"Crotchety" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... passion, woman, might have curbed his contempt, but that, too, had palled on him. He had taken to carnal repasts with the eagerness of a crotchety man affected with a depraved appetite and given to sudden hungers, whose taste is quickly dulled and surfeited. Associating with country squires, he had taken part in their lavish suppers where, at dessert, tipsy women would ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... edition was revised by Steevens, and Pericles was readmitted. This was a valuable but crotchety edition. In 1790 Edmund Malone published his famous edition in ten volumes. No Shakespearean scholar ranks higher than he in reputation. Numerous editions followed up to 1865, of which the most important is James Boswell's so-called Third Variorum in twenty-one volumes. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... a marplot; he does not know what he would be at; if he did, he does not much care for it; and, moreover, he is 'governed habitually by a spirit of contradiction, and is always wise beyond what is practicable.' Upon this text Hazlitt dilates with immense spirit, satirising the crotchety and impracticable race, and contrasting them with the disciplined phalanx of Toryism, brilliantly and bitterly enough to delight Gifford; and yet he is writing a preface to a volume of radical Essays. He is consoling himself for being in a ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... We will simply call him a governor, not troubling ourselves with his qualifications, as of course they have not been considered at the Colonial Office. He may be an upright, clear-headed, indefatigable man, in the prime of life, or he may be old, crotchety, pigheaded, and mentally and physically incapable. He may be either; it does not much matter, as he can only remain for five years, at ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... it that I have promptly made up my mind to speak to you.' 'You must guide him, you know; you must steer him; you must direct him; he is one of a crotchety sort,' said Mr Meagles, evidently meaning nothing more than that he did new things and went new ways; 'but he is as honest as the sun, and so good night!' Clennam went back to his room, sat down again ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
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