but he interests nobody but the economist and the statistician, who take the heap of sand as a whole into consideration, without troubling themselves about the uninteresting uniformity of the individual grains. The crowd counts only as a massive elementary force—why? because its constituent parts are individually insignificant: they are all like each other, and we add them up like the molecules of water in a river, gauging them ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... close upon four o'clock when he left the tavern, and then began for the indefatigable Mr. Howard one of the most wearisome and uninteresting chases, through the mazes of the London streets, he ever remembers to have made. Up Notting Hill, down the slums of Notting Dale, along the High Street, beyond Hammersmith, and through Shepherd's ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... leaning up against the trunk of the willow and looked out upon the plain, over which a uniform hum could be heard, the profoundly reassured activity of a sunny work-day. This made him sad and discouraged. He had a disagreeably distinct feeling that he himself was uninteresting and commonplace. The girls fell in love with others, unusual experiences existed for others; and even his sleek, pale-blond hair, his round face, his light-blue eyes seemed to cause him woe. And suddenly a very remote ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... to the highly civilised statement of scientific fact. I think the machine, which is the intelligent and respectable end, should be preserved, if still it exists, at South Kensington or in the Louvre, along with the earlier monuments of the Christian slope. As for that uninteresting and disreputable end, official nineteenth-century art, it can be studied in a hundred public galleries and in annual exhibitions all over the world. It is the mouldy and therefore the obvious end. The spirit that came to ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Batuta crossed the Arabian Desert a second time, and took up his residence in Mecca for the space of three years. His account of the voyage along the eastern coast of Africa, as far south as Quiloa, is brief and uninteresting; but on his return he visited Oman, of which province he gives us the first authentic account. From the Pearl Islands in the Persian Gulf, he bent his way once more across Arabia to Mecca, whence he crossed ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... the Barnacle fowl, it may be an addendum, not uninteresting to your correspondent "W.B. MacCabe," to add to his extract from Giraldus another from Hector Boece, History of Scotland, "imprentit be Thomas Davidson, prenter to the Kyngis nobyll grace [James VI.]." He observes, that the opinion of some, that the "Claik geis growis on treis be the nebbis, is ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... in his carved chair in the Jacobean dining-room. He felt strangely old and dull. The portraits of beautiful women by Lawrence and Reynolds and Raeburn, which had often seemed like real company to him, looked remote and uninteresting. He fancied something cold and almost unfriendly in their expression, as if they were staring through him or beyond him. They cared nothing for his principles, his hopes, his disappointments, his successes; they belonged to another world, in which he had ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... reflect that though, after we die, we cease to be familiar with ourselves, we shall nevertheless become immediately familiar with many other histories compared with which our present life must then seem intolerably uninteresting. ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... foster children were some animals which he had had as pets, whose habits he had carefully studied. One was a Gila monster from the plains of Arizona, another was a horned owl, the third was a rat, and the fourth was an opossum. If you can imagine more uninteresting subjects than these you are more imaginative than myself, and yet he thrilled me and held three thousand people in breathless interest. Oh, my brethren, if I believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and as a Savior able not only to ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... to Rhoneland's too frequent. But whatever may have passed between him and Kate, and even if they did occasionally meet in the street and stop to speak, and sometimes to hold conversations which were neither short nor uninteresting to themselves, that is a matter between themselves with which we have nothing to do. Certain it is, however, that as Ned cooled off in his intimacy with Rhoneland, he appeared to rise in the old man's estimation; and he grew ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... plan is not closely followed in the new additions and suburbs. This uniformity in plan, combined with the level ground and the style of buildings first erected, gave to the city an extremely monotonous and uninteresting appearance, but with its growth in wealth and population, greater diversity and better taste in architecture ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... had been coupled with Maxime Dalahaide's. She had a good voice and a pretty enough face, but she would not have succeeded in Paris, people whispered, if Maxime had not helped her. I had spoken to him of this girl, and he had denied caring for her. She was a very ordinary, uninteresting creature, apart from her beauty, he said; but she had been friendless and in hard luck, and as he was half English himself, he had done what he could to aid a lonely and deserving young countrywoman, that was all. ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... than to agree with Doctor Johnson, that Miranda's slumbers were perfectly to be accounted for without the coat. Mr. Collier does not seem to know that a deeper and heavier desire to sleep follows upon the overstrained exercise of excited attention than on the weariness of a dull and uninteresting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... this work, the object of the author has been to render the knowledge of Plants entertaining and useful, not only to Botanists, but to those who have hitherto deemed it a difficult and uninteresting science. He has endeavoured to ascertain of what countries the vegetables now cultivated are natives, the earliest accounts of their cultivation, and how far they have improved by attention, or degenerated by neglect; also ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... so, my own mother. I am not ill, only lazy, and that you were not wont to encourage; my eyes would close, spite of all my efforts. But why should you have the uninteresting task of watching ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... sail between low and uninteresting shores brought us from the mouth of the Willamette to Fort Vancouver, on the Washington-Territory side of the river. Here we debarked for the night, making our way, in an ambulance sent for us from the post, a distance of two minutes' ride, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... elevate. Garrick give Strength and Majesty to the Scene. Let us soften at the keen Distress of a Belvidera; let our Souls rise with the Dignity of an Elizabeth; let us tremble at the wild Madness of a Lear;[F] but let us not Yawn at the Stupidity of uninteresting Characters. ...
— Critical Strictures on the New Tragedy of Elvira, Written by Mr. David Malloch (1763) • James Boswell, Andrew Erskine and George Dempster
... an inch during the year. The rainfall is about 130 inches annually. It is most abundant in January, February and March, and at the change of the monsoon, and there is enough all the year round to keep vegetation in beauty. Here, on uninteresting cleared land with a featureless foreground and level mangrove swamps for the middle distance, it must be terribly monotonous to have no change of seasons, no hope of the mercury falling below 80 degrees in the daytime, or of a bracing wind, or of ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... them in readiness for my arrival. The men have been selecting sweethearts instead; thus I must wait here tomorrow, that being the "Soog" or market day, when I shall purchase my camels and milch goats. The banks of the river very uninteresting—flat, desert, and mimosa bush. The soil is not so rich as on the banks of the Blue Nile—the dhurra (grain) is small. The Nile is quite two miles wide up to this point, and the high-water mark is not more than five feet above the present level. The banks shelve ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... all, don't think of coming out to this place which makes you miserable, and where you can't work. What a queer menage you must be at the Abbey now! You and the Star who has risen from the ocean—she ought to have been called Venus—tete-a-tete, and the, I gather, rather feeble and uninteresting old gentleman in bed upstairs. I should like to see you when you didn't know. Why don't you invent a machine to enable people at a distance to see as well as to hear each other? It would be very popular and bring Society ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... a burnt-sacrifice on the altar; until we reach the present time, when, although the manner of its worship has changed, the old idolatry remains in spirit the same. One or two anecdotes illustrative of the passion for gold worship may not prove uninteresting. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... bicycle skirt, and on the shelf there is a pile of bedding. There is no trap door leading into either subterranean or overhead apartments. In fact, there is nothing else, except a chair. It's very uninteresting." ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... appeared for thirty or forty or fifty years, it would be interesting to watch the gradual changes of aspect from the age of twenty, or even of thirty or forty, to that of threescore and ten. The face might be an uninteresting one; still, as sharing the inevitable changes wrought by time, it would be worth looking at as it passed through the curve of life,—the vital parabola, which betrays itself in the symbolic changes of the features. ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... footways, which are always so well worth threading out in England, leading the pedestrian into picturesque and characteristic scenes, when the highroad would show him nothing except what was commonplace and uninteresting. Now the gables of the old manor-house appeared before them, rising amidst the hereditary woods, which doubtless dated from a time beyond the days which Middleton fondly recalled, when his ancestors had walked beneath their shade. On each side of them were thickets and copses of fern, amidst which ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... there is to my uninteresting history. I came here as a candidate for this church. For the first time in my whole life I was beginning to taste real happiness. But no sooner had I taken my first breath of independence than I saw I must fight to hold the ground I had ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... do. It is, or should be, sufficient that Le Cousin Pons is a very agreeable book, more pathetic if less "grimy," than its companion, full of its author's idiosyncracy, and characteristic of his genius. It may not be uninteresting to add that Le Cousin Pons was originally called Le Deux Musiciens, or Le Parasite, and that the change, which is a great improvement, was due to ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... a long, gently rising, but hitherto uninteresting road, brings the posting traveller suddenly upon the rich, well-wooded, beautifully undulating vale of Fordingford, whose fine green pastures are brightened with occasional gleams of a meandering river, flowing through the centre of the ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... excite his attention and give him pleasure, and thus make lighter the difficult task of learning to read. The ruggedness of this task has often been increased by the use of disconnected sentences, or lessons as dry and uninteresting as finger exercises on the piano. It is a sign of promise that the demand for reading matter of interest to the child has come from teachers. I have endeavored to meet this requirement in ...
— Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans • Edward Eggleston
... know; and if it might be wrong, and isn't, it's a score to you; and if it might be wrong, and is—as so often happens—well, you know yourself, adventures sometimes turn out wrong that you didn't think were going to, but seldom, or never, the uninteresting kind, and——" ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... impatiently. The boys always seemed to get a great deal of fun out of Weaver Jimmie's tempestuous love-affair, but he found it very uninteresting. He slipped under the table, clambered upon the bench beside Hamish, and stuck his curly head between the book and the young man's face; for he had long ago discovered this to be the only effectual means of bringing Hamish back to actualities. Such a proceeding would not have been safe with ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... notes which I received from him at this time,—some of them relating to our joint engagements in society, and others to matters now better forgotten,—I shall select a few that (as showing his haunts and habits) may not, perhaps, be uninteresting. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... this is written, illustrates this rule, first by doing nothing to increase the number of houses, second by smiting the greedy landlord on the hip, third by investigating the profiteering builders and working men. For a constructive policy deals with remote and uninteresting factors, while a greedy landlord, or a profiteering ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... home and live in this exposed manner, if they were not compelled to do so. Second, he desired to find out why people who had the privilege of living in large cities came of their own accord into the uninteresting country, anyhow. Even when explanations were offered, the problem seemed still ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... her children, who, starting thence, have found name and fame elsewhere. The scope of the present work will not allow of anything move than a few brief notes, and those entirely of local bearing, but a history of the Birmingham stage would not be uninteresting reading. ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... copied quite generally into our own leading newspapers, it may be fairly presumed that most of my readers are familiar with the prominent incidents in his long and honorable public career. As a speaker he is decidedly prosy, with a hesitating utterance, a monotonous voice, and an uninteresting manner. Yet he is always heard with respectful attention by the House, in consideration of his valuable public services, his intrinsic good sense, and his unselfish patriotism. On the question at issue, he took ground midway between Lord Palmerston ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... that good chance was denied to the young couple, doubtless in order that this story might be written, in which numbers of their wonderful adventures are narrated—adventures which could never have occurred to them if they had been housed and sheltered under the comfortable uninteresting forgiveness of Miss Crawley. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... force of character, were weak and wandering, or stared blankly at the judge; her over-sized head, broad at the base, terminating in the scantiest possible light colored braid in the middle of her narrow shoulders, was as hard and uninteresting as the wooden spheres that topt the railing against which she sat. The jury, who for six weeks had had her described to them by the plaintiffs as an arch, wily enchantress, who had sapped the failing reason of Jim Byways, revolted to a man. There was something so appallingly gratuitous ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... they are allowed to combat until one has become victorious over all the rest. Why? Because the object is only to replace the last queen. Now, provided that among the worms reared as queens, only one succeeds, the fate of the others is uninteresting to the bees, whereas, during the period of swarming, it is necessary to preserve a succession of queens, for conducting the different colonies; and to ensure the safety of the queens, it is necessary to avert ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... will not be uninteresting to observe how far the influence of a great commander may extend. St. Vincent and Pownoll, who were brought up under Boscawen, and received their lieutenant's commissions from him, contributed materially to form ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... contemplation of those supreme wonders of the universe which mathematical astronomy has laid open. The grammar of a language is defined to be the art of reading and writing that language with propriety. The study of its elements is dry and uninteresting; and, while the teacher dwells with care upon the merits of the text, he should also lift the veil from that which is hidden, and lead his pupils to appreciate those riches of learning which the knowledge of a language may confer ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... doctor had sent him to a specialist. Today the specialist, after various laboratory tests, had told him most disconcerting things about the state of very necessary, but hitherto wholly uninteresting, organs of ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... Fellows saw it, and her method was to classify her acquaintances according to their systems, to keep them in their proper bundles, and to give every one the treatment he or she was accustomed to receive. And since all things British are now changing and passing away, it may not be uninteresting to record the classification Mrs. Garstein Fellows adopted. First she set apart as most precious and desirable, and requiring the most careful treatment, the "court dowdies "—for so it was that the dignity and quiet good taste that radiated ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... object—contemptible indeed in itself, but truly important and attractive as the means of gratifying those I love. No other consideration could induce me to spend another day of my life in objects in themselves uninteresting, and which afford neither instruction nor amusement. They become daily more disgusting to me; in some degree, perhaps, owing to my state of health, which is much as when I left New-York. The least fatigue brings a ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... 1820, contain "A History of the Confederation." The course of public opinion on a most important point—the nature of the connexion which ought to be maintained between these United States—may be in some degree perceived in the progress of this instrument, and may not be entirely uninteresting to the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
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