unlovely

I find writers whose writing is lovely in unlovely settings so interesting.

Small Town Dreaming « Tales from the Reading Room

Preston's strange heat and sudden Southernism, Mr. Davis's wile and greatness, a coming disputed election, quarrels between the people where I was born and the people where I was brought up, divisions and jealousies, floated before my mind in unlovely and confused visions.

Daisy

"Others called her unlovely, but in her spirit she was beautiful, and I think as time passed that came to be reflected in her physical aspect.

Harpy Thyme

By this time the Ten of Clubs, the Nine, the Eight, and all the little cards of the pack were dancing about us in a state bordering on frenzy, but Maida and Sir Ralph together eventually evolved a kind of unlovely order out of chaos, and everybody was told off to perform some task or other: one to sweep, one to dust, one to change the bedding.

My Friend the Chauffeur

Groups who are called unlovely names "co-opt" the terms, and by doing so, defuse them.

Page 2

Though he looses a shock-and-awe flurry of evidentiary darts (natural selection, fossil records, molecular biology, and much more), he also mutes some of the shriller tendencies that have unhinged — or at least made hectoring and unlovely — his previous works.

Cover to Cover

His choice of the unlovely, pedestrian Ford sedan as a metaphor is telling: pilots like Corcoran see the F‑22 as a Formula One racer by comparison.

The Last Ace

During the fashion boom that began in the 1980s, the relationship between fashion and its customers was the same as the one between art and its rich, often unlovely patrons: all that money sloshing around led to excessive consumption, but it also created a fertile soil in which works of beauty and integrity could develop.

Fashion in Dark Times

More generally, the relationship between fashion and the few who populated the boom-engendered scene under the tents, as well as between fashion and the vast army of boom-engendered fashion customers, was the same as the relationship between art and its rich, powerful, often unlovely patrons: all that money sloshing around led to excessive, vulgar creations and consumption, but it also created a fertile soil in which works of beauty and integrity could develop.

Fashion in Dark Times

Furniture that had been unlovely new, now covered with dust and grit, bespoke in its casual disarray a hasty abandonment.

Abomination at the Shilkie