UNNATURALNESS • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Unnaturalness

"Unnaturalness" Quotes from Famous Books

... the friendliness stiff, the gaiety forced. Susan, like all other girls, was not herself with the young unmarried men of her acquaintance; she was too eager to be exactly what they supposedly wanted her to be. She felt vaguely the utter unnaturalness of this, without ever being able to analyze it. Her attitude, the attitude of all her sex, was too entirely false to make an honest analysis possible. Susan, and her cousins, and the girls in the office, rather than reveal their secret longings ...

— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris

... that any mind should so distinctly, so livelily, and so voluntarily, have presented to itself, in connection with feelings and intentions so malignant, and so contrary to those which the qualities expressed would naturally have called forth. But I dare not say that this seeming unnaturalness is not in the nature of an abused wilfulness, when united with a strong intellect. In such characters there is sometimes a gloomy self-gratification in making the absoluteness of the will ('sit pro ...

— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks; and a man shall ever see, that when ages grow to civility and elegance, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection." And, indeed, in spite of their stiffness and unnaturalness, there must have been a great charm in those gardens, and though it would be antiquarian affectation to attempt or wish to restore them, yet there must have been a stateliness about them which our gardens have not, and they must have had many points of real comfort which it seems a pity to ...

— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe