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More "Unsociable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It fully explained his eccentricities, John reflected sagely, as he mixed himself a grog. Poor Alan! He was drunk; and what a dreadful thing was drink, and what a slave to it poor Alan was, to drink in this unsociable, uncomfortable fashion! The man who would drink alone, except for health's sake - as John was now doing - was a man utterly lost. He took the grog out, and felt hazier, but warmer. It was hard work opening the portmanteau ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... only one fear—that it might not be bad enough. Then, when the image of the marquise and her son rose before him again, standing side by side, the old woman's hand in Urbain's arm, and the same cold, unsociable fixedness in the eyes of each, he cried out to himself that the fear was groundless. There was blood in the secret at the very last! He arrived at Fleurieres almost in a state of elation; he had satisfied himself, logically, that in the presence of his threat ...
— The American • Henry James
... must be more than a God, or less than a man; the latter part of this assertion would have held good had he carried it farther, and said lower than a brute, for there is no creature in the universe that is not linked into some society, except we allow the existence of that exploded and unsociable bird the Phoenix.' ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... am not especially pleased to encounter him again," he said with a slight frown; "for, if I remember aright, he acted very rudely to Myrtle and proved unsociable when I made overtures and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... he was so strong, and young, and honest-hearted, that he had been successful enough hitherto within his narrow limits. He had pleasant manners, too, and a pleasant face, which gained him as many friends as he ever cared to have; for he had a queer, reserved, unsociable twist in his character, which kept him aloof from much company, and rather spoilt his reputation for geniality and heartiness. He hated the hard work he had to go through in society; so at least he was wont to grumble, and then would add, laughing, "I daresay ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... house, and witnessed the founding of the Society of Arts in 1754. It had another claim to slight distinction as being the resort of Dr. John Armstrong, the poet of the "Art of Preserving Health," and a man so generally unsociable that one acquaintance described him as having a rooted aversion against the whole human race, except a few friends, and ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... of the evening is over now. We have all signalized ourselves by feats of valor. I have scampered through an unsociable country-dance with the head coachman, and have had my smart gown of faint pink and pearl color nearly torn off my back by the ponderous-footed pair that trip directly after me. We have, in fact, done our duty, and may retire as soon as we like. But the music has got ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... the Isle of Rhe, Felton had applied for the company; and when disappointed, he threw up his commission, and retired in discontent from the army. While private resentment was boiling in his sullen, unsociable mind, he heard the nation resound with complaints against the duke; and he met with the remonstrance of the commons, in which his enemy was represented as the cause of every national grievance, and as the great enemy of the public. Religious fanaticism further inflamed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... single woman. Such a grace could, indeed, seem merely invidious, ungracious, and unreasonable in the eyes of both parties; he retreated without listening to the persuasions of his opponents, or asking the consent of his friends. The origin of all lay in his unsociable, supercilious, and self-willed disposition, which, in all cases, is offensive to most people; and when combined with a passion for distinction passes into absolute savageness and mercilessness. Men decline to ask favors of the people, professing not to need any honors from them; and then are ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... us. We shut the door against cheerfulness, and surround ourselves with gloom. The habit gives a coloring to our life. We grow querulous, moody and unsympathetic. Our conversation becomes full of regrets. We are harsh in our judgment of others. We are unsociable, and think everybody else is so. We make our breast a store-house of pain, which we inflict upon ourselves as well as ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... required," if one must descend to the vernacular. Well, I sat persistently and patiently through I am afraid to say how many operations, and the operator described me as being surrounded by spirits—I always am according to Mediums, but my spirits must be eminently unsociable ones, for they seldom give me a word, and on this occasion refused to be "taken" as resolutely as the bashful gentleman in the Graphic who resisted the operations of the prison officials to obtain a sun-picture of his interesting ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... be thought unsociable, he rose hastily, and was soon talking to the guests with unusual eagerness. His sudden lapses into thought, however, created the impression in the minds of some of his listeners that he ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... refer events to the conflict of higher powers, he is content to lay before us the scenes of everyday life. We are introduced to men who, in times of trouble, lose first their incomes and then their places; to others who, in trying to get two appointments, miss both; to unsociable misers who carry about their money sewn into their clothes, and die mad when they are robbed of it; to others, who accept well-paid offices, and then sicken with a melancholy longing for their lost freedom. ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Came, who was a friend of her Aunt Miranda's and one of the few persons who exchanged calls with that somewhat unsociable lady. The Came farm was not a long walk from the brick house, for Rebecca could go across the fields when haying-time was over, and her delight at being sent on an errand in that direction could not be measured, now that the new ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... is, the comic character may, strictly speaking, be quite in accord with stern morality. All it has to do is to bring itself into accord with society. The character of Alceste is that of a thoroughly honest man. But then he is unsociable, and, on that very account, ludicrous. A flexible vice may not be so easy to ridicule as a rigid virtue. It is rigidity that society eyes with suspicion. Consequently, it is the rigidity of Alceste that makes us laugh, though here rigidity stands ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... in what had been once the centre, but was now the edge of the town. The little troop had to pass through the negro quarter—small frame-houses, peppered over grassless, bare lots, the broken-down fences protesting against unsociable isolation. The Rooms, from the outside, reminded one of a hive of angry bees. In and out of the door men were hurrying, and a crowd swarmed on the side-walk talking in a loud, excited hum. As soon as the Professor was recognized, a silence of astonishment fell upon the throng. With stares ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... round. depopulate; dispeople^, unpeople^. Adj. secluded, sequestered, retired, delitescent^, private, bye; out of the world, out of the way; the world forgetting by the world forgot [Pope]. snug, domestic, stay-at-home. unsociable; unsocial, dissocial^; inhospitable, cynical, inconversable^, unclubbable, sauvage [Fr.], troglodytic. solitary; lonely, lonesome; isolated, single. estranged; unfrequented; uninhabitable, uninhabited; tenantless; abandoned; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to engross him. He grew moodier, more exacting. If Myra arrived home late, he wanted to know where she had been, whom she had seen. Were they dining out, he muttered unsociable objections; were people coming to the house, he complained of the lack of privacy. What a whirl they lived in! So they did, but what was the remedy? Myra herself felt helpless in a tangle of engagements. They overpowered ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... something French in his manner? Many people will like him because they see in him—or they think they do—a certain happy mean. Will they not fancy they catch him taking the middle way between the unsociable French etude and the old-fashioned English "picture"? If one of these extremes is a desert, the other, no doubt, is an oasis still more vain. I have a recollection of productions of Mr. Alfred ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... Lilac Lane and the words Mr. Richmond had given her, that Maria charged her with being unsociable. Much Matilda wished that she could have talked with her sister about those same words; but ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... Pitt; harsh and unbending, like a settled frost, he seemed wrapped in the mantle of egotism and sublunary conceit; and it was from the uninviting expression of this great man's countenance, that I first drew my conceptions as to how a proud and unsociable man looked. With very different emotions I was wont to survey the mild but expressive features of his great opponent, Fox: there was a placidity mixed up with the graver lines of thought and reflection, that would have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... or less a shamefaced thing to speak of one's feelings before others; and yet here am I talking like this to you, and am not a bit ashamed or shy. I am an unsociable sort of fellow and shall very likely not come to see you again for some time; but don't think the worse of me for that. It is not that I do not value your society; and you must never suppose that I have ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... are, as Plater notes, desides, taciturni, aegre impulsi, nec nisi coacti procedunt, &c. they will scarce be compelled to do that which concerns them, though it be for their good, so diffident, so dull, of small or no compliment, unsociable, hard to be acquainted with, especially of strangers; they had rather write their minds than speak, and above all things love solitariness. Ob voluptatem, an ob timorem soli sunt? Are they so solitary for pleasure (one asks,) ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... way, what has become of Jack? He needn't have taken me so literally as never to send me a message even! You mentioned his having been at the Cape while you were there. Was he just as unsociable as ever? I can see him now lying flat on his back in the bottom of a boat reading poetry. I hate poetry, and when he used to quote his favorite passages I made parodies on them. Now you were always different. You'd rhapsodize with ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... received from my master, with my private and ill-chosen studies, rendered me reserved, unsociable, and almost deranged my reason. Though my taste had not preserved me from silly unmeaning books, by good fortune I was a stranger to licentious or obscene ones; not that La Tribu (who was very accommodating) had any scruple of lending ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... recalled that haymaking party and her gradual friendship, as the years went by, with the unsociable young Sales, a friendship which had been tacitly recognized by them both when, meeting her soon after his mother's death, he had laid his arms and head on the low stone wall by which they were standing, and wept without restraint. It was a display she could not have given herself and it shocked ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... was perhaps, of all persons, better able to explain the mystery than any one else. He had overheard in Ranger's study a general lamentation about the prospects for Saturday, and a wish expressed by his brother that Rollitt were not so unsociable and undependable. Everybody agreed it was utterly useless to ask him to play, and that they would have to get a second-rate man to fill the empty place, and so most probably ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... circumcised and also baptized: where the soldier, who in one or several engagements, has been so fortunate as to present seven of the enemies' heads to the king, is made noble: where they live in that rare and unsociable opinion of the mortality of the soul: where the women are delivered without pain or fear: where the women wear copper leggings upon both legs, and if a louse bite them, are bound in magnanimity to bite them again, and dare not marry, till first they have made their king ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... as a defect. But there is another way of looking at it; for even shyness has its bright side, and contains an element of good. Shy men and shy races are ungraceful and undemonstrative, because, as regards society at large, they are comparatively unsociable. They do not possess those elegancies of manner acquired by free intercourse, which distinguish the social races, because their tendency is to shun society rather than to seek it. They are shy ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... Good-Neighbourhood. A Man that is out of Humour when an unexpected Guest breaks in upon him, and does not care for sacrificing an Afternoon to every Chance-comer; that will be the Master of his own Time, and the Pursuer of his own Inclinations makes but a very unsociable Figure in this kind of Life. I shall therefore retire into the Town, if I may make use of that Phrase, and get into the Crowd again as fast as I can, in order to be alone. I can there raise what Speculations ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... extent of matrimony by the lady of the house,—a widow, and a shrew. He hated, or at least professed to hate her, and had ridiculous stories about her to no end; but she married him, and he still lives. Another, of a rather unsociable turn, rejected the proffered civilities of all his fellow-boarders who ever came to offer him rations of curious tobacco or to assist him in performing a libation of old and valuable Hollands. The only one of the party ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... watch these animals, they kill some; and thus by defending their property, they soon become professed hunters; this is the progress; once hunters, farewell to the plough. The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable; a hunter wants no neighbour, he rather hates them, because he dreads the competition. In a little time their success in the woods makes them neglect their tillage. They trust to the natural fecundity of the earth, and therefore do ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... position of musical director in Weimar. He had left Vienna before my poetry had attracted attention, so that we had not become acquainted with each other. It was almost touching to witness the joy with which this ordinarily unsociable man greeted me and took possession of me. In the first place I probably revived in him memories of his native city, which he had left with reluctance; then, too, it probably gave him satisfaction to find his literary countryman honored and respected in Weimar, where he heard ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... man to be a good citizen or a faithful subject. Without being able to compel anybody to believe the articles, the sovereign could banish from the state anybody who did not believe them; it can banish him, not as impious, but as unsociable, as incapable of sincerely loving laws and justice. If anyone, having publicly accepted these dogmas, should act as if he did not believe them, he should be punished with death; he would have committed the greatest of crimes, that of ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... timidity was extreme, and Claire was unsociable to excess, they therefore seldom spoke to each other. During the entire winter, the magistrate did not directly address the young girl ten times; and, on these rare occasions, he had learned mechanically by heart the phrase he proposed to repeat to her, well knowing that, without ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... Beard," where, amidst irony and invective, the literary monarch bestows on himself many exquisite and characteristic touches. All that the persons of fashion alleged against the literary character, Julian unreservedly confesses—his undressed beard and awkwardness, his obstinacy, his unsociable habits, his deficient tastes, while at the same time he represents his good qualities as so many extravagances. But, in this Cervantic pleasantry of self-reprehension, the imperial philosopher has not failed to show this light and corrupt people that the reason he could not possibly ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... the pleasure, I implore you. I can't blame you for being gruff and unsociable; were you otherwise you wouldn't reside at—at—" he turned his head to read the half legible sign on the station house, "at Chazy Junction. I'm familiar with most parts of the United States, but Chazy Junction gets ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... papers from which a bit is clipped every six months, and which represent three or four thousand francs of income. It is rare in our profession, and to gain that poor hoard I have been obliged—I, a poet—to imitate the unsociable virtues of a bourgeois, know how to deny a jewel to my wife, a dress to my daughter. At last I have that money. And I often said to myself, if I should die their bread is assured, and here is a little marriage portion for Helen! And I was content—I ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... in mind, every morning, that before night you will meet with some meddlesome, ungrateful and abusive fellow, with some envious or unsociable churl. Remember that their perversity proceeds from ignorance of good and evil; and that since it has fallen to my share to understand the natural beauty of a good action and the deformity of an ill one; since I am satisfied that ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... the cavernous bedroom was gained I felt decidedly quivery-mouthed, so that I dumped my belongings on the floor in a heap and went to the window to gaze on the lake until my spirits should rise. But it was a gray day, and the lake looked large, and wet and unsociable. You couldn't get chummy with it. I turned to my great barn of a room. You couldn't get chummy with that, either. I began to unpack, with furious energy. In vain I turned every gas jet blazing high. They only cast dim shadows in the murky vastness of that ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... harmonise well with such surroundings, and that some persons, by the dispensing power of the imagination, can go back several centuries in spirit, and put themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless, unsociable way of life that was in its place upon these savage hills. Now, when I am sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like David before Saul;[9] and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in me but an unpleasant pity; so ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... knew a little English already, and quickly picked up more. He was thus well able to understand the orders given him. He did not appear to be a favourite with the men. He was evidently retiring and unsociable. Perhaps he had been so long subjected to ill-treatment from others, that he was unwilling to place confidence in those among whom he was cast, until he had ascertained that they were well-disposed towards ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... has, in many of these instances, attained the representation or resemblance that he purposes. Verse can imitate only sound and motion. A boundless verse, a headlong verse, and a verse of brass, or of strong brass, seem to comprise very incongruous and unsociable ideas. What there is peculiar in the sound of the line expressing loose care, I cannot discover; nor why the pine is taller in an alexandrine ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... one side of the street," he gasped, "pretending to be interested in Roman roads, and me on the other pulling a long face over my diaries, and neither of us with a Roman road or a diary to our names. Let's have an end to such unsociable arrangements, old friend; you bring your Roman roads and the bottle to lay the dust over to me one night, and I'll bring my diaries and my peg over to you the next. Never drink alone—one of my maxims in life—if you can find someone to drink with you. And there were you within a few yards of me ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... Gashford to keep his gold in a huge leathern bag, which he hid in a hole in the ground within his tent during the day, and placed under his pillow during the night. It pleased him also to dwell and work alone, partly because he was of an unsociable disposition, and partly to prevent men becoming acquainted with ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... necessary but unequal laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind by confining to a few the possession of those objects that are coveted by many. Of all our passions and appetites the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... that it freezes the marrow of our bones—and in this world one must have one's feet warm. And then all that would infallibly fill me with ill-humour; for why do we so constantly see religious people so harsh, so querulous, so unsociable? 'Tis because they have imposed a task upon themselves which is not natural to them. They suffer, and when people suffer, they make others suffer too. That is not my game, nor that of my protectors either; I have to be gay, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Then Turner was accounted unsociable; besides, he was ragged, uncouth, independent, and did not conform to the ways of society; so the select circle cast him out—more properly speaking, did not let ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... were not chums, but, somehow, when they had the whole school to themselves they couldn't sit on forms ten yards apart—it seemed so very unsociable and unfriendly. So Will brought his slate over to Johnnie, and they were soon busily discussing the difficulties of ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... began to say it himself. He is now the person to say "Silence, boys;" and then to ask the blessing on the meal. It makes them gather round the table, instead of sitting down here and there in the comfortless, unsociable way they used to do. Tom and Dick go to school together now, and Dick is getting on famously, and will soon be able to help his next brother over his lessons, as Tom has ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... broke off suddenly, she remembered, and smiled in delighted recollection of the evening before. Waking was usually such a bore; the thought of breakfast, always a severe test to the unsociable, was horrid to her. There would be either a solitary meal in the big dark dining-room, or what was worse, guests to entertain (for Lady Kingsmead never appeared until after eleven), and the disagreeable hurry and scurry contingent on ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... Jillifrey, and proceeded to Vintain, a town situated about two miles up a creek on the southern side of the river. This place is much resorted to by Europeans on account of the great quantities of beeswax which are brought hither for sale; the wax is collected in the woods by the Feloops, a wild and unsociable race of people. Their country, which is of considerable extent, abounds in rice; and the natives supply the traders, both on the Gambia and Cassamansa rivers, with that article, and also with goats and poultry, on very reasonable terms. ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... visit to Silly in the following year the son of the house arrived, and at first kept very much to himself and to his books. But having heard his sister and myself complaining of these unsociable ways, he frankly confessed his fault and amended it, and from that day we spent every hour together. His mind and his manner was infinitely agreeable; and in my successive visits to Silly we formed a delightful friendship which was never ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... matter-of-fact way). Helen, ask yourself this question: what choice is left to a man in such a case? You are generally known as the most beautiful woman in this city. Now shall I, an artist, allow myself to acquire the reputation of an unsociable lout who shuts himself up in his four walls and denies himself to all visitors? The second possibility would be to receive you while at the same time pretending not to understand you. That would give me the wholly undeserved reputation ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... and a tear fell like a dew-drop from her long eyelashes. These things still more amazed the soul of Mr. Fordyce. That anybody should shed a tear for a being so sordid and unsociable as Abel Graham struck him as one of the extraordinary things he had met with in his career; and to see this fair young creature, fitted by nature for a sphere and for companionship so different, sincerely grieving for the old man's distress, seemed the most extraordinary thing of all. Mr. Fordyce ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... element" because it was hard to get it into combination with other elements. It might, on the other hand, be looked upon as an active element because it acts so energetically in getting out of its compounds. We can dodge the question by saying that nitrogen is a most unreliable and unsociable element. Like Kipling's cat it ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... my air of dejection increased. I must be unsociable no longer. Let me rejoin my dear schoolfellows, making a little detour in order to appear to reach them from the direction not of the pond but of ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... who, if we might judge of him by the benignity of his writings, was surely of a most amiable and happy temper, has yet left us a melancholy and discouraging history of the unsociable condition of men of superior knowledge and abilities. He supposes that those who have devoted much time to the cultivation of their understandings, have habitually less sympathy, or less exercise for their sympathy, than those ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... said Mr. Lindsay holding out his hand "here's your aunt says you don't like anybody how is it? are you of an unsociable disposition?" ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... for a minute or two. Then she got up. "I don't see," she remarked, "why Rule No. I. should make us unsociable each with the other. The very object of our club is that we should have no secrets, but should be quite open and above-board. Now, Martha West, look ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... I replied. "Of course I shall not think you unsociable. I would not interfere with any of your ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... rather a silent affair at Kent's, as well as at Madame Bernard's. Being absorbed in his own thoughts, Allison did not realise how unsociable he was, nor that the old man across the table from him perceived that they had reached the beginning of ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... marketing and paid cash for everything. The telegraph operator, who is the only one I've spoken with in the town, represents the attitude of everybody there, probably, and he thinks, evidently, that an eccentric recluse lives here, and that his housekeeper is pretty close-mouthed and 'unsociable,' as he put it. It's rather strange that they aren't more curious, but she must have known how to deal with them, for whatever interest anybody may have felt died out long ago. They know the man had a daughter and that she's grown now, but this ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... the start met popular disapproval. The early Christians, who tried to keep themselves free from idolatry, were regarded as very unsociable persons. They never appeared at public feasts and entertainments. They would not join in the amusements of the circus or the amphitheater. They refused to send their children to the schools. The ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... was at an intolerant age, and if his schoolfellows struck him as more backward or more stupid than they need be, he is not likely to have taken pains to conceal the impression. It is difficult, at all events, to think of him as unsociable, and his talents certainly had their amusing side. Miss Browning tells me that he made his schoolfellows act plays, some of which he had written for them; and he delighted his friends, not long ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... to ask him point blank whether he, at least, didn't know why Falk, a notoriously unsociable man, had taken to visiting his ship with such assiduity. After all, I reflected suddenly, it was a most remarkable thing. I wonder now what Hermann would have said. As it turned out he didn't let me ask. Forgetting all about Falk apparently, he started a monologue on his plans ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... from impenetrable secrecy, and Ludloe's admonitions tending powerfully to impress me with the necessity of wariness and circumspection in my general intercourse with mankind, I had gradually fallen into sedate, reserved, mysterious, and unsociable habits. My heart wanted ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... for such undertaking, the civilization of barbaric nations. And what Scythian horse, or Parthian arrows, or Indian wealth could have checked seventy thousand Romans advancing in arms under Pompeius and Caesar, whose name these nations heard of long before they heard of the name of Rome? Such unsociable, and various, and savage nations had they invaded and conquered. But now they engaged with one another in battle, without even feeling any compunction about their own glory, for which they spared not their ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... it's more of a sociable place there," Miss Mela broke in again. "I never saw such an unsociable place as New York. We've been in this house three months, and I don't believe that if we stayed three years any of the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... his gold in a huge leathern bag, which he hid in a hole in the ground within his tent during the day, and placed under his pillow during the night. It pleased him also to dwell and work alone, partly because he was of an unsociable disposition, and partly to prevent men becoming acquainted ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... passed among winter-sporters of a certain type. From their conversation I was able to learn that Badeloden was formerly overrun by Germans; that Franzheim was excellent if you stayed at the Grand, but at the Kurhaus the guests were unsociable, while at the Oberalp you were not done well and the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... red papers from which a bit is clipped every six months, and which represent three or four thousand francs of income. It is rare in our profession, and to gain that poor hoard I have been obliged—I, a poet—to imitate the unsociable virtues of a bourgeois, know how to deny a jewel to my wife, a dress to my daughter. At last I have that money. And I often said to myself, if I should die their bread is assured, and here is a little marriage portion for Helen! And I was content—I was proud!—for ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... of this new desire—the desire of seeing the world—soon had its effect in making Rasselas no longer gloomy and unsociable. Considering himself as master of a secret stock of happiness, he affected to be busy in all the assemblies and schemes of diversion, because he supposed the frequency of his presence necessary to the success of his purposes. He retired gladly to privacy, because in picturing ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... "and I think the club-house is very comfortable. There are often some quite nice men staying there. If only father weren't so awfully peculiar, the place would be almost tolerable in the season. That reminds me," she went on, with a little sigh, "I must warn you about father. He's the most unsociable person ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... indeed great outlying portions of mankind which are not, perhaps never have been, included in this Human Society; still they are outlying portions and nothing else, fragmentary, unsociable, solitary, and unmeaning, protesting and revolting against the grand central formation of which I am speaking, but not uniting with each other into a second whole. I am not denying of course the civilization of the Chinese, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... nearly ten years I endured cold, hunger, insults, the dungeon, and blows, according to the more or less savage caprices of this monster. His fierce hatred of me arose from the fact that he could not succeed in depraving me; my rugged, headstrong, and unsociable nature preserved me from his vile seductions. It is possible that I had not any strong tendencies to virtue; to hatred I luckily had. Rather than do the bidding of my tyrant I would have suffered a thousand deaths. And so I grew up without conceiving any affection for vice. However, my ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... for there was no chair, and that in his own cold lobby on this freezing night! It fully explained his eccentricities, John reflected sagely, as he mixed himself a grog. Poor Alan! He was drunk; and what a dreadful thing was drink, and what a slave to it poor Alan was, to drink in this unsociable, uncomfortable fashion! The man who would drink alone, except for health's sake - as John was now doing - was a man utterly lost. He took the grog out, and felt hazier, but warmer. It was hard work opening the portmanteau and finding ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... loose riding-coat with huge cuffs ornamented with tarnished silver lace and large metal buttons, who sat apart from the regular frequenters of the house, and wearing a hat flapped over his face, which was still further shaded by the hand on which his forehead rested, looked unsociable enough. ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... situated near the Court House, in what had been once the centre, but was now the edge of the town. The little troop had to pass through the negro quarter—small frame-houses, peppered over grassless, bare lots, the broken-down fences protesting against unsociable isolation. The Rooms, from the outside, reminded one of a hive of angry bees. In and out of the door men were hurrying, and a crowd swarmed on the side-walk talking in a loud, excited hum. As soon as the Professor was recognized, ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... having at his disposal a rich and perfectly ordered store of thought and knowledge upon which he could draw with perfect ease and assurance. When I was first introduced to him, he appeared to be rather distant in manner than inviting friendly approach. But I was told that ill health had made him unsociable and somewhat morose and testy, and, indeed, there was often the trace of suffering and weariness in his face. It was also remarked in the Senate that at times he was ill-tempered and inclined to indulge in biting sarcasms and to ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... to purify the convention, or to dismiss one of its members, and it was a difficult step to get over, even for parties. Danton did not exonerate Marat. "I do not like him," said he; "I have had experience of his temperament; it is volcanic, crabbed and unsociable. But why seek for the language of a faction in what he writes? Has the general agitation any other cause than that of the revolutionary movement itself?" Robespierre, on his part, protested that he knew very little of Marat; that, previous to the 10th of August, he had ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... shows you the way to get to a red cross that doesn't exist on the face of nature. I like green crosses as a matter of taste, but all our paralysed friend had left was a red one, so I took that, not to be unsociable." ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... came and listened to the letters in silence while the others buzzed and commented. Rob, so the Harbour folk said, was much changed. He had grown unsociable and preferred to stay home and read books rather than go a-visiting as did others. The Harbour folk shook their heads over this. There was something wrong with a man who read books when there was a plenty of other amusements. Jacob Radnor ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... those motives which operate upon all his fellows, he is not fit to live in society; he would contradict the very end of his association: he would he its enemy; he would place obstacles to its natural tendency; his rebellious disposition, his unsociable will, not being susceptible of that modification which is convenient to his own true interests and to the interests of his fellow-citizens; these would unite themselves against such an enemy; and the law which is, or ought to be the expression of the general will, would ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... place. When an Old Lady has a guilty conscience, it is apt to make her nervous and distract her thoughts from immediate pleasure. She wondered a little uneasily if Sylvia really did suspect her. Then she concluded that it was out of the question. Who would suspect a mean, unsociable Old Lady, who had no friends, and who gave only five cents to the Sewing Circle when everyone else gave ten or fifteen, to be a fairy godmother, the donor of beautiful party dresses, and the recipient of gifts ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... I've spoken with in the town, represents the attitude of everybody there, probably, and he thinks, evidently, that an eccentric recluse lives here, and that his housekeeper is pretty close-mouthed and 'unsociable,' as he put it. It's rather strange that they aren't more curious, but she must have known how to deal with them, for whatever interest anybody may have felt died out long ago. They know the man had a daughter and that she's grown now, but ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... unsociable than usual. I was too much annoyed to speak, and my father too preoccupied. I longed to inquire after the Chevalier, but not choosing to break the silence, hurried through my breakfast that I might run round to the Red Lion immediately after. Before we had left the table, a messenger ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... Evadne was naturally unsociable was pretty general, and Colonel Colquhoun believed it as much as anybody. I remember being at As-You-Like-It one afternoon when he rallied her on the subject. He had stopped me as I was driving past to ask me to look at a horse he was ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... almost venerable Teuton by the name of Scheidle. Mr. Scheidle occupied an anomalous position, but one of absolute authority, since he had been for many years the United States Manager of no less than three of the largest foreign reinsurance companies. He was unsociable, apparently uninterested in anybody save possibly himself, and disinclined to be lured by any call or beckoning whatsoever from his William Street office. An outsider would have said that most of his time was employed in crossing the ocean, for it seemed as ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... captain being killed in the retreat at the Isle of Rhe, Felton had applied for the company; and when disappointed, he threw up his commission, and retired in discontent from the army. While private resentment was boiling in his sullen, unsociable mind, he heard the nation resound with complaints against the duke; and he met with the remonstrance of the commons, in which his enemy was represented as the cause of every national grievance, and as the great enemy of the public. Religious fanaticism further inflamed these vindictive ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... morning, that before night you will meet with some meddlesome, ungrateful and abusive fellow, with some envious or unsociable churl. Remember that their perversity proceeds from ignorance of good and evil; and that since it has fallen to my share to understand the natural beauty of a good action and the deformity of an ill one; since I am satisfied that the disobliging person is of kin to me, our minds being both extracted ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... Mr. Coulson replied. "I don't think he was seasick, but he was miserably unsociable, and he seldom left his cabin. I doubt whether there were half a dozen people on board who would have recognized him afterwards ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... begging me to take pains to introduce the new-comers into the "best society." To appreciate the joke thoroughly you must understand that there is no society here at all—absolutely none. We are not proud, we Maritzburgians, nor are we inhospitable, nor exclusive, nor unsociable. Not a bit. We are as anxious as any community can be to have society or sociable gatherings, or whatever you like to call the way people manage to meet together; but circumstances are altogether too strong for us, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... fond of clubs, corporate bodies, joint-stock companies, and large associations of all kinds?—Because they are the most unsociable set of people in the world; for being mostly at variance with each other, they are glad to get any one else to join and be on their side; having no spontaneous attraction, they are forced to fasten themselves into the machine of society; and each ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... afraid," he confessed, "that when I found that I had a fellow traveller in my coupe I felt most ungracious and unsociable. I was in a thoroughly bad temper and indisposed for conversation. The simplest way to escape from it seemed to be to plead ignorance of any language save ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... it is more or less a shamefaced thing to speak of one's feelings before others; and yet here am I talking like this to you, and am not a bit ashamed or shy. I am an unsociable sort of fellow and shall very likely not come to see you again for some time; but don't think the worse of me for that. It is not that I do not value your society; and you must never suppose that I have taken offence ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... (who would probably be glad to dispense with the sight of her countenance), inspire in this fairy such a lofty idea of herself and such a profound contempt for her neighbor, that they make her positively unsociable. She remains forever absorbed in the latrian worship which she believes due to herself. She deigns to speak but to God, and He must indeed be a kind and merciful God if He listens ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... have been circulated about General Gordon is one that he was very unsociable and morose, shunning society in general, and ladies' society in particular. It is true that he shunned a certain class of society; there was also a certain set of women that he fought shy of; but it is quite untrue to say that he was unsociable. ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... of the river. This place is much resorted to by Europeans on account of the great quantities of beeswax which are brought hither for sale; the wax is collected in the woods by the Feloops, a wild and unsociable race of people. Their country, which is of considerable extent, abounds in rice; and the natives supply the traders, both on the Gambia and Cassamansa rivers, with that article, and also with goats and poultry, on very reasonable terms. The honey which they collect is ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... Cherub. "You should see a tertulia, if you want to know how families can enjoy themselves together. But there's another side of the picture, too. English and American people—there are a few—accuse us of being unsociable. They say we never give invitations to luncheons and dinners as people of other countries do; that a few calls are exchanged, and that is all, in an intercourse, it may ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... when he arrived, do much to help matters. He was so hopelessly English. At least, that was the way Ann put it. He was shy and sensitive. It is a trying combination. It made him appear stupid and conceited. A lonely childhood had rendered him unsociable, unadaptable. A dreamy, imaginative temperament imposed upon him long moods of silence: a liking for long solitary walks. For the first time Ann and ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... trembled, and a tear fell like a dew-drop from her long eyelashes. These things still more amazed the soul of Mr. Fordyce. That anybody should shed a tear for a being so sordid and unsociable as Abel Graham struck him as one of the extraordinary things he had met with in his career; and to see this fair young creature, fitted by nature for a sphere and for companionship so different, sincerely grieving ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... offended at a trifle. Do not be offish and unsociable. The Steamship Subsidy bill was a fraud on the government. You voted for it, Mr. Trollop, though you always opposed the measure until after you had an interview one evening with a certain Mrs. McCarter at her house. She was my agent. She was acting for me. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... the afterguard was concerned. Pound being a rough and capable man of the old school with no false dignity and an open manner of speech. He had been talking of his little house at Twickenham, of Mrs. Pound and the children, of servants and neighbours that were unsociable and now he was talking of dreams. He had been dreaming the night before of Pembroke docks, the port he had started from as a boy. Pembroke docks was a bad dream for Pound, and he said so. It always heralded some disaster when it appeared ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... applause. Poor Fred was indeed in need of some appreciation on the score of merit, for he was not much to look upon, being at that trying age when a young fellow's moustache is only a light down, an age at which youths always look their worst, and are awkward and unsociable because they are timid. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... country of the Quadi at Granua, these. Betimes in the morning say to thyself, This day I shalt have to do with an idle curious man, with an unthankful man, a railer, a crafty, false, or an envious man; an unsociable uncharitable man. All these ill qualities have happened unto them, through ignorance of that which is truly good and truly bad. But I that understand the nature of that which is good, that it only is to be desired, ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... the latter part of this assertion would have held good had he carried it farther, and said lower than a brute, for there is no creature in the universe that is not linked into some society, except we allow the existence of that exploded and unsociable bird ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... try!" Was still the voluble Pedlar's cry; "It's a great privation, there's no dispute, To live like the dumb unsociable brute, And to hear no more of the pro and con, And how Society's going on, Than Mumbo Jumbo or Prester John, And all for want of this sine qua non; Whereas, with a horn that never offends, You may join the genteelest party that is, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... I thought marked the physiognomy of Pitt; harsh and unbending, like a settled frost, he seemed wrapped in the mantle of egotism and sublunary conceit; and it was from the uninviting expression of this great man's countenance, that I first drew my conceptions as to how a proud and unsociable man looked. With very different emotions I was wont to survey the mild but expressive features of his great opponent, Fox: there was a placidity mixed up with the graver lines of thought and reflection, that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... bronzed and bearded Greek, sat sullenly on his net while we sailed his craft. It was a new Columbia River salmon boat, evidently on its first trip, and it handled splendidly. Even when Charley praised it, our prisoner refused to speak or to notice us, and we soon gave him up as a most unsociable fellow. ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... door against cheerfulness, and surround ourselves with gloom. The habit gives a colouring to our life. We grow querulous, moody, and unsympathetic. Our conversation becomes full of regrets. We are harsh in our judgment of others. We are unsociable, and think everybody else is so. We make our breast a storehouse of pain, which we inflict upon ourselves as well ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... severe in the rule of his household, very seldom unbending to mirth. Though not particularly robust, he employed his leisure in long walks about the moors, walks sometimes prolonged till after midnight, sometimes begun long before dawn. His acquaintances called him unsociable, and doubt less he was so in the sense that he could not find at Sowerby Bridge any one for whose society be greatly cared. It was even a rare thing for him to sit down with his wife and children for more than a few minutes; if he remained in the house, he kept apart ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... citizen or a faithful subject. Without being able to compel anybody to believe the articles, the sovereign could banish from the state anybody who did not believe them; it can banish him, not as impious, but as unsociable, as incapable of sincerely loving laws and justice. If anyone, having publicly accepted these dogmas, should act as if he did not believe them, he should be punished with death; he would have committed the greatest of crimes, that of ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... why. He never talked of his private affairs, even with me, though we were friends, "Jack" and "Roddy" to each other still, and inhabited lodgings together in Jesus Lane. He owed money to no one. Unsociable habit, I used to call it; destructive of ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Mr. Ottinger interrupted, "chop the trimmings. We're here for the stuff, ain't we?" He was immediately reprehended for his brusque, unsociable manner. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 'You unsociable devil,' George's eyes seemed to answer. "Yes, that's all: Look him up in his mausoleum—the old chap might want to prophesy." The grin died on the rich curves of his face, and he added: "Haven't ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... such important differences, Philautus cannot do less than find a wife in England, and Euphues, whose unsociable humour prevents his doing likewise, carries away with him into his native land the remembrance of "a place, in my opinion (if any such may be on the earth) not inferiour to a paradise," and of a Queen "of singuler beautie and chastitie, excelling ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... M. Joly, an unsociable man, who was for raising his fortune by using the Princes badly, and who, on this account, was often the dupe of Montreuil, secretary to the Prince de Conti.—See JOLY'S "Memoirs," vol. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... nation of antiquity. Again, he 'knows nothing' of duties to the mother, although he is so insistent on duties to the father; but the high position of women and their matriarchal privileges oppose any deduction that Egyptian manners were somewhat to seek in this direction. Ke'gemni says of the unsociable man that he is a grief to his mother, and another moralist of uncertain date (perhaps Twelfth Dynasty, about B.C. 2700), named 'Eney, is explicit on this matter. He says to his son, 'I gave thee thy mother, she that bore ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... who do not smoke are usually of a sour and unsociable disposition. All red-haired people smoke naturally, and they almost invariably use cut-plug. Very dark-haired men smoke twist, and their natural strength and virtue is such that in the intervals of smoking they ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... character, and Annette really seemed like an anomalous contradiction. There was a duality about her nature as if the blood of two races were mingling in her veins. To some persons Annette was loving and love-able, bright, intelligent, obliging and companionable; to others, unsociable, unamiable and repelling. Her heart was like a harp which sent out its harmonious discords in accordance with the moods of the player who touched its chords. To some who swept them it gave out tender and touching ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... there are poets and poets, poets sociable and poets very unsociable. Wordsworth made the country, but Lamb made the town; and there is quite a band of poets nowadays who share his distaste for mountains, and take London for their muse. If you'll promise not to cry again, I'll recall some lines by a ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... moved. Possibly he raised his eyebrows, and certainly he stared harder than he did before. "You're pretty unsociable," he said slowly, as Mr. Hoopdriver seized the handles and stood ready to mount as soon as ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... over that," responded Mattingly, with an exasperating confidence that drove her nearly frantic, from the manifest kindliness of intent that made it impossible for her to resent it. "I felt that way myself at first. Things will look strange and unsociable for a while, until you get the hang of them. You'll naturally stamp round and cuss a little—" He stopped in ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... out there too. They are all gone. I catch sight of a small door, in the panelling, on my right at the end of this corridor, closing quickly. They are gone evidently to visit some other quarter of the house. They might have stopped for me. Very unsociable. One seems to hear every footfall in this house. And even when you're not speaking, your thoughts appear to find an echo, and to be repeated aloud. In this short narrow gallery, there is an old picture of a man in a Spanish dress, holding a melon in his hand. His eyes follow ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... could never forgive Mrs. Whittredge. Few guessed the intensity hidden beneath Celia's gentle manner. Only now and then a spark from her dark blue eyes revealed it. The general construction put upon her proud reserve was that she was unsociable. ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... mixed with the men on the Kalahua Estate in the wild revelries with which they too often sought to break the monotony of their existence and celebrate a good season, he was by no means a morose or unsociable man; and Chard, the merry-hearted Belgian sugar-boiler, often declared that it was Prout alone who kept the estate going and the native labourers from turning on the white men and cutting their throats, out of sheer revenge for the brutal treatment they received from Sherard, the savage, ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... to see you!" Flint raised his glass and tilted it ever so slightly in her direction. Claire lifted the cocktail to her lips and set it down untasted. "What's the matter? Getting unsociable again?" ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... to a private school, and after a year or two to Eton, but at neither was he happy. And although he had been so merry at home, at school he was looked upon as a strange unsociable creature. He refused to fag for the bigger boys. He never joined in the ordinary school games, and would wander about by himself reading, or watching the clouds and the birds. He read all kinds ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... was so much struck with this room that he secured it, together with two bedrooms, permanently for himself. He determined to spend the rest of his life here, and as he was within certain limits not unsociable, he invited his friends to come and stay with him on any Saturday they pleased, ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... woman whose life is very empty, and, it seems to me, from the tone of her letters, growing daily more indifferent to life, more desultory, more cynical, more misanthropic and tittle-tattling. And Alfieri, meanwhile, was growing more unsociable, more misanthropic, more violent in temper, hanging a printed card stating that he wished no visits (one such is preserved in the library at Florence) in the hall, pursuing and flogging street-boys because they splashed his stockings by playing in the puddles; insulting Ginguene and General ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... world proportion ye revealed, That every being joyfully obeys,— A boundless structure, in night's veil concealed, Illumed by naught but faint and languid rays, A band of phantoms, struggling ceaselessly, Holding his mind in slavish fetters bound, Unsociable and rude as be, Assailing him on every side around,— Thus seemed to man creation in that day! United to surrounding forms alone By the blind chains the passions had put on, Whilst Nature's beauteous spirit fled away Unfelt, untasted, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... he is so intolerant of tedium that he sacrifices himself to fatiguing efforts in trying to strike a spark out of a dull stone. The spark is perhaps struck, but he parts with his vital force in striking it. He will be apt to be reproached with being eremitical, self-absorbed, unsociable, fastidious; but he must not care for that, because the essence of his work is to cultivate relations of sympathy with people whose faces he may never see, and he must save his talk, so to speak, for his books. With his friends it is different, for talking to congenial ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... evening, informed Agnes that her husband had left her with all reasonable expression of conjugal kindness; his temper being improved by the prospect of going abroad. But one other servant accompanied the travellers—Lady Montbarry's maid, rather a silent, unsociable woman, so far as Emily had heard. Her ladyship's brother, Baron Rivar, was already on the Continent. It had been arranged that he was to meet his sister ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... the prickly heat of Agnas Blancas, and grimly counted the days, and the money (although his nature, I believe, was fundamentally generous, in his set concentration of purpose, he had grown morbidly avaricious) which should restore him to his beautiful mistress. Morose, reticent, unsociable as he had become, he had still, I discovered by degrees, a leaning towards the humanities, a nice taste, such as could only be the result of much knowledge, in the fine things of literature. His infinitesimal library, a few French novels, an Horace, and some well ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... place in which they could do nothing but get drunk. It is for something else that they go to the Fox or the Happy Home. The drinking is but a pleasant incident. They despise the fellow who merely goes in to have his unsociable glass and be off again, as heartily as they dislike the habitual soaker who brings their entertainment into disfavour; and they themselves keep a rough sort of order—or they increase disorder in trying to quell it—rather than that the landlord should ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... much DISLIKE it!" he said, emphatically—"But then I'm quite an unsociable person. You see I've lived alone here for ten ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... o' your conscience. It's conscience cotton, Thomas Jefferson. I've explained before, but I don't know's you understood. It seems a little unpolite to wear it in my ears, with you here keeping me comp'ny. I s'pose you think it's un—unsociable. But Aunt Olivia doesn't allow me to 'sociate with the Tony Trumbullses. Oh, Thomas Jefferson, I wish she'd allow me ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... and what they call Good-Neighbourhood. A Man that is out of Humour when an unexpected Guest breaks in upon him, and does not care for sacrificing an Afternoon to every Chance-comer; that will be the Master of his own Time, and the Pursuer of his own Inclinations makes but a very unsociable Figure in this kind of Life. I shall therefore retire into the Town, if I may make use of that Phrase, and get into the Crowd again as fast as I can, in order to be alone. I can there raise what Speculations I please upon others without being observed my self, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... One was half foundered, one had a leg-sprain, another swollen joints; but hoof complaints, such as toe-cracks, quarter-cracks, brittle feet, and the like, were the most frequent ills. They were not a cheerful lot, and they were unsociable. ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... would disown him vociferously to the bereaved one, and hasten on to come up with him before he had eaten it all. He preferred being beaten to going hungry, so they never caught him till he had fed full. But what troubled him most was the tramping, the long dusty stages afoot in country where the unsociable villages lay remote from each other, and the roads were hot and long. A man can outwalk any other animal. After thirty miles, a horse is nowhere and the man is still going, but even fifteen miles leaves the ordinary dog limp and sorry. And then, when every bone in him was aching, ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... warranting him to keep anybody away from the house. Upon this point there was never the least doubt. We might just as well have lived on a desert island while we had him. People went around the next block to avoid our house. It was not because Mac was unsociable; quite the contrary. He took to the town from the first, especially to the other dogs. These he generally took by the throat, to the great distress of their owners. I have never heard that bulldogs as a ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... felt easy. As to what there was to find out, he had only one fear—that it might not be bad enough. Then, when the image of the marquise and her son rose before him again, standing side by side, the old woman's hand in Urbain's arm, and the same cold, unsociable fixedness in the eyes of each, he cried out to himself that the fear was groundless. There was blood in the secret at the very last! He arrived at Fleurieres almost in a state of elation; he had satisfied himself, logically, that in the presence of his threat of exposure they would, as ...
— The American • Henry James
... little town a solitary, plain, elderly gentleman called Thomson or Wilson—but that does not matter; the surname is not the point. He followed an honorable profession: he was a doctor. He was always morose and unsociable, and only spoke when required by his profession. He never visited anyone, never extended his acquaintance beyond a silent bow, and lived as humbly as a hermit. The fact was, he was a learned man, and in those days learned men were not like ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... have? Yes, yes; I cal'late I understand, Mr. Graves. Well, I guess you'll have to give me to-night to chew over this. I guess you will. It's come on me so sudden, 'Bije's death and all, that I want to be by myself and think. I don't want to seem unsociable or lackin' in hospitality. The whole house is yours. Help yourself to it. But when I'm caught in a clove hitch, I just have to set down and think myself out of it. I have to. I was built and launched that way, I guess, and maybe ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the fragrant weed which Raleigh taught our gallants to puff in capacious bowls; which a royal pedant denounced in a famous 'Counterblast,' which his flattering, laureate, Ben Jonson, ridiculed to please his master; which our wives and sisters protest gives rise to the dirtiest and most unsociable habit a man can indulge in; of which some fair flowers declare that they love the smell, and others that they will never marry an indulger (which, by the way, they generally end in doing); which has won a fame over more space and among ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... The next circumstance is ready in my mind. One of the doctor's fellow-students (described as being personally an irresistible man) was possessed of abilities which even attracted our unsociable Benjulia. They became friends. At the time of which I am now speaking, my brother's disgusting wife—oh, but I repeat it, Mr. Mool! I say again, his disgusting wife—was the mother of ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... Debussy won more and more distinction as a unique composer, but also gained the reputation of being a very unsociable man. Physically it has been said that in his youth he seemed like an Assyrian Prince; through life he retained his somewhat Asiatic appearance. His eyes were slightly narrowed, his black hair curled lightly over an extremely broad forehead. He spoke little and often in brusque phrase. For this ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... I cannot agree that sociability is a duty at all, and to conceive of it as such seems to me to misunderstand the whole situation. I think that a man loses a great deal by being unsociable, and that for his own happiness he had better make an effort to see something of his fellows. All kinds of grumpinesses and morbidities arise from solitude; and a shy man ought to take occasional dips into society ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... looking over the rail while I was dancing," she told Kennedy, accepting a chair pulled around by the waiter. "I knew you saw me. Also I glanced up and found that you were perfectly well aware of the location of our table. So"— engagingly—"unsociable creature! Why didn't you come down and say 'Hello!' or ask ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... engross him. He grew moodier, more exacting. If Myra arrived home late, he wanted to know where she had been, whom she had seen. Were they dining out, he muttered unsociable objections; were people coming to the house, he complained of the lack of privacy. What a whirl they lived in! So they did, but what was the remedy? Myra herself felt helpless in a tangle of engagements. They overpowered ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... "I beg your pardon for leaving you in such a manner, but you know you had become so very unsociable ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... egoism, of gruffness and sullenness; in a word, of everything that contrasts most strongly with the ideal of social and civic life. And yet, as a matter of fact, no nation possesses in so high a degree the social and civic virtues. The unsociable Englishman, quotha? Why, what country in the world can show such multifarious, vigorous and cordial co-operation, in all ranks, but especially, of course, among the intelligent, for ends which concern ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... amidst irony and invective, the literary monarch bestows on himself many exquisite and characteristic touches. All that the persons of fashion alleged against the literary character, Julian unreservedly confesses—his undressed beard and awkwardness, his obstinacy, his unsociable habits, his deficient tastes, while at the same time he represents his good qualities as so many extravagances. But, in this Cervantic pleasantry of self-reprehension, the imperial philosopher has not failed to show this light and ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... me the pleasure, I implore you. I can't blame you for being gruff and unsociable; were you otherwise you wouldn't reside at—at—" he turned his head to read the half legible sign on the station house, "at Chazy Junction. I'm familiar with most parts of the United States, but ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... were disappointed, for Madam Conway was a proud, unsociable woman, desiring no acquaintance whatever with her neighbors, who, after many ineffectual attempts at something like friendly intercourse, concluded to leave her entirely alone, and contented themselves with watching the progress of matters at "Mill Farm," ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... up. By the time the cavernous bedroom was gained I felt decidedly quivery-mouthed, so that I dumped my belongings on the floor in a heap and went to the window to gaze on the lake until my spirits should rise. But it was a gray day, and the lake looked large, and wet and unsociable. You couldn't get chummy with it. I turned to my great barn of a room. You couldn't get chummy with that, either. I began to unpack, with furious energy. In vain I turned every gas jet blazing high. They only cast ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... apparition was so vivid that the idea of its being other than normal never entered the constables' heads till they had got into the barrack. When they found the door shut and bolted, their amazement was caused by indignation against an apparently unsociable or thoughtless comrade, and it was only afterwards, while discussing the whole thing on their homeward journey, that it occurred to them that it would have been impossible for any ordinary mortal to shut, bolt, and bar a ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... a Welsh farmer was a poor pirate but a born soldier. He was described by one who knew him as being morose, sour, unsociable, and ill-tempered, and that he "knew as little of the sea or of ships as he did of the Arts of Natural Philosophy." But it is recorded to his credit that he was not cruel. He started life in a merchant ship bound for India, ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... my prisoner, and I shall not let you escape till you have answered a few questions. I have been doing my best to become acquainted with you, but you listen and reply in monosyllables, which is most unsociable. You leave me to do all the talking, and I want to hear your side of the question. Is she always so ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... very still for a minute or two. Then she got up. "I don't see," she remarked, "why Rule No. I. should make us unsociable each with the other. The very object of our club is that we should have no secrets, but should be quite open and above-board. Now, Martha West, look me straight in ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... stove, smoking pipe after pipe of cheap tobacco. Sometimes he joined in the poker games. He had learned poker when a boy at the mine, and after a few deals his knowledge returned to him; but for the most part he was taciturn and unsociable, and rarely spoke to the others unless spoken to first. The crew recognized the type, and the impression gained ground among them that he had "done for" a livery-stable keeper at Truckee and was trying to get down ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... which Nature and Providence have designed to live together in union and friendship, and which we cannot separate like man and wife when they happen to disagree. The profound silence that is enjoined upon the monks of La Trappe is a singular circumstance of their unsociable and unnatural discipline, and were this injunction never to be dispensed with, it would be needless to visit them in any other character than as a collection of statues; but the superior of the convent suspended ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... possessed an indomitable will. It was only his terrible determination that could make his life a success. Emerson, who had little sympathy with him otherwise, always admired the perfect equipoise of his nature. A man could not be more thoroughly himself; but, such a reticent, unsociable character as Hawthorne could never be used as the main-spring of a drama, for he would continually impede the progress of the plot. A dramatic character needs to be a talkative person; one that either acts out his internal life, or indirectly exposes it. Hawthorne's ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... their hands; they watch these animals, they kill some; and thus by defending their property, they soon become professed hunters; this is the progress; once hunters, farewell to the plough. The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable; a hunter wants no neighbour, he rather hates them, because he dreads the competition. In a little time their success in the woods makes them neglect their tillage. They trust to the natural fecundity of the earth, and therefore do little; carelessness in fencing often exposes ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... the fish-wives of Dieppe. Smokers, tossing pipes and puffing smoke over the dinner-table, forgot all cleanliness and modesty. Men now, he says, cannot welcome a friend but straight they must be in hand with tobacco. He that refused a pipe in company was accounted peevish and unsociable. 'Yea,' says the royal coxcomb and pedant, 'the mistress cannot in a more mannerly kind entertain her servant than by giving him out of her fair hand a pipe of tobacco.' The royal reformer (not the most virtuous or cleanly of ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... failed to engross him. He grew moodier, more exacting. If Myra arrived home late, he wanted to know where she had been, whom she had seen. Were they dining out, he muttered unsociable objections; were people coming to the house, he complained of the lack of privacy. What a whirl they lived in! So they did, but what was the remedy? Myra herself felt helpless in a tangle of engagements. They overpowered her. She could ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... people are saying," her brother protested. "They call you unsociable and stuck-up, and it is hard for me ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... strangest is to come. The Professor, next morning, proved uncomfortably unsociable, and though he could have done a roaring business that night—and for a week of nights after, for that matter—and though he was approached several times, he, for some mysterious reason known only to himself, flatly refused to give one more performance, and ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... Countess improved. She talked. Mme. de Listomere no longer despaired of fathoming the new-made wife, whom yesterday she had set down as a dull, unsociable creature, and discoursed on the delights of the country, of dances, of houses where they could visit. All that day the Marquise's questions were so many snares; it was the old habit of the old Court, she could not help setting traps to discover her niece's character. For several ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... of it he knew that he had grown somewhat churlish; that men who did not understand his unsociable ways and extreme reticence looked at him askance. But what of it? How little such things mattered! The tragedy was his and the silence was his, and he had never asked anyone ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... A most unsociable dog he proved to be, resenting all their advances, refusing to let them lay hands on him, menacing them with bared fangs and bristling hair. Nevertheless he remained, sleeping and resting by the spring, and eating the food they gave him after they ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... beyond the modest 'fiver' which a man would be thought unsociable if he did not risk on the horse that carries the country's colours. But he is very 'thick' with the racing-people on the Downs, and supplies the stable with oats, which is, I believe, not an unprofitable commission. The historical anecdote ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... I do?" said Mrs. Buller. "She's always saying that everybody is so unsociable, and that she is so dull, she doesn't know what to do with herself, and begging me to take my work and go and sit with her in a morning. How can I go and leave the children and the servants, just at the time of day ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a very brave scale, though it is not manifest that the bravery of Fecamp has won a victory; and, indeed, the local attractions did not strike me as irresistible. A pebbly beach of immense length, fenced off from the town by a grassy embankment; a Casino of a bold and unsociable aspect; a principal inn, with an interminable brown facade, suggestive somehow of an asylum or an almshouse—such are the most striking features of this particular watering-place. There are magnificent cliffs on each side of the bay, but, as the French say, without ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... not unsociable that day, and, her father expressing a hard and fast acceptance of the invitation, she perforce agreed to go with him. Meanwhile at home, Jim made himself as mysteriously busy as before in those rooms ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... an old canvas over the model of the solar engine that had stood for so many years in a corner of the graduate laboratory. It was six months before he could induce himself to touch his work again. And it dawned on him that his twenties were slipping by and that he was becoming unsociable and grave. But there seemed no remedy for the matter. His dream had become the most vital part of his life, and would not let him lead a normal existence. Such is the price that a ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... much over Lilac Lane and the words Mr. Richmond had given her, that Maria charged her with being unsociable. Much Matilda wished that she could have talked with her sister about those same words; but Maria ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offences, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... holidays would be left to their own disposal. They were by no means pleased with the arrangement made with Mr. Stevens and most unwillingly did they undertake the expedition to Stony Bridge, performing the journey in a very unsociable manner. Maurice was no horseman, and chose to jog on foot through three miles of lane, while Reginald's pony cantered merrily along, its master's head being intent upon the various winter sports in ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Edmondstone's passion took new phases. He wrote no sonnets, painted no pictures. He neglected his work, and spent his idle hours in rambling here and there in a gloomy, unsociable fashion. ...
— "Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... gay, and he talked the most. Wright alone seemed uncommunicative and unsociable. He smoked fiercely and drank continually. All at once he straightened up as if listening. "What's that?" ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... a word to the wise. Besides, she had no longing for the society of men, but rather a wish to forget that she had ever known any. Life had made a hole in her heart which she meant to fill if she could, but only with inanimate things and the love of children. So that Mr. van Cannan's unsociable restriction, far from being irksome, suited ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... spoken to in neighborly greeting. We grunted indifferently in reply, as an unsociable man might. When, as sometimes happened, people rose up in front of us from gateways or hidden roads, it was very disconcerting. On such occasions only the darkness saved us, for we took no ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... may, I am informed, occasionally be seen in petticoats at home, still I fear that the firm stride of the Laughlan lady could hardly be reproduced in English boots. To see ten or twelve of these ladies walking in the unsociable formation of single file, which they adopt, with their many-coloured kilts flying out on either side, is a very pretty sight.' Evidently, a judicious traveller and observer might do worse than take a tour to ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... a failure. If Edgar made any poetry while in the water he did not mention it; but he was absent-minded and unsociable all the way to the river and back—sky-gazing for curious cloud-forms, listening for bird-notes and hunting wild-flowers, and talking almost none ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... and well defined, and well distinguished; for otherwise treaty only weakens the energy of compulsion, while compulsion destroys the freedom of a bargain. The advantage of both is lost by the confusion of things in their nature utterly unsociable. It would be to introduce compulsion into that in which freedom and existence are the same: I mean credit. The moment that shame or fear or force are directly or indirectly applied to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... he is so insistent on duties to the father; but the high position of women and their matriarchal privileges oppose any deduction that Egyptian manners were somewhat to seek in this direction. Ke'gemni says of the unsociable man that he is a grief to his mother, and another moralist of uncertain date (perhaps Twelfth Dynasty, about B.C. 2700), named 'Eney, is explicit on this matter. He says to his son, 'I gave thee thy mother, ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... Moreover, it seemed dangerous to attempt to purify the convention, or to dismiss one of its members, and it was a difficult step to get over, even for parties. Danton did not exonerate Marat. "I do not like him," said he; "I have had experience of his temperament; it is volcanic, crabbed and unsociable. But why seek for the language of a faction in what he writes? Has the general agitation any other cause than that of the revolutionary movement itself?" Robespierre, on his part, protested that he knew very little of Marat; that, previous to the 10th ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... events to the conflict of higher powers, he is content to lay before us the scenes of everyday life. We are introduced to men who, in times of trouble, lose first their incomes and then their places; to others who, in trying to get two appointments, miss both; to unsociable misers who carry about their money sewn into their clothes, and die mad when they are robbed of it; to others, who accept well-paid offices, and then sicken with a melancholy longing for their lost freedom. We read how some ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... freezing night! It fully explained his eccentricities, John reflected sagely, as he mixed himself a grog. Poor Alan! He was drunk; and what a dreadful thing was drink, and what a slave to it poor Alan was, to drink in this unsociable, uncomfortable fashion! The man who would drink alone, except for health's sake - as John was now doing - was a man utterly lost. He took the grog out, and felt hazier, but warmer. It was hard work opening the ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... opened a studio while we were in Rome four or five years ago, and I heard much talk about her from her brother and sister artists. I intended at one time to visit her studio and see her work, but several sculptors advised me not to do so; she was, they declared, "queer," "unsociable," often positively rude to her visitors, and had been heard to fervently wish that the Americans would not come to her studio, as they evidently looked upon her only as a curiosity. When, therefore, I did see her for the first ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... before this. How did he know I could not match him in these being a woman? He was one of those wonderful erudites, I supposed, who think that a girl's conversational power lies rigidly between dry goods and sentiment. Poor things! What a heresy they foster? But what need I care? He was a glum, unsociable recluse anyway, may be at a loss for a second idea to keep his mind busy. He was certainly not worth worrying about, so I gathered up my needle-work that rested on the window-sill, and with a deliberate sullenness went in search ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... Brandon," said the voice of Vancouver, who came up behind them at a great pace, and holding his feet together let himself slide rapidly along beside the two girls,—"excuse me, but do you not think you are very unsociable, going off in ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... Triantiwontigongolope The Circus You and I Going to School Hist! Bird Song The Music of Your Voice The Boy who Rode into the Sunset The Tram-man The Axe-man The Drovers The Long Road Home The Band Bessie and the Bunyip Good Enough The Porter Growing Up The Unsociable Wallaby The Song of the Sulky Stockman Our Cow The Teacher The Spotted Heifers Tea Talk The Looking Glass Woolloomooloo The Barber Farmer Jack Old Black Jacko Bird Song The Sailor The Famine The ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... "Still, it made people call Crompton unsociable. I guess, though, most geniuses are that. They always seem to be so in books; and Crompton certainly was a genius. He hadn't an ounce of brain for business but he had no end of ideas; and it was those that got him on in life. For you see, although the ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... dignity. He could never though have got Polly to see it. Undignified to do a kindness? What a funny, selfish idea! The fact was, there was a certain streak in Polly's nature that made her more akin to all these good people than to him—him with his unsociable leanings towards a hermit's cell; his genuine need of an occasional hour's privacy and silence, in which to think a few thoughts through ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... Semyonitch," the little lady explained, noticing my surprise. "He's been living with us for the last year. Please excuse him; he cannot come in to see you. He is such an unsociable person, he is shy with strangers. He is going into a monastery. He was unfairly treated in the service, and the disappointment ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... you saw yesterday; she is very sweet—but that is all. Her brother is also a capital fellow—un parfait honnete homme. The Prince Garin you know. Those are all. There are two or three neighbours besides, but they are really good for nothing. They either give themselves airs or are unsociable, or else quite unsuitably free and easy. The ladies, as you know, I see nothing of. There is one other of our neighbours said to be a very cultivated, even a learned, man, but a dreadfully queer creature, a whimsical character. Alexandrine, knows ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... was a duality about her nature as if the blood of two races were mingling in her veins. To some persons Annette was loving and love-able, bright, intelligent, obliging and companionable; to others, unsociable, unamiable and repelling. Her heart was like a harp which sent out its harmonious discords in accordance with the moods of the player who touched its chords. To some who swept them it gave out tender and touching melody, to others its harshest and saddest discords. ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... are some phases of mental trouble that harmonise well with such surroundings, and that some persons, by the dispensing power of the imagination, can go back several centuries in spirit, and put themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless, unsociable way of life that was in its place upon these savage hills. Now, when I am sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like David before Saul; and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in me but an unpleasant pity; so that I can never hit on the right humour for this sort of landscape, ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... operator, who is the only one I've spoken with in the town, represents the attitude of everybody there, probably, and he thinks, evidently, that an eccentric recluse lives here, and that his housekeeper is pretty close-mouthed and 'unsociable,' as he put it. It's rather strange that they aren't more curious, but she must have known how to deal with them, for whatever interest anybody may have felt died out long ago. They know the man had a daughter and that she's grown now, but this fellow ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... to the grocery boy, hunted up the station master, an elderly fellow who was well known for his unsociable disposition. ...
— The Rover Boys at School • Arthur M. Winfield
... Pole himself, when he arrived, do much to help matters. He was so hopelessly English. At least, that was the way Ann put it. He was shy and sensitive. It is a trying combination. It made him appear stupid and conceited. A lonely childhood had rendered him unsociable, unadaptable. A dreamy, imaginative temperament imposed upon him long moods of silence: a liking for long solitary walks. For the first time Ann and Mrs. Travers ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... with the conductor and train crew. The dentist sat apart, behind the stove, smoking pipe after pipe of cheap tobacco. Sometimes he joined in the poker games. He had learned poker when a boy at the mine, and after a few deals his knowledge returned to him; but for the most part he was taciturn and unsociable, and rarely spoke to the others unless spoken to first. The crew recognized the type, and the impression gained ground among them that he had "done for" a livery-stable keeper at Truckee and was trying to get ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... the exchequer confided to him, which was daily growing fuller in despite of the cormorants who trembled at his frown; hard worker, good hater, conscientious politician, who filled his own coffers without dishonesty, and those of the state without tyranny; unsociable, arrogant; pious, very avaricious, and inordinately vain, Maximilian de Bethune, Duke of Sully, loved and respected Henry as no man or woman loved and respected him. In truth, there was but one living being for whom the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... DISLIKE it!" he said, emphatically—"But then I'm quite an unsociable person. You see I've lived alone ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... at Troyes, has long suffered from enteritis, for which different treatments have been tried in vain. He is also in a very bad state mentally, being depressed, gloomy, unsociable, and obsessed by thoughts of suicide. Preliminary experiments easy, followed by suggestion which produces an appreciable result from the very day. For three months, daily suggestions to begin with, then at increasingly longer intervals. At the end of this time, the cure is complete, the ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... To the neighbors and itineraries he had been preaching hard times for twenty years, although the whole earth suspected the contrary. He became known throughout the width and breadth of Yale, Lillooet and Cariboo as "Hard Times Hance." Although diplomatically reserved and unsociable, he was more popular and famed than he suspected. ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... and there in that drawer are a certain number of yellow, green, and red papers from which a bit is clipped every six months, and which represent three or four thousand francs of income. It is rare in our profession, and to gain that poor hoard I have been obliged—I, a poet—to imitate the unsociable virtues of a bourgeois, know how to deny a jewel to my wife, a dress to my daughter. At last I have that money. And I often said to myself, if I should die their bread is assured, and here is a little marriage portion ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... naturally unsociable was pretty general, and Colonel Colquhoun believed it as much as anybody. I remember being at As-You-Like-It one afternoon when he rallied her on the subject. He had stopped me as I was driving past to ask me to look at a horse he was thinking of buying. The animal was being trotted ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... nothing but failure for the ill-natured, unsociable, disgusting tramp who is known to be ignorant, lazy, shiftless, a spendthrift, a liar, and an all-around crook. Such a worthless man will make a complete failure of life because he is ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... and listened to the letters in silence while the others buzzed and commented. Rob, so the Harbour folk said, was much changed. He had grown unsociable and preferred to stay home and read books rather than go a-visiting as did others. The Harbour folk shook their heads over this. There was something wrong with a man who read books when there was a plenty of other amusements. Jacob Radnor had read books all one winter and had drowned himself in the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Designs. It is the observation of Forreigners concerning our Universities, that they finde in them men of as great learning as any where els; but that they lie as it were dead and unknown to the whole world of other men of Learning; becaus they delight to live a retired and unsociable life: this humor therefore amongst other parts of our Reformation, must by som Gospel-principles and Rational inducements bee Reformed, not onely in Colleges but in other Associations. The Lord teach us the waie of Truth and Righteousness, ...
— The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) • John Dury
... him to me for old acquaintance' sake, warranting him to keep anybody away from the house. Upon this point there was never the least doubt. We might just as well have lived on a desert island while we had him. People went around the next block to avoid our house. It was not because Mac was unsociable; quite the contrary. He took to the town from the first, especially to the other dogs. These he generally took by the throat, to the great distress of their owners. I have never heard that bulldogs ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... been rather a silent affair at Kent's, as well as at Madame Bernard's. Being absorbed in his own thoughts, Allison did not realise how unsociable he was, nor that the old man across the table from him perceived that they had reached the beginning ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... to admit that any human experience was beyond her ken, but no! not one single instance of the kind could she remember. She had felt lonely at times, silent and unsociable, but never shy! She shook ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... definition to his ark. I mean map—m-a-p, map—a drawin' that shows you the way to get to a red cross that doesn't exist on the face of nature. I like green crosses as a matter of taste, but all our paralysed friend had left was a red one, so I took that, not to be unsociable." ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... from the start met popular disapproval. The early Christians, who tried to keep themselves free from idolatry, were regarded as very unsociable persons. They never appeared at public feasts and entertainments. They would not join in the amusements of the circus or the amphitheater. They refused to send their children to the schools. The ordinary citizen could not understand such people. It is not surprising, therefore, that they gained the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... say no more!" De Morbihan protested. "Rest assured the Chief of the Surete has laid his plans: his web is spun, and so artfully that I think our unsociable outlaw will soon be making friends in the Prison of the Sante.... But now we must adjourn. One is sorry. It has ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... and guavas, but he is by no means averse, if opportunity offers, to the Indian corn of the industrious native. His wife accompanies him in his solitary rambles, for they are not gregarious. In her native haunts, indeed, Polly is an unsociable bird. It is only in confinement that her finer qualities come out, and that she develops into ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... which the necessary but unequal laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind by confining to a few the possession of those objects that are coveted by many. Of all our passions and appetites the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... reserved for the Van Wardens, and automobiles, was of bluestone. It helped greatly to give the Van Warden estate the appearance of a well kept cemetery. And those Van Wardens who occupied the country-place were as cold and unsociable as the sort of people who occupy cemeteries—except "Harry" Van Warden, and she lived in New York at ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... least idea of living up to the character my friend Lanrivain ascribed to me (as a matter of fact, under my unsociable exterior I have always had secret yearnings for domesticity) that I took his hint one autumn afternoon and went to Kerfol. My friend was motoring over to Quimper on business: he dropped me on the way, at a cross-road on a heath, and said: "First turn to the right and second to the ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... arm's length, draw a cordon round. depopulate; dispeople^, unpeople^. Adj. secluded, sequestered, retired, delitescent^, private, bye; out of the world, out of the way; the world forgetting by the world forgot [Pope]. snug, domestic, stay-at-home. unsociable; unsocial, dissocial^; inhospitable, cynical, inconversable^, unclubbable, sauvage [Fr.], troglodytic. solitary; lonely, lonesome; isolated, single. estranged; unfrequented; uninhabitable, uninhabited; tenantless; abandoned; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... nothing would induce her to budge from Paris till she had seen her sister through, and Gaston shrank from proposing that she too should spend five weeks in the Place Beauvau or the Rue de Lille. There was moreover a slight element of the mystifying for him in the perverse unsociable way in which Francie took up a position of marked disfavour as yet to any "visiting." AFTER, if he liked, but not till then. And she wouldn't at the moment give the reasons of her refusal; it was only very ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... and developing her small fragment of soul. Social duties, rightly done, are one of the developments of soul. Let it be seen that you girls who can enjoy your literature, and your history, and your music, and your drawing with keen appreciation are not made thereby selfish or unsociable; but that you are more delightful creatures than those who have no such independent resources and joys. A girl who gets her certificate or prize and is cross or dull at home, and does not think it worth while to ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... disown him vociferously to the bereaved one, and hasten on to come up with him before he had eaten it all. He preferred being beaten to going hungry, so they never caught him till he had fed full. But what troubled him most was the tramping, the long dusty stages afoot in country where the unsociable villages lay remote from each other, and the roads were hot and long. A man can outwalk any other animal. After thirty miles, a horse is nowhere and the man is still going, but even fifteen miles leaves the ordinary ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... was as unsociable as a storm at midnight, and while Charlotte Bronte was at best like that warmer and more domestic thing, a house on fire—they do connect themselves with the calm of George Eliot, as the forerunners of many later ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... out, however. I forget whether the wheels of my little cart failed before my mother's patience, or the reverse. I was growing away from those tiny journeys; my head bulged with loose heaps of intellectual rubbish acquired during long hours of unsociable communion with a box of books in the lumber room. I knew the date of Evil Merodach's accession to the Assyrian throne, but I did not know who killed Cock Robin. I knew more than Keats about the discovery of the Pacific, but I did not know Keats. ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... temptation. He has made a resolve to reform, but he is now solicited again by the bottle. His moral triumph or failure literally consists in his finding the right name for the case. If he says that it is a case of not wasting good liquor already poured out, or a case of not being churlish and unsociable when in the midst of friends, or a case of learning something at last about a brand of whiskey which he never met before, or a case of celebrating a public holiday, or a case of stimulating himself to a more energetic resolve in favor of abstinence ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... "warmth and sweetness of the blood that would not be confined in the communicating itself—an overflowing of good nature, of which he had such a stream that it would not be restrained within the banks of a crabbed and unsociable virtue." ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... replied. "Of course I shall not think you unsociable. I would not interfere with any of your ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... spoke to them at all, and save when he was cooking or giving the kitchen a slovenly cleaning they saw little of him. Monypenny had predicted that their presence must make a new man of him, but he was still unsociable and morose and sat as long as ever at the warping-mill, of which he seemed to have become the silent wheel. Tommy and Elspeth always dropped their voices when they spoke of him, and sometimes when his mill stopped he heard one of them say to the other, "Whisht, he's coming!" Though ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... nations. And what Scythian horse, or Parthian arrows, or Indian wealth could have checked seventy thousand Romans advancing in arms under Pompeius and Caesar, whose name these nations heard of long before they heard of the name of Rome? Such unsociable, and various, and savage nations had they invaded and conquered. But now they engaged with one another in battle, without even feeling any compunction about their own glory, for which they spared not their native country, up to this day having ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... motives which operate upon all his fellows, he is not fit to live in society; he would contradict the very end of his association: he would he its enemy; he would place obstacles to its natural tendency; his rebellious disposition, his unsociable will, not being susceptible of that modification which is convenient to his own true interests and to the interests of his fellow-citizens; these would unite themselves against such an enemy; and the law which is, or ought to be the expression of the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... startling or remarkable kind occurred to Mary during her rather long and tedious journey. Various passengers got into her third-class compartment and got out again, but they were somewhat dull and commonplace folk, many of them being of that curiously unsociable type of human creature which apparently mistrusts its fellows. Contrary to her ingenuous expectation, no one seemed to think a journey to London was anything of a unique or thrilling experience. Once only, when she was nearing her destination, did she venture to ask a fellow-passenger, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... bestows on himself many exquisite and characteristic touches. All that the persons of fashion alleged against the literary character, Julian unreservedly confesses—his undressed beard and awkwardness, his obstinacy, his unsociable habits, his deficient tastes, while at the same time he represents his good qualities as so many extravagances. But, in this Cervantic pleasantry of self-reprehension, the imperial philosopher has not failed ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... the impression left upon you will be one of hard egoism, of gruffness and sullenness; in a word, of everything that contrasts most strongly with the ideal of social and civic life. And yet, as a matter of fact, no nation possesses in so high a degree the social and civic virtues. The unsociable Englishman, quotha? Why, what country in the world can show such multifarious, vigorous and cordial co-operation, in all ranks, but especially, of course, among the intelligent, for ends which concern the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... Graves. Well, I guess you'll have to give me to-night to chew over this. I guess you will. It's come on me so sudden, 'Bije's death and all, that I want to be by myself and think. I don't want to seem unsociable or lackin' in hospitality. The whole house is yours. Help yourself to it. But when I'm caught in a clove hitch, I just have to set down and think myself out of it. I have to. I was built and launched that way, I guess, ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... mischievous as a small boy, destructive as a monkey, deft at hiding as a squirrel. He is unsociable and unamiable, disliking the society of other birds. His harsh screams, shrieks, and most aggressive and unmusical calls seem often intended maliciously to drown the songs ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... this assertion would have held good had he carried it farther, and said lower than a brute, for there is no creature in the universe that is not linked into some society, except we allow the existence of that exploded and unsociable bird the Phoenix.' ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... was unsociable, he shrank from his neighbours because they had been cruel to him when they were children, and the dislike was more than returned; yet I think that, but for the loneliness of his whole life, he would have been friendly enough. No one knew more of folklore—I ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... home, but very lonely. Bobbing his head as high as he could above the water, he stared about him in every direction, dimly hoping to catch sight of Captain Ephraim or Toby—or even of the unsociable yellow cat. They were nowhere to be seen. Well, company he must have. After fish, of which there was no lack in those teeming waters, company was his urgent demand. He headed impatiently for the coast, which he could not see indeed, but which he felt ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... mankind in order and harmony by government, yet there is nothing but continual rents, distractions, dissipations, divisions, and dissolutions in commonwealths amongst themselves and between nations, so that all men may be represented as lions, tigers, wolves, serpents, and such like unsociable creatures, till the gospel come to tame them and subdue them, as it is often holden out in the prophets, Isa. ii. 4, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... of cooking mingling with that of leather told that he was preparing his own evening meal. He was, it seemed, an unsociable man, who had but a son beneath his roof, and mostly ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... no more, but seemed to await developments. Randy was greatly embarrassed. His aunt's coldness repelled him, and he easily saw that he was not a welcome visitor. A touch of pride came to him and he resolved that he would be as unsociable as his relative. ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... of the tent. Our arrival was evidently regarded as an important event, and all the inhabitants of the aoul were anxious to make our acquaintance. First our host came forward. He was a short, slimly-built man, of middle age, with a grave, severe expression, indicating an unsociable disposition. We afterwards learned that he was an akhun*—that is to say, a minor officer of the Mahometan ecclesiastical administration, and at the same time a small trader in silken and woollen stuffs. With him came the mullah, or priest, a portly old gentleman with an open, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... The priest was unsociable, and kept reading his breviary as though his life depended upon it. Yet this made no difference to Ashby. He did not desire to make any new acquaintances or talk small-talk with strangers. He preferred to be left to ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... the boys said, with much sorrowful profanity. When they abandoned Black Peter Gulch to the Chinese, and located at Bender, Twitchett should have come along with the crowd, instead of staying there by himself, in such an unsociable way. Perhaps he preferred the society of rattlesnakes and horned toads to that of high-toned, civilized beings—there was no accounting for tastes—but then he should have remembered that all the rattlesnakes in the valley couldn't ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... Chatillon; but now he was not even barely civil to any of the court beauties. He had eyes and ears for one person alone. In this manner, and, as it were, without design, he devoted himself to Monsieur, who had a great regard for him, and kept him as much as possible in his own apartments. Unsociable from natural disposition, he had estranged himself too much previous to the arrival of Madame, but, after her arrival, he did not estrange himself sufficiently. This conduct, which every one had observed, had been particularly remarked by the evil genius ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... accounted unsociable; besides, he was ragged, uncouth, independent, and did not conform to the ways of society; so the select circle cast him out—more properly speaking, did not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... Mrs. Cassius Came, who was a friend of her Aunt Miranda's and one of the few persons who exchanged calls with that somewhat unsociable lady. The Came farm was not a long walk from the brick house, for Rebecca could go across the fields when haying-time was over, and her delight at being sent on an errand in that direction could not be measured, now that the new minister and ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... be very glad of your company. I came out to escape my own thoughts. Did you ever meet such an unsociable lot of people as our fellow boarders, Mr. Spencer? If it was not for my work, and the fact that I have taken my room for a month, I should hie me forthwith to the beaten track of the vulgar but ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... the dark stairs, guiding himself with a hand on the rail, his eyes as abstracted as a sleep walker's. The sounds were issuing from the back parlour of course. The door was partly open—so she was not as unsociable as Charley had feared, or perhaps it was only that it was hot. The room was dark inside. Evan leaned against the banisters with bent head, scarcely daring to breathe for fear of ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... taken in the country. The ordinary ambitions and aims of men in my position seem to me dull and unattractive. I have little fancy for the whirl of society, and none for the jostle of politics. Lady Burlesdon utterly despairs of me; my neighbours think me an indolent, dreamy, unsociable fellow. Yet I am a young man; and sometimes I have a fancy—the superstitious would call it a presentiment—that my part in life is not yet altogether played; that, somehow and some day, I shall mix again in great affairs, I shall again ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
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