"Priggish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... care a bit about that when you first came!" cried Nora. "You despised us because we weren't soldiers, or diplomats, or politicians. You thought we were a little priggish, provincial world where nothing mattered. You were sorry for us because we had only ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Trenchard in his English voice. (He told me afterwards that he was conscious at the time of a horrible priggish superiority.) "Here in Russia you go up and down so. You've no restraint. Now if ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of knowledge. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy to come by. To be "intellectual" or "artistic" or, in their own word, to be "highbrow," is to be priggish and ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the increasing exhilaration of the game, drove her to risk higher stakes at each fresh venture. She tried to excuse herself on the plea that, in the Trenor set, if one played at all one must either play high or be set down as priggish or stingy; but she knew that the gambling passion was upon her, and that in her present surroundings there was small hope of ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... all, for the jest is not aimed at the real Washington, but at the Washington portrayed in the Weems biography. The worthy "rector of Mount Vernon," as he called himself, meant no harm, and there is a good deal of truth, no doubt, in his book. But the blameless and priggish boy, and the equally faultless and uninteresting man, whom he originated, have become in the process of development a myth. So in its further development is the Washington of the humorist a myth. Both alike are ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... cannot be revived! The whipping boy, a device to put princes on their honor to be neither negligent nor wanton in the fulfilment of their duties; and the jester to break us of our too self-conscious airs and exhibit to us our follies. See what we have done instead! When our growing sense of priggish decorum and our dishonest ceremoniousness of speech made the jester a figure no longer possible, we substituted for him the poet-laureate!—not to persuade us of our follies, but to chant our undeserved praises. And alas, how much more ridiculous, at certain times, he has made us appear—nay, ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... idiosyncrasy would, in another, have seemed either priggish or facetiously intended. With Professor Eldridge it was merely a natural method of speech. Thus, arriving once at the stroke of the dinner hour, he replied to compliments on ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... the Vicarage. He was rather disturbed by Jack's remarks; it put him, he thought, in an odious light. Was he really so priggish and Jesuitical? That was the one danger of the life of the Don which he hoped he had successfully avoided. He was all for liberty, he imagined. Was he really, after all, a mild schemer with an ethical outlook? Was he bent on managing ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... his faults," urged Lady Mary, "only I can laugh at them better than you can, because I know all the while that at the very bottom of his heart he's only my baby Peter after all. He's not—God bless him—he's not the dreary, cold-blooded, priggish boy he sometimes pretends to be. Don't remember him like that now, Timothy. Think of that morning in June—that glorious, sunny morning in June, when you knelt by the open window in my room and thanked God because you had a son. Think of that other summer day when we couldn't bear ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... asked Mignon La Salle with cool impudence. "You look like that priggish Miss Stevens. I hope for your sake you are not a relative ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... see to it that she spends a good share of it on us. Then, too, we can borrow money of her. She is a great convenience. The funny part of it is she doesn't know about that letter we wrote. For once that priggish Miss Harlowe did manage to hold her ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... unwilling because it is something very new and curious in his experience; he is often a little frightened of it, and he is exceedingly frightened of other people's contempt for it. And he is unable, because the words he is accustomed to use are valueless in this connection, and he feels priggish if he tries to use others.... But, though unexplained, the mystical tendency is there, and should be ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... truth she illustrates with a modesty and restraint which are rarely met with in modern fiction. She never insists; she never says a word too much. With exquisite concision she sets her carefully selected facts and types before you, and being the antithesis of priggishness in a priggish city, she glorifies "the common growth of Mother Earth," and compels your agreement. Her collection of stories—'Every One His Own Way'—as free from pretence as from exaggeration, paints the citizens of Chicago with the subtlest fancy and the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... the debate seems to be closed) a young Aramaean Arab, Elihu, who has been loitering around and listening to the controversy, bursts in and delivers his young red-hot opinions. They are violent, and at the same time quite raw and priggish. Job troubles not to answer: the others keep a chilling silence. But while this young man rants, pointing skyward now and again, we see, we feel—it is most wonderfully conveyed—as clearly as if indicated by successive stage-directions, a terrific thunder-storm ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... attainments, although the junior of the youngest of them, keeping at the head of every class with unostentatious ease. I am afraid that I may have done my orphaned cousin seeming injustice in former chapters of this autobiography. Her temper was even, and her nature was finer than her prim, priggish ways would have led the casual acquaintance to suppose. She was ultra-conscientious, and naturally so exemplary that her good behavior was a snare. She could not sympathize with my temptations to naughtiness and many falls from good-girlhood. I mention this to introduce ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... inconsiderate creature upon the globe as yourself. It would be unpardonably rude in us to send the man away, if he is a charlatan, without letting him see me. Have him up, by all means, and let us hear what priggish nonsense he has to say. He will feel the easier ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... he argued half to himself, "that the next generation preferred black walnut, even with all its grapes and gewgaws! Horrible as it was, it wasn't so orthodox and priggish and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... romances became appreciated. He is a profound psychologist, a force in literature, and his style is very pure and attractive. He advocates resignation and the domestic virtues, yet his books are neither dull, nor tiresome, nor priggish; and as he has advanced in years and experience M. Bazin has shown an increasing ambition to deal with larger problems than are involved for instance, in the innocent love-affairs of 'Ma Tante Giron' (1886), a book which enraptured Ludovic Halevy. His novel, 'Une Tache d'Encre' ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... with the efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacies of high-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristram, and ultimately discovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there was no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the whole artificial and bombastic schemes which bred these moral evils. It might be that in spite of this new view of the case, it would ultimately appear that Ulysses was really right and Arthur was really right, just ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... people's writings!!! But the minor writers of the "Fleshly school" are perhaps producing a reaction! Though it's marvellous what people will read, and think "so clever!" Some novels lately—Sophy and Mehalah, deeply recommended to me, have made me aghast. I'm not very young, nor I think very priggish; but I do decline to look at life and its complexities solely and entirely from a point of view that (bar Christian names and the English language) would do equally well for a pig or a monkey. If I am no more than a Pig, I'm a fairly "learned" pig, ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... But also she felt she had lost something. She looked at him as he sat crouched on the bank. There was a certain priggish Sunday-school stiffness over him, priggish and detestable. And yet, at the same time, the moulding of him was so quick and attractive, it gave such a great sense of freedom: the moulding of his brows, his chin, his whole physique, something so alive, somewhere, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... loved good music—Mozart, Bach, Beethoven—and were almost priggish in their contempt for anything of a lighter kind; especially with a lightness English or French! It was only the musical lightness of Germany they could endure at all! But whether in Paris or London, enter Barty Josselin, idle school-boy, or dandy dissipated guardsman, and fashionable ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... be forgiven on the plea that where so many names of the strong and powerful bid for recognition, a good way to avoid jealousies, is to ignore them all. So speaks proud and pious Philadelphia—snug, smug, prosperous, priggish and pedantic Philadelphia. But how about these five supremely great names—William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Stephen Girard ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... in fairyland can two and two make five; he can state quite calmly that the weakness of Feminism is that it drives the woman from the freedom of the home to the slavery of the world; he can make priggish clergymen, who accuse him of joking and taking the name of the Lord in vain, bite their words by explaining that to make a joke of anything is not to take it in vain. As an essayist, Chesterton stands apart from his contemporaries. Of older ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... incomplete one. He does not recognise it as courage if a sensitive, conscientious, and right-minded boy risks unpopularity by telling a master of some evil practice which is spreading in a school. He simply regards it as a desire to meddle, a priggish and pragmatical act, and even as a sneaking desire to ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Mr. Fakrash, riches alone don't make any fellow happy. You must have observed that they're apt to—well, to land him in all kinds of messes and worries.... I'm talking like a confounded copybook," he thought, "but I don't care how priggish I am if I can only get ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... I have!" he accepted her somewhat sadly humorous statement; "and that's why I don't believe I'll ever make a mistake. I'd rather never marry than make a mistake. I know I sound priggish; but I've thought a good deal about it: I've had to." He paused for a moment, and then, in the tone of quiet, unconfused confidence that always filled her with a sense of mingled pride and humility, he added:—"I ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Vanderpool. "I thought I knew him. He seemed an ordinary, rather priggish, opinionated country boy, and I wrote and said—Oh, I said that the world is the world; take it as it is. You wrote differently, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... are disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem most frequently undeserving of the love that unites us; and that it is by our friend's conduct that we are continually rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh endeavour. Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is profit he is after in these intimacies; moral profit, certainly, but still profit to himself. If you will be the sort of friend I want, he remarks naively, "my education cannot dispense with your society." ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is just where the whole of this state of mind is false and wrong," he told himself. "God is something more than a priggish devotion, an intellectual formula. He has a hold and a claim—he should have a hold and a claim—exceeding all the claims of Phoebe, Miriam, Daphne, Clementina—all ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... to be a priggish Ellen, or a moral Fleda, and I do detest bothering about self-improvement all the time. I know I ought, but I'd rather wait another year or two, and enjoy my vanities in peace just a LITTLE longer." And Carrie tucked Wanda under the sofa pillow, as if a trifle ashamed of her society, with Eva's ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... hear them speak true American, with all the varying Tennesseean, Philadelphian, Bostonian, and New York accents. If we bother ourselves to write what the critics imagine to be "English," we shall be priggish and artificial, and still more so if we make our Americans talk "English." There is also this serious disadvantage about "English," that if we wrote the best "English" in the world, probably the English themselves would not know it, or, if they did, certainly would not own it. It has always ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... priggish or surly Thou didst not enthuse or beguile; But tilted a little and curly Of brim—how seductive thy style! And never was pride that is proper Sartorially better expressed Than when an immaculate topper Sat light ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... La Salle strolled out of school between her two satellites, Susan and Muriel, she was heard to declare with disappointed peevishness that that priggish Miss Dean was either too stupid to resent or too thick-skinned to feel a ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... that is saying a very great deal. From the first to the last the book overflows with the strange knowledge of child-nature which so rarely survives childhood; and moreover, with inexhaustible quiet humor, which is never anything but innocent and well-bred, never priggish, and never clumsy."—Academy. ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... sound somewhat priggish today; but in those days they were a necessary part of one's education. Washington was probably neither better nor worse than the run of Virginia boys, of gentle stock, in those days—just a good-natured, ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... frightfully priggish thing to say, but I'm extraordinarily interested as to what's going to happen next—inside, I mean. At least, sometimes; and then at other times ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... the same country. The adjustment of these subtle distinctions forms a part of the problem of life in all complicated societies. Thus in A Chance Acquaintance the heroine is a bright and pretty Western girl, who becomes engaged during a pleasure tour to an irreproachable but offensively priggish young gentleman from Boston, and the engagement is broken by her in consequence of an unintended slight—the betrayal on the hero's part of a shade of mortification when he and his betrothed are suddenly brought into the presence ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... interpret "need" in another sense, with an inversion; "the world of men needs me, and I must go to do my share." This would make the man perhaps nobler, but surely not so natural; indeed it would sound like a priggish excuse to leave his mistress. I have never quite surrendered to the ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... gratification at the announcement that Pethel liked me. But I did not go and seek him in the baccarat-room. A great character assuredly he was, but of a kind with which (I say it at the risk of seeming priggish) ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm
... girlish figures in the latest cut of golfing skirts, who are chattering odds on the Grand Prix in faultless English, to realize that these light-hearted gamines are the present owners of sonorous titles. One shudders to think what would have been the effect on poor Marie Antoinette’s priggish mentor could she have foreseen her granddaughter, clad in knickerbockers, running a petroleum tricycle in the streets of Paris, or pedalling “tandem” across country behind some young cavalry officer ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... unflinching hearts—these are the ones who are developing a moral fiber and strength of will which will stand in the day of stress. Better a thousand times such training as this in the thick of life's real conflicts than any volitional calisthenics or priggish self-denials entered into solely for ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... passages quoted, a foretaste of the priggish extravagance of the Faithful Shepherdess. That there should have been found critics to combine just but wholly otiose condemnation of Cloe with reverential appreciation of the absurdities of Clorin and ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... her mind, which worked by flashes of insight rather than orderly processes. She saw his earnest young face, with the sleek dark hair, which swept in a point back from his forehead, his sombre smoke-coloured eyes, and the firm, slightly priggish line of his mouth. He seemed miles away from her, separated by some imponderable yet impassable barrier. The first time her gaze had rested on him at the charity ball she had thought impetuously, "Any girl could fall in love with a man like that!" and she had carelessly asked his ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... that because my father was a saint, as undoubtedly he was, his general attitude towards life was of the priggish or puritanical kind. It was nothing of the sort. Was not one of his favourite characters in Shakespeare the immortal ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Master Harry Sandford of England, the priggish little boy in the story of "Sandford and Merton," has a worthy American cousin in one Elsie Dinsmore, who sedately pirouettes through a seemingly endless succession of girls' books. I came across a nest of fifteen of them the other day. This ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... she conceived a doubt whether Lucian was so safe an authority and example in matters of personal deportment as she had hitherto unthinkingly believed. He could not dance; his conversation was priggish; it was impossible to feel at ease when speaking to him. Was it courageous to stand in awe of his opinion? Was it courageous to stand in awe of anybody? Alice closed her lips proudly and began to be defiant. Then a reminiscence, which had never before failed to rouse indignation ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... firm and supple body. In this matter our young people are less exacting. The ordinary conversation of people gathered together for social purposes is not particularly intellectual, and any attempt to make it so at present seems priggish. With a broader education, will come keener demand for intelligence. We may hope the time is not too far distant when a question of governmental policy, a new book or play, or a new discovery in science will stimulate ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... Lucius Mason. The priggish, good-looking youth for whom Lady Mason risks so much. When he learns the truth he is stern in his judgment of the unhappy ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... and began to think that he was a priggish fellow after all. But as the burlesque went on, Mademoiselle Lalage charmed away this disagreeable impression. She warbled in an amorous duet, and then sang the pleasures of champagne; tossing her head; ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... moment—a terrible solecism in political economy. Even this, however, I believe she would have endured, rather than have quitted the house where she was born, and to which all her ways and notions were adapted, had not a priggish steward, as much addicted to improvement and reform as she was to precedent and established usages, insisted on binding her by lease to spread a certain number of loads of chalk on every field. This tremendous innovation, for never had that novelty in manure whitened the crofts and pightles ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... exciting and even romantic about them—they would not be so alluring if they had not—while the homely virtues of honesty, frankness, modesty, and self-restraint appear too often as a dull and priggish abstention from the more daring and adventurous joys of eager living. If evil were always ugly and goodness were always beautiful at first sight, there would be little of the trouble and havoc in the world that is wrought ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pronounced, "those are thoroughly second-rate ideas, the result of a perfectly superficial view. Excuse my possibly priggish tone, but they really attribute to my dear detached friend a part he's quite incapable of playing. He can neither make trouble nor take trouble; no trouble could ever either have come out of him or have got into him. Moreover," our young ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Dandy, airily. "The young ladies who drove with my master used to say that it was priggish and tiresome to be too good. To go on with my story: I stayed with Mrs. Judge Tibbett till I got sick of her fussy ways. She made a simpleton of herself over those poodles. Each one had a high chair at the table, and a plate, and they always sat in these chairs and had meals with her, and the ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... the word "ideals" had grown out-of-date and priggish—we had substituted for it the more robust word "ambitions." Today ideals have come back to their place in our vocabulary. We have forgotten that we ever had ambitions, but at this moment men are drowning for ideals in the mud ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... the curate; there was really nothing questionable in that, but he was just slightly prejudiced against a man who made such a quotation; it sounded a little priggish. ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... hardship and all careless of himself. Dickens spent his youth among them, Morland his old age—alas! a drunken, premature old age. Hans Andersen, the fairy king, dreamed his sweet fancies beneath their sloping roofs. Poor, wayward-hearted Collins leaned his head upon their crazy tables; priggish Benjamin Franklin; Savage, the wrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer bed than a doorstep; young Bloomfield, "Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watts the engineer—the roll is endless. Ever since the habitations of ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... are delightfully vague, and who, in English history, light-heartedly confuses the Reformation and the Revolution, has tastes similar to those of Belinda. Pursued by an instructive husband, she turns at bay, and tells her priggish preceptor what kind of ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... world of fiction. In The Three Clerks, the young men who give the tale its title are all well drawn. To accomplish this in the cases of Alaric and Charley Tudor was easy enough for a skilled writer, but to breathe life into Harry Norman was difficult. At first he appears to be a lay-figure, a priggish dummy of an immaculate hero, a failure in portraiture; but toward the end of the book it is borne in on us that our dislike had been aroused by the lifelike nature of the painting, dislike toward a real man, priggish ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... meet or pass a strange man in the woods or fields with as finished an air of being unaware of him (particularly if he be a rather shabby painter no longer young) as if the encounter took place on a city sidewalk; but this woman was not of that priggish kind. Her straightforward glance recognised my existence as a fellow-being; and she further acknowledged it by a faint smile, which was of courtesy only, however, and admitted no reference to the fact that at the first sound of her voice I had leaped into the air, kicked a camp-stool twenty ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... do matter. Quakerism is not my favourite creed; but on that day when William Penn stood unarmed upon that spot and made his treaty with the Red Indians, his creed of humanity did have a triumph and a triumph that has not turned back. The praise given to him is not a priggish fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions have illogically curtailed it. The Nonconformists have been rather unfair to Penn even in picking their praises; and they generally forget that toleration cuts both ways and that an open mind is open on all sides. Those who ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... keep a prisoner upon a barren rock at Saint Helena, contrary to every principle of justice and humanity, and in violation of all law, and particularly in violation of the law of nations, notwithstanding Mr. Brougham's priggish assertions ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... don't know, except that she knew we were so anxious about it. We shan't have any fun now. I expect she'll be dreadfully priggish ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... ideas, will never be brilliant on an occasion when he longs to outshine the stars. Living at one's best is constant preparation for instant use. It can never make one over-precise, self-conscious, affected, or priggish. Education, in its highest sense, is conscious training of mind or body to act unconsciously. It is conscious formation of mental habits, not mere acquisition ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... better now, when the phenomenon replied, "Thank you, madam, the agony is abated." Of course so quaint and remarkable a child was much petted and spoiled, and probably rendered somewhat conceited and priggish. But he was docile and affectionate, and was then, as always thereafter, the idol of ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... Miss Alice du Cane, at first an intelligent, cynical and rather trivial person. Then suddenly, for no very sure reason that any one could discover, her character changed. She had known Bobby during many years and had always laughed at him for a solemn, rather-priggish young man—then she fell in love with him and, to his own wild and delirious surprise, married him. The companions of her earlier girlhood missed her cynicism and complained that brilliance had given way to commonplace but you could not find, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... real author, all this would of course have been delightful to him; it was all so kind and so evidently sincere for the most part, that only a very priggish or cynical person could have affected to undervalue it, and any other, even if he felt it overstrained now and then, would have enjoyed it frankly while it lasted, remembering that, in the nature of things, it ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... in such an atmosphere a girl like myself, of serious not to say priggish tendency, did not escape a concerted pressure to push her into the "missionary field." During the four years it was inevitable that every sort of evangelical appeal should have been made to reach the comparatively few "unconverted" girls in the school. We were the subject of prayer at the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... would be or I shouldn't have come. You think Life's an important thing, don't you? That's priggish, isn't it? Good-bye. We're coming to dinner ... Aunt Julia and I. Miss Trebell arrived to ask us just as ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... it was so fine and frosty a kind of devil seemed to creep into me. I have been so good since Saturday, so when Malcolm said, in his usual prim, priggish voice, "Miss Travers, may I have the pleasure of taking you for a little exercise," I jumped up without consulting Lady Katherine, and went and put my things on, and ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... him approach his dinner with vexation, and, failing to find the man he had sought, he finished hastily. As he went out, Silas Trimmer, though looking straight in his direction, did not seem to be at all aware of Bobby's approach. He was deep in a business discussion with his priggish son-in-law. ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... imply. The love affairs of a young officer who, while blind from wounds, fell in love with his nurse to the extent of becoming engaged to her and didn't recognise her when they met again, are Mr. RILEY'S real concern. Eric, who is quite as priggish as his name suggests, falls in love with his sweetheart, as a lady of leisure, all over again, and goes through agonies of remorse on account of his own faithlessness to her as a nurse. Marion or Constance, for she uses two names to help the confusion, lets ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... never saw Peter Jensen again, nor the forty Malays and the two women. Jensen may have escaped; he may even have lived to read these lines; God only knows what was the fate of the unfortunate fleet of pearl- fishers. Priggish and uncharitable people may ejaculate: "The reward of cupidity!" But I say, "judge not, lest ye ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... of the times when his mother had implored him with anxious, fervent words to be good. How ill he had succeeded as to that "goodness"! That dear tender mother had not grudged him the freedom of youth; often she had told him that she had no wish to see him a priggish, model boy, but had urged him not to lag behind the others, nor to fall short of his goal. This was chiefly because of the stingy, well-to-do relations, whose goodwill she had to secure in order that he might not have an utterly joyless youth. She had borne every burden, and was prematurely ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... going," replied Winnie, stopping to bestow a smile on the elder girl's pleasant face. "But you can't understand why I am so happy. You don't belong to our set, and therefore know very little about Ada's conceit and—yes, I shall say it—priggish ways. She's just as horrid as can be, and I hate her," wound up the malicious monkey, quite reckless of ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... of her position came up into clear consciousness: the lights, the laughter, the very smell of the smoke endeared by a thousand triumphs. How dared he speak of Nelly O'Neill as though she couldn't be touched with a pitchfork! Yes, and Bob Maper, too—her anger ricocheted to him—with his priggish notions of saving her from black bogs! And who was it that now stood over her like a fuddled accusing angel? She pulled out ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... moment, the points of his little moustache went up again in the habitual barometrical smile. Rather a priggish, supercilious smile, she thought, taking a glance ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... think he will! But if he did—No, I think he will be a staff to guide a silly, priggish heart to ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... stand well with others, and in particular the desire to seem manly, increases. If a debased public opinion demands of a boy the cheap manliness of profanity, tobacco, and irreverence, the demand creates a plentiful supply, while it also suppresses as priggish or "pi" any avowed or suspected devotion to higher ideals. A healthy public opinion, working in harmony with a boy's nobler instincts, calls forth in him an earnest devotion to high ideals, and causes him to exercise, on the development of his powers and in a crusade against wrong, ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... big goose," sneered Marian. "I never thought you'd be so silly. And all on account of that priggish Jane ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... her, his attitude seemed to her priggish and dictatorial, and as the sun disappearing behind a sudden cloud, so her childish merriment quickly gave place to a ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... is a wonderful country," he said aloud, "where you get people studying Spanish in their off-hours." Ellen thought it rather wonderful too, and looked at her toes with a priggish blankness. "You've got a marvellous educational system...." He paused, conscious that he was too manifestly talking at random. "In two continents you've enjoyed the reputation of being able to talk the hind-leg off a donkey," he reminded himself. "It's the language ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... AB'SOLON, a priggish parish clerk in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. His hair was curled, his shoes slashed, his hose red. He could let blood, cut hair, and shave, could dance, and play either on the ribible or the gittern. This gay spark paid his addresses to Mistress ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... growing lack of color in Anthony's days. He felt it constantly and sometimes traced it to a talk he had had with Maury Noble a month before. That anything so ingenuous, so priggish, as a sense of waste should oppress him was absurd, but there was no denying the fact that some unwelcome survival of a fetish had drawn him three weeks before down to the public library, where, by ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... in her honor. If, however, we accept Damascius's theory of their relation, what forbids us to conjecture that the goddess's name was itself "formed from the infantine sound ba"? In any case, the little domestic scene between the priggish father and the dandling mother is amusing and instructive to parents ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... But no; we must talk. Now, possibly there are topics she knows about and I do not—it is unlikely, but suppose so; on these topics she requires no information. Again, I know about other topics things unknown to her, and it seems a mean and priggish thing to broach these, since they put her at a disadvantage. Thirdly, comes a last group of subjects upon which we are equally informed, and upon which, therefore, neither of us is justified in telling things to the other. This classification of topics seems ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... such new vistas of what can be done with time that was wasted in former years have opened before me that time seems to me the greatest luxury in the world—time that was formerly wasted and now is used! I hope that does not sound priggish. I have tried to show that I value highly the privilege of associating with my fellows, and that I like their ways and their talk and their company. What I mean by this paean to time is that I can have company in a modified measure, if I choose; and that I can and do have other things ...
— The Old Game - A Retrospect after Three and a Half Years on the Water-wagon • Samuel G. Blythe
... practise the musical art that they might have a soul-developing aesthetic training, a means of solace, delight, and self-expression—but that they might "play their piece" to the casual visitor to the school-room with priggish pride, expectant of praise; they were not to be Christian for any other reason than that it was the recommended way to Eternal Bliss and a Good Time Hereafter—the whole duty of canny and respectable man being to ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... There was no one to whom she could turn. Had good Dr. Bayly been at home—but he was away on some important mission from his lordship to the king: and indeed she could scarcely have looked for refuge from such misery as hers in the judgment of the rather priggish old-bachelor ecclesiastic. Gladly would she have forsaken the castle, and returned to all the dangers and fears of her lonely home; but that would be to yield to a lie, to flee from the devil instead of facing him, and with her own hand ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... everything in sight, even to the point of changing her mind on the instant, if circumstances seemed to make it advisable. Her instinctive point of view, when she went so far as to hold one, was somewhat cut and dried; in a word, priggish. She kept a young man strictly on his good behavior, that much could be said in her favor; the only criticism that could be made on this estimable trait was that no bold youth was ever tempted to overstep the bounds of discretion when in her presence. No unruly ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... scene [Footnote: Coleridge gives this scene as an instance of Shakespeare's "wonderful judgement"; the introduction of the gardener, he says, "realizes the thing," and, indeed, the introduction of a gardener would have this tendency, but not the introduction of this pompous, priggish philosopher togged out in old Adam's likeness. Here is the way this gardener criticises the King: "All superfluous branches We lop away, that bearing boughs may live; Had he done so, himself had borne the crown, Which waste of idle hours hath ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... in a moment of inspiration. "In the strictest sense a boy," was Mr. Gladstone's expressive phrase in his controversy with Colonel Dopping. For my own part, I confess to a frank dislike of boys. I dislike them equally whether they are priggish boys, like Kenelm Chillingly, who asked his mother if she was never overpowered by a sense of her own identity; or sentimental boys, like Dibbins in Basil the Schoolboy, who, discussing with a friend how to spend a whole holiday, said, "Let us go to Dingley Dell and talk about ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... I was a priggish young cub, I suppose. I had been brought up in an over-luxurious home, and coddled and faddled after till I thought the world was made of pink cotton-wool and sugared almonds. Then one fine day I found out that someone I ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... even" with him, Mrs. Skaggs did a most priggish thing. She died six months later. But, before doing so, she made a will in which she left the entire estate to her daughter, effectually depriving the absent husband of any chance to reclaim ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... what does the tone matter?" said Bertha. "You are one of those painfully priggish people, Mr. Trevor, who will never get on in the world. Have you not yet discovered that being extra good does ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... said Rosamund. "I am not a very good girl myself, and perhaps that is why I partly understand her. At the present moment I hate my position. I like Mr. and Mrs. Merriman very well, and some of the girls; but I can't stand that priggish Lucy. Perhaps that is why I comprehend Irene—anyhow, if I may sometimes come to ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... essentially is thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all. There is no radically alien corner, but an all-pervading intimacy. Now, in certain sensitively egotistic minds this conception of reality is sure to put on a narrow, close, sick-room air. Everything sentimental and priggish will be consecrated by it. That element in reality which every strong man of common-sense willingly feels there because it calls forth {90} powers that he owns—the rough, harsh, sea-wave, north-wind element, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... outcome of a flippant, vulgar mind. Boltt had a wider public than Lensley. Boltt, a tall, thin, stooping man, with peering eyes, had discovered "the human note" of which Gilbert's editor prated continually. He was a precise, priggish man, extraordinarily vain though no vainer than Lensley, who, however, had an easy manner that Boltt would never acquire. He spoke in the way in which one might expect a "reduced gentlewoman, poor dear!" to speak, and there was something about him that made ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... and Rodney's common friendship for the Lakes had drawn him rather intimately into their circle, his attitude toward Rose herself throughout had remained deliberately detached and impersonal. He was not in the least priggish about it. He was quite willing to let it appear that he liked her and to admit that she liked him. But their talk had always been not only objective, but about objects comparatively remote; chorus-girls, for example, and Norse sagas, to take at random two of his wide assortment ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... laugh, and Saffy into silent tears, for she thought she had made a fool of herself. She was not a priggish child, and did not deserve the mockery with which her barbarian brother invaded her little temple. She was such a true child that her mother was her neighbor, and present to all her being—not her eyes only or her brain, but her heart and spirit ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... a fat-head, And a bellicose body to boot. He was selfish and priggish and worse, he was piggish— A regular beast of a brute. At table his acts were incredibly mean; He gave his wife ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... with consumption but forget that he lived with consumption. And without using much charity, this can be made to excuse many of his irascible and uncongenial moods. You to whom that gaunt face seems forbidding—look into the eyes! If he seems "dry and priggish" to you, Mr. Stevenson, "with little of that large unconscious geniality of the world's heroes," follow him some spring morning to Baker Farm, as he "rambles through pine groves ... like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... they scold her, then, my pretty one? And did she want to be as wise as they, To bear a bucklered heart and priggish mind? Ay, you may crow; she did! but no, no, no, The night-time will not let her, all the stars Say nay to that,—the old sea laughs at her. Why, Gladys is a child; she has not skill To shut herself within ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... lightning made audible. Here you have freedom in love and in morality mocking exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you, attracting you, tempting you, inexplicably forcing you to range the hero with his enemy the statue on a transcendant plane, leaving the prudish daughter and her priggish lover on a crockery shelf below to live piously ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... and now the widow and young Craven's sister lived in Cambridge. Craven had tried, during his first term, to make a friend of Olva, but his happy, eager attitude to the whole world had seemed crude and even priggish to Olva's reserve, and all Craven's overtures had been refused, quietly, kindly, but firmly. Craven had not resented the repulse; it was not his habit to resent anything, and as the year had passed, Olva had realized that Craven's impetuous desire for the friendship ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... He could not say that Billy employed the wrong tailor; it would show only gross ignorance or temper to say so. But just the things in which he felt himself superior, utterly different in fact from Billy, were the stupid, priggish things that no one boasts of. He read a good deal; he thought a good deal; he knew he might have had a future, and the bitterness of his heart lay in the fact that at fifteen years later in life than Billy he was still so completely a slave to all that ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... she reflected. "As to titles, perhaps he only wants to try me. He has been told that I am mad about titles, and bent on marrying none but a peer's son. My priggish sisters have played me that trick."—"I assure you, monsieur," she said aloud, "that I have had very extravagant ideas about life and the world; but now," she added pointedly, looking at him in a perfectly ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... very popular, apparently, as poems for children to recite; yet in the one case it is beyond any teacher's power to show children the unearthly flaming beauty which alone gives the poem its peculiar quality and undefinable power; and in the other the maudlin sentimentalism and almost priggish piety of the verses are positively dangerous to the child's health of mind. Both types of recitation work out in the end to this—that when the child attains adolescence, and the great world of literature dawns on the hungry mind, an evil association of ideas ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... that he could do no more, hastily put on his cap again and disappeared. "What a pity," he thought, "that such a fine young Prince should be so priggish when his ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... things which I particularly dislike—heat, and crowds, and cricket." It certainly was a rather priggish answer, but let me say in self-defence that before I left the school I had become as keen on "Lord's," as the best of ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... Bobbie found it quite hard to be as nice to him as she wanted to be, for fear he should think her priggish. But that soon wore off, and both she and Phyllis were, as he observed, jolly good sorts. Mother sat with him when his sisters were out. And the words, "he's not a coward," made Peter determined not to ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... and climate of the country being reported as having a wonderful effect on growth. Another entertained me with a long account of how he was leaving England because of his wife; but, as he was of a somewhat priggish nature, I suspect the fault may have been his own ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... successful, bustling Onze; tactless but honest Douze; treacherous yet fascinating Treize; blundering Seize; graceful, brunette Dix-Sept; and the faithful, friendly Vingtneuf; feminine Rouge; brusque, virile Noir; mean little, underbred Manque, and senile Passe; priggish Pair with his skittish young wife; the Dozens, nouveaux-riches, thinking themselves a cut above the humbler Simple Chances in Roulette Society; the upright, unbending Columns; the raffish Chevaux; the excitable Transversales, ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... edition." Well, qui s'excuse. . . . Who, pray, has accused me as yet? Here am I smothering dear good old Mrs. Grundy's objections, before she has opened her mouth. I love, I say, and scarcely ever tire of hearing, the artless prattle of those two dear old friends, the Perigourdin gentleman and the priggish little Clerk of King Charles's Council. Their egotism in nowise disgusts me. I hope I shall always like to hear men, in reason, talk about themselves. What subject does a man know better? If I stamp on a friend's corn, his outcry is genuine—he confounds ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... for reasons that will be analyzed later on. But boys whose brains are amenable to academic training are liable, unless the environment of the school is peculiarly unfavourable to the development of the species, to become priggish. ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... justification of Savonarola's anger, upon the hideous and extravagant character of the crimes which polluted the palaces of the Renaissance. But they need not be so anxious to show that Savonarola was no ascetic, that he merely picked out the black specks of wickedness with the priggish enlightenment of a member of an Ethical Society. Probably he did hate the civilisation of his time, and not merely its sins; and that is precisely where he was infinitely more profound than a modern moralist. ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... eyes,' if they were not combined with 'A smooth and steadfast mind, Gentle thoughts, and calm desires.' A rosy cheek, a coral lip, and even star-like eyes, as he sagely said, would waste away. And in this somewhat priggish, and perhaps not wholly sincere, vein, he finds a rival in the anonymous bard who declared ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... near to beating me. Most of them you know are such able men. You can FEEL their knowledge and commonsense. They, and everybody about me, seemed busy and intent upon more immediate things, that seemed more real to them than this remote, theoretical, PRIGGISH end ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... presumptuous and priggish in the memory. But I did mean truly by him. I began to question him, and by slow degrees, in broken hints, and in jets of reply, drew from him the facts. When at length he saw that I understood, he burst into tears, hid his face in ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... began his military career as a prize cadet and after getting his commission he was quickly promoted from subaltern rank. His advancement, however, caused no jealousy, for Dick Brandon was liked. He was, perhaps, a trifle priggish about his work—cock-sure, his comrades called it—but about other matters he was naively ingenuous. Indeed, acquaintances who knew him only when he was off duty thought him something of ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... allowance for the eccentricities of their titled or moneyed acquaintances. They were the subdued, smiling, unimaginatively dressed women on a small definite income that you meet at every rectory garden-party in the country, a little snobbish, a little priggish, wholly conventional, but apart from these weaknesses, sound and simple and dignified, managing their two small servants with a display of the most exact traditions, and keeping a somewhat vague and belated but constant eye upon the doings of their country as chronicled ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... color, with a consistently developed plot, constructed with a fine sense of proportion and vivid characterization, except in one respect, which constitutes the weak point of the story—that is to say, the character of Dick Lawton, who is somewhat priggish and altogether disappointing. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... go-between. He pushed a button in the row on his study table. "This new job as mayor seems to be playing some sort of a devil's trick with Stewart. I'll admit, Daunt, that I didn't relish some of the priggish preachment on politics mouthed by him in his office when we were there. But I didn't pay much attention—any more than I did to his exaggerated flourish in the way he attended to city business. The ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... cooerdination and subordination, when once he had this universal key to insight. Applying it wholesale as he did, innumerable truths unobserved till then had to fall into his gamebag. And his peculiar trick, a priggish infirmity in daily intercourse, of treating every smallest thing by abstract law, was here a merit. Add his sleuth-hound scent for what he was after, and his untiring pertinacity, to his priority in perceiving ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... and after listening awhile to an old droning-beetle, without hearing a word he said, they bowed and courtesied, and made some sort of a reply, nobody could guess what; and then forth stepped the master of ceremonies, a priggish-looking grasshopper, with straw-colored tights, and a fashionable coat, single-breasted, and so quakerish it set poor little Rosebud a-laughing, in spite of all she could do, every time she looked at his legs; and then! out ran the ten thousand trumpeting bumble-bees, ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... being able even to report such conversations as he said he had had with North Wind, had I not known already that some children are profound in metaphysics. But a fear crosses me, lest, by telling so much about my friend, I should lead people to mistake him for one of those consequential, priggish little monsters, who are always trying to say clever things, and looking to see whether people appreciate them. When a child like that dies, instead of having a silly book written about him, he should be stuffed like one of those ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... ice of their commonplaces. She looked directly at him, her cheeks flushing. "I don't know how you're going to forgive me, Clay. I've been awf'ly small and priggish. I hate to think I'm ungenerous, but that's just what ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... said Dolly, giggling frankly, and seemingly not at all hurt because Bessie did not take the recital of her troubles more seriously. "Aunt Mabel would like you, I don't mean that you're stiff and priggish like her, but you seem quieter than most of the girls, and more serious minded. I ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the Farm - Or, Bessie King's New Chum • Jane L. Stewart
... be said that education of the type we have been considering demands great gifts in the teacher: simplicity, enthusiasm, sympathy, and also a vigorous sense of humour, keeping him sharply aware of the narrow line that divides the priggish from the ideal. This education ought to inspire, but it ought not to replace, the fullest and most expert training of the body and mind; for the spirit needs a perfectly balanced machine, through which to express its life in the physical world. The ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... perhaps best shown in a repetition of what he claimed to be the debate in the city council of Boston on his plans for a new city hall, which were afterward adopted. The speeches in Irish brogue, Teutonic Jargon, and down-east Yankee dialect, with utterances interposed here and there by solemnly priggish members, were inimitable. His pet antipathy seemed to be the bishop of the diocese, Dr. Eastburn. Stories were told to the effect that Gilman, early in life, had desired to take orders in the Protestant Episcopal ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... promised him she would consider his question, and when, after he had left her, she wandered back to the bench where he had found her and lost herself in meditation, it might have seemed that she was keeping her vow. But this was not the case; she was wondering if she were not a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... priggish or otherwise, are assumed for Mr. Gresley which, we are told, distinguish the true, the perfect gentleman, and some of which, thank Heaven! the "gentleman born" frequently lacks. Whether he had them or not ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... partner, the fair and fleet-footed "Dorphy," had deserted him for good and sufficient cause, and his hard old heart rebelled against priggish Christians and their superior ways. Some of the tardiness of age has come upon him. Though he had "worked" the oysters with all the resourcefulness of the lone hand, the marketable results were less in bulk than formerly. "Dorphy" had been wont to re-sort and classify Hamed's gleanings, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... his glance, and the thought crossed her mind uncomfortably that she had perhaps made a mistake, a serious mistake, in asking this priggish-looking Englishman to come to the Chalet des Muguets. He evidently did not like the look of ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... all, sir, at my age one is naturally experimenting, and trying to find one's (with a laugh)—well, it sounds priggish, but one's medium of expression. I shall find out what I want to do directly, but I think I shall always be able to earn enough to live on. Well, I have for ...
— Mr. Pim Passes By • Alan Alexander Milne
... a dunce onyway," said the boy. "He canna spell an easy word like 'examination,' an' he had twenty-two mistakes in his dictation test," he went on, and she was quick to note the air of priggish importance in his utterance. ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... sir, at my age one is naturally experimenting, and trying to find one's (with a laugh)—well, it sounds priggish, but one's medium of expression. I shall find out what I want to do directly, but I think I shall always be able to earn enough to live on. Well, I have ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne |
