"Surliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... satisfy him either. Rose said nothing. He had indeed left her nothing to say. But there was a look of perplexity in her eyes—as if she were casting about for some stupidly tactless act or omission of her own to account for his surliness—that made ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... information, but was satisfied with what he had seen. He took no lead in conversation, and it was evident that he almost wholly lacked facility in that way. What he said was kindly; there was nothing like surliness in his manner; but he seemed to be without the faculty of drawing other people out and putting himself in easy accord with them. No doubt his interviews with General Foster had contained all that was necessary for making up his mind as to our situation except the personal ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... riders, the boys were soon on the Islington road. The New Gate was shut by the time they reached it, and their explanation that they were belated after a nutting expedition would not have served them, had not Stephen produced the sum of twopence which softened the surliness of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... male servant belonged to this latter class. I was very much afraid of him, he had such an air of suspicious surliness about him in all he did for me; and yet M. de la Tourelle spoke of him as most valuable and faithful. Indeed, it sometimes struck me that Lefebvre ruled his master in some things; and this I could not make ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... rats are not engaging pets; they show a considerable amount of surliness and ferocity. I have noticed that on approaching the bars of the cage, one would grind its teeth, put back its ears, and fly ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... is all one to me, for I am at home in these woods and wastes, I and my shafts. Tell me of the deeds when thou wilt." But indeed he longed to know the deed, and fretted him because of Simon's surliness and closeness. Then he said: "Well, Squire Simon, let us to the road; for thou shalt know that to-night we must needs house us under the naked heaven; in nowise can we come to the ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris
... at best had had only a local and provincial respectability, which it was now daily losing by habits which were both sensual and vulgarising; a man, too, who was strangely changing from joyous geniality into moody surliness. Besides, he doubted if, in the evident change in the prosperity of the family, the fortune to be paid down on the occasion of his marriage to Ellinor could be forthcoming. And above all, and around all, there hovered the shadow of some unrevealed disgrace, which might come to light ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... welcome that is indispensable, is a civil one. When that is not forthcoming, we shake the dust, or the dirt, off our feet, and pursue our journey, well assured that a few milestones will bring us to a humaner roof. Incivility and surliness have occasionally given us opportunities of beholding rare celestial phenomena—meteors—falling and shooting stars—the Aurora Borealis, in her shifting splendours—haloes round the moon, variously bright as the rainbow—electrical arches forming themselves ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the dismal passages, some officers of the jail who are in waiting there, congratulate him, in their rough way, on his release. The newsmonger is of the number, but his manner is not quite hearty—there is something of surliness in his compliments. He looks upon Kit as an intruder, as one who has obtained admission to that place on false pretences, who has enjoyed a privilege without being duly qualified. He may be a very good sort of young ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... suppose it makes much difference to the excluded whether it is done out of mere surliness, or for the sake ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Good-breeding in society, a balance between surliness on the one hand, and weak assent or interested flattery on the other. It is a nameless virtue, resembling friendship without the special affection. Aristotle shows what he considers the bearing of the finished gentleman, studying to give ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... second Rendlesham match) did not always turn out in the way he expected. This, however, was only rumour, and was not to be reckoned among Bob's known transgressions, which were general stupidity, surliness, unsteadiness, and an ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... the other Malay, in whose seagoing craft they had escaped in the bewilderment, fear, and gloom of the disaster. The shock of it seemed to have changed their natures. It had turned her passion into stone, and it made the surly taciturn Tamb' Itam almost loquacious. His surliness, too, was subdued into puzzled humility, as though he had seen the failure of a potent charm in a supreme moment. The Bugis trader, a shy hesitating man, was very clear in the little he had to say. Both were evidently over-awed by a sense of deep inexpressible wonder, by the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... but it is somewhat surprising, how he becomes so well informed of the actual state of things, and of the feelings and opinions of both parties in our country. His acuteness, his wit, his logic, and his surliness, form, altogether, a curious portraiture of an English politician. We, now and then, get sight of American papers; but they are almost all of them federal papers, and contain matter more hostile to our government than the English papers. The most detestable paper printed in London, is ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... his captive—with the same wondering surliness. Nor could he understand another thing which was evident. After the first shock of resistance the major had exhibited none of the indignation of a betrayed man, but actually seemed to accept the situation with a calmness that his captor lacked. His ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... thick and clumsy shoes, my rough stockings, the old, cord breeches that disfigured me, hideous in themselves and rendered more so by numerous darns and ill-contrived patches. Here then, as it seemed, was the explanation for the brutality, surliness and odious familiarity I had been subjected to; for my voice and manner being out of all keeping with my appearance, I must naturally become an object of suspicion, coarse merriment, ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... he seems to have let spleen take the place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and ill-humoured banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one fresh from Voltaire. "So you have chosen for yourself a tender and virtuous mistress! I am not surprised; ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... whether it were of set purpose or no, the dame forgat her other promise, to give Birdalone more holiday, and kept her close to her work about meadow and acre. Otherwise her mistress nowise mishandled or threatened her, though she had gone back to the surliness and railing which was her wont. At last, on a morning when the dame had bidden her to nought of work, Birdalone took her bow in her hand and cast her quiver on her back, and went her ways into the wood, and forgat not the tress of Habundia's hair; but she had no need ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... respectfully, but with a dogged surliness that revealed no loyalty. Yet there was in his look a hint of fanatical intensity. Outside in the passageway he smiled grimly. For once the errand on which the duke had sent him fell in with his own inclinations. He opened a window and looked out through ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... on talking of nothings, a conversation in which Daniel joined with somewhat of surliness, while Bell, grave and anxious, kept wistfully looking from one to the other, desirous of gleaning some further information on the subject, which had begun to trouble her mind. She hoped some chance would give her the opportunity of privately questioning Philip, but ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... often deprived of his legitimate spoils, that, while his surliness was increased, his bodily growth was checked. He was small and thin for his age; and so, when a kind of fever peculiar to young badgers broke out in the woodland home, he succumbed. His grave was a shallow depression near the path below ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... worn out these stains, and the same cause is now removing what is repulsive among those who toil with their hands. I cannot believe that coarse manners, boisterous conversation, slovenly negligence, filthy customs, surliness, indecency, are to descend by necessity from generation to generation in any portion of the community. I do not see why neatness, courtesy, delicacy, ease, and deference to others' feelings, may not be made the habits of the laboring multitude. A change is certainly ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... custode was very nervous and hurried us through the thickets of bushes growing up between the stones of the pavement, and fairly pushed us out again into the small parkway, accepting the very generous fee which I gave him with what I should call surliness. But we ignored this completely, after the manner of old travelers, which we had ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... younger, although at the meeting of their eyes her glance was instantly withdrawn and succeeded by fiery blushes. He stayed as long as he had the least excuse for doing so, and then arose to take his leave, half smiling at Hannah's inhospitable surliness and his own perseverance under difficulties. He went up to Nora to bid her good-by. He took her hand, and as he gently pressed it he looked into her eyes; but hers fell beneath his gaze; and with a simple "Good-day, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... drawing-room, ostensibly to avoid the cool night air. It was the former "card-room" of the hotel, but now fitted with feminine taste and prettiness. She arranged a seat for him on the sofa, which he took with a certain brusque boyish surliness, the last vestige of ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... suppose those things cut deep with a boy," she added gently. She had a maternal instinct to put out a comforting hand, and say "never mind." Poor man! because, when he was twenty a girl had jilted him, he was still, at over forty, defending a sensitive heart by an armor of surliness. "Won't you come in?" she said, when they reached her door; she smiled at him, with her pleasant leaf-brown eyes,—eyes which were less sad, he thought, than when she first came to Mercer. ("Getting over her husband's death, I suppose," ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... few men can speak of Nature, for instance, with any truth. They overstep her modesty, somehow or other, and confer no favor. They do not speak a good word for her. Most cry better than they speak, and you can get more nature out of them by pinching than by addressing them. The surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of his woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, is better than the mealy-mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature. Better that the primrose by the river's brim be a yellow primrose, and nothing more, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... impartiality, because, as he liked the French, he always gave the pirates of that nationality the credit for most of the bravery displayed on their expeditions, and all of the magnanimity and courtesy, if there happened to be any, while the surliness, brutality, and extraordinary wickednesses were all ascribed to the English. But be this as it may, Esquemeling's history was a great success. It was written in Dutch and was afterwards translated into ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... this stage I remember thinking it odd that I should be talking like this with a stranger whom I met in a country inn, for it has always been one of my failings that to strangers my manner is brief to surliness. It was as though we were figures meeting in a dream, speaking without sound, obeying laws not operative in the everyday working world, and about to play with a new scale of space and time perhaps. But my astonishment passed ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... I wished to command a ship, not to take in lodgers; persons whom you are bound to treat with a certain degree of consideration, and, in one sense, as your superiors. Still, it had too much of an appearance of surliness, and a want of hospitality, to refuse a respectable man a passage across the ocean, when he might not get another chance in a month, and that, too, when it was important to himself to proceed immediately. In this particular instance, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... concerning the pamphlet Common Sense, he censured it because it attacked the English form of government. John was for independence because he expected to be made great by it; but it was not difficult to perceive, for the surliness of his temper makes him an awkward hypocrite, that his head was as full of kings, queens, and knaves, as a pack of cards. But John has ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... she spoke, but moved slowly and in the direction of the hill, although she took a less direct trail than the one she had pointed to him. But he followed her, albeit still embarrassedly, and with that new sense of respect which had checked his former surliness. There was her strong, healthy, well-developed figure moving before him, but the modish gray dress seemed to give its pronounced outlines something of the dignity of a goddess. Even the firm hands had the ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... to part with her, though her presence was a very obvious drawback to his comfort. He never took her part, but also he never threw his weight into the balance against her. He merely, with considerable surliness, looked on. ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... bowed rather ungracefully. Standing up he looked more than ever like a huge boy, and he had much of the expression that is often characteristic of huge boys—an expression in which impudence seems to float forward from a background of surliness. ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... the characteristics of the girls and boys, develops into surliness in men and billingsgate in women. And I have no doubt that little Diega, the sulkiest and prettiest of the Visayan beauties, in a few years will be gambling at the cock-fights, smoking cigars, and losing her money every Sunday ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... had been so thoroughly taught them, that her people rather caricatured, than otherwise, ce grand talent pour le silence that was thought to distinguish their enemies. Ithuel, who had a waggery of his own, smiled as he saw the seamen folding their arms, throwing discontent and surliness into their countenances, and pacing the deck singly, as if misanthropical and disdaining to converse, whenever a boat came alongside from the shore. Several of these visitors arrived in the course of the two hours mentioned; but the sentinel at the gangway, ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... pale they meet; their eyes with fury burn; None greets, for none the greeting will return; But in dumb surliness each armed with care His foe professed, as brother of the war; Then both, no moment lost, at once advance Against each other, armed with sword and lance: They lash, they foin, they pass, they strive ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... should be taken of her presence there by the owner of the house for his convenience. As she sat thinking of the offer which had been made to her she fancied that she could see and hear her Cousin Will as he discussed the matter with his sister, and with a half assumption of surliness declared his own intention of going away. Captain Aylmer, after that interview in London, had spoken of Belton's conduct as being unpardonable; but Clara had not only pardoned him, but had, in her own mind, pronounced his virtues to be so much greater ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... peasant farmer, small, leathery, peat faced, with a deep voice and a surliness that is meant to be aggressive, and is in effect pathetic—the voice of a man of hard life and many sorrows—comes in at the gate. He is old enough to have perhaps worn a long tailed frieze coat and knee breeches in his time; but ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... near the horses, was at first inclined to be surly, when aroused from a sound sleep and told to pack the horses as quickly and as quietly as possible; but in a few minutes all his surliness had vanished and he was doing the work with a swift and skilful dexterity that showed ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... the discipline to which they were accustomed. The young chattels are an infallible barometer—they indicate the real state of the weather on a plantation. One may never see among the older slaves of even a cruel master, any but sunshiny faces, for they know the penalty of surliness before a stranger; but the little darkies cannot be so restrained. They will slink away into by-corners, or scamper out of sight whenever their owner appears, if they ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the best defense against such a cataract. The rain could not enter bodily, but it beat through the canvas in a fine drizzle, that wetted us just as effectively. We sat upon our saddles with faces of the utmost surliness, while the water dropped from the vizors of our caps, and trickled down our cheeks. My india-rubber cloak conducted twenty little rapid streamlets to the ground; and Shaw's blanket-coat was saturated like a sponge. But what most concerned us was ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... impracticability. This latter process is the germ of the psychosis. But not its development. A certain compromise may be reached—he who digs for gold in his back-yard is not so crazy as he who reaches out his hand for the moon. Nor is the paranoic who chooses to put his interpretation on the surliness of his employer as far estranged from reality as the praecox who recognizes his employer in the person of the physician. The content of the psychosis may then express the relative strength of the two antagonistic ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... begged him to teach her chess, but he scouted the notion of her having wit enough to learn. She offered to read to him, entreated him to let her do something with him, but he repelled her every advance with contempt and surliness, which now and then broke ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... backwards by a blow in a poaching fray, so that when the sun was low and shining in his face, people could see far into his head. There was in him a quiet grimness, which would in his moments of displeasure have become surliness, had it not been tempered by honesty of soul, and which was often wrongheadedness because not ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... kindly. "Sir Percival is indeed fortunate to have a page, who while so young, yet is so loyal. So shall we see you again. Kind Merlin," and the King turned to the Wizard, "awaken you this sleeping knight whose only sin seems an undue amount of surliness and arrogance, which his bravery and ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... cried the guide impatiently. He loathed the sight of Bower standing there, smiling and courteous, in the presence of one whom he regarded as a Heaven-sent friend and protectress. Spencer attributed his surliness to its true cause. It supplied another bit of the mosaic he was slowly piecing together. Greatly as he preferred Helen's company, he was willing to sacrifice at least ten minutes of it, could he but listen to the "discussion" between ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... macaroni and pasti, and of those who sell mighty umbrellas. And it is then, I think, that Pontedera is at her best; life which ever contrives in Italy to keep something of a gay sanity, disposing for that day at least of the surliness of this people, who are very poor, and far from any ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... I never shall hear the last of that hearse! But at all events it took the surliness out ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... But the abrupt surliness completed the recognition, and, seizing his hand, Louis cried, 'Tom! how are you?' You have turned into a thorough Spaniard, and taken me ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him try a colt that he was breaking, Helen knew there were subtle questions in his brain, but if George suspected them, he gave no sign. He was at his ease, for with men he had neither diffidence nor surliness, and Helen remembered that she had hardly seen him except in the presence of Miriam or herself, two women who, in different ways, ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... ten minutes,' said Sophy, 'and I am sure I should not care! I should have something else to think about. Oh! papa, when my forehead aches with surliness, it does feel so unblest, so uncrossed!' and she put her hand over it, 'and all the books and hymns seem not to belong to me. I think I shall be able to keep off the tempers when I have a right ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have it, Mr. Randolph took the wrong road. He went far out of his way and lost much time, all on account of his surliness. ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... called his "dark mood." He had eaten no breakfast, and he scarcely spoke at all as he took up his stout ash stick and prepared to fare forth upon his way. Miss Tranter was not inquisitive, but she had rather a liking for Tom, and his melancholy surliness was not ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... that shoemakers and pastry-cooks are not the kind of people who compose the French court; but there can be no denial of the fact that certain kinds of artisans are treated by the French people with a greater degree of respect than they are with us. Very different from the dogged surliness of an Englishman, or the who-cares-for-you manner of our own countrymen, is the air of conscious self-respect of certain classes of French tradesmen. In the present condition of our society, we ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... But then, repenting of my surliness, I added, "And none so perilous that you need fear, ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... utter lack of sociability could scarcely have arisen from positive surliness or unkindness of disposition. Instances were not wanting in which he had given pretty strong evidence that he carried beneath that rugged and uncouth exterior a kinder and more gentle heart than is possessed by most men. Upon one occasion he had jumped ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... robbery, he gave little account; but, instead of sinking into his former shame, endeavoured to support himself by surliness ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... the prison he was shown into the director's private room, and he noticed that M. Dedet received him with a strange mixture of surliness and suspicion. ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... shoot one of the company through the heart, he would have executed the command according to the manual of arms, brought his carbine to a "recover," and at the word marched back to his quarters without an inquiry as to the cause of the proceedings. He made no friends, and though his surliness repelled us, he made few enemies. Indeed, he was rather a favorite, since he was a genuine character; his gruffness had no taint of selfish greed in it; he minded his own business strictly, and wanted others to do the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... months after the death of Louis XV. that the Court of Vienna obtained his recall. The avowed grounds for requiring it were, first, the public gallantries of Prince Louis with some ladies of the Court and others; secondly, his surliness and haughtiness towards other foreign ministers, which would have had more serious consequences, especially with the ministers of England and Denmark, if the Empress herself had not interfered; thirdly, his contempt for religion in a country where ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... even if the chimney-pot hat rose higher than a factory chimney or the high heels had evolved into a sort of stilts. By the same fallacy the Englishman will not only curse the French peasant as a miser, but will also try to tip him as a beggar. That is, he will first complain of the man having the surliness of an independent man, and then accuse him of having the servility of a dependent one. Just as the hypothetical Chinaman cannot believe that we have top-hats but not pig-tails, so the Englishman cannot believe that peasants are not snobs even when they are savages. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... straight, straighten, straightness, outstretch, overstretch. STYRAN, to steer—steer, steerage, steersman, stern (the hind part of a ship), astern. STYRIAN, to stir—stir, bestir. SUR, sour—sour, sourish, sourness, sorrel, surly, surliness. SWERIAN, to swear—swear, swearer, forswear, answer, unanswered. SWET, sweet—sweet, sweetbread, ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... her sympathy, weakened by his surliness, was also limited by her ignorance of his real plight, and by the secret preoccupation of her own existence. From the evening of the funeral the desire to see Arthur again, to study his features, to hear his voice, definitely took the uppermost place in her mind. She thought of him always, and ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... being in better fortune than many of his tenants, for they had seen their young crops ridden over, or used as pasture, by the cavalry of both sides, and were therefore not merely without means of paying rent, but were faced by actual want for their own families. The surliness or threats with which the squire's demands were met should have proven to him their impolicy; but if to the simple-minded landlord a debt was a debt and only a debt, he was quickly to learn that there are various ways of ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... landlord, a little brought down from his dignity by the stranger's surliness, 'is a Maypole story, and has been any time these four-and-twenty years. That story is Solomon Daisy's story. It belongs to the house; and nobody but Solomon Daisy has ever told it under this roof, or ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... our Boat. But, bless us! what a numerous band Of cockneys anglicise the strand! 95 Delinquent bankrupts, leg-bail'd debtors, Some for the news, and some for letters— With hungry look and tarnished dress, French shrugs and British surliness. Sick of the country for their sake 100 Of them and France French leave I take— And lo! a transport comes in view I hear the merry motley crew, Well skill'd in pocket to make entry, Of Dieman's Land the elected Gentry, 105 And founders of Australian ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... considering that Lycurgus their lawgiver was so addicted to elegant learning, as to have been the first that brought out of Ionia the scattered works of Homer, and sent the poet Thales from Crete to prepare and mollify the Spartan surliness with his smooth songs and odes, the better to plant among them law and civility, it is to be wondered how museless and unbookish they were, minding nought but the feats of war. There needed no licensing of books among them, for they disliked all but their own ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... necessary to go two hundred and thirty miles farther up the river to Eagle, before he could despatch his message. So he left his Esquimaux at Fort Yukon and took this Indian as guide. And in his modest and most interesting book he mentions the man's surliness and says he was glad to get rid ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... rule, and it must be annoying to eugenists to find that the natives are such a hardy and vigorous race. The "Kimberlin," as all foreigners from the mainland are called, is still looked upon with a certain amount of suspicion, and oftener than not advances are met with a surliness that must be understood and so forgiven. Heredity is stronger in remote and insular districts than in those where the channels of communication are free, but the long story of brave and self-sacrificing endeavour to save life on their inhospitable shores more than counterbalances ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... me through to the holidays! At all events, school was already very far away, like a nightmare remembered at noon. I said good-night to my brother, and received an irritated grunt in reply. I did not mind his surliness; tomorrow when I woke up, I would ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... stated, in answer to my questions, brothers; their names were Spiro and Demetri, and they informed us that their family had served the lords of Neopalia for many generations. Hearing this, I was less inclined to resent the undeniable reserve and even surliness with which they met my advances. I made allowance for their hereditary attachment to the outgoing family; and their natural want of cordiality toward the intruder did not prevent me from plying them with many ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... catastrophe? "Qu'aux Anglais, aux Pandours, a ce peuple insolent, "J'aille donner la discipline?— "Tame to sobriety those English, those Pandours, and obstreperous people? "Mais examinez mieux ma mine; "Examine the look of me better; "Je ne suis pas assez mechant! "I have not surliness euough. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... able to cope, Chief of Police George S. Riley recommended to the civil service commission that forty magazine rifles be purchased for the police department.[78] At that time the police had only their pistols and clubs. It was said that surliness then existed among certain negroes and the police wanted to be able to cope with any situation that might arise. The City Council, thereafter, raised the license fee for labor agents to $25,000, requiring also ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... too far, Polly," he admitted. He was mild, but he preserved a little touch of surliness in order that she might not conclude that her victory was won. "But seeing that I brought you off to sea to get you away ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... no means sorry when, upon the return to the camp, the latter declined his invitation to remain on shore to dinner, and curtly requested to be at once put off to the barque. During the passage off to the vessel the man's surliness of demeanour suddenly vanished, and, as though a brilliant idea had just struck him, he became in a moment almost offensively civil, strongly urging Dick to remain aboard the barque and "make a ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Robert engaged to return to dinner, and went, leaving Lucilla with nothing to do but to watch those heavy slumberings on the sofa and proffer attentions that were received with the surliness of one too miserable to know what to do with himself. She yearned over him with a new awakening of tenderness, longing, yet unable, to console or soothe. The light surface-intercourse of the brother and sister, each selfishly refraining from ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... full of talk, but broke off to ask if Mark were ill. Mark, with a kind of surliness, an unusual mood for him, denied it somewhat sharply. Roland raised his eyebrows, and said no more, but prattled on. Presently after a silence he said to Mark, "What did you do all the morning?" and it seemed to Mark as though this were accompanied with a spying look. An unreasonable anger ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... thwartings of the will, bickering and misery. No man is always cheerful and kind. We manage to correct a stranger with urbanity and good humour. Only when the intercourse is too close and unremitted do we degenerate into surliness and invective. In an earlier chapter Godwin had formulated a general objection to all promises, which reminds us of Tolstoy's sermons from the same individualistic standpoint on the text, "Swear not at all." Every conceivable mode of action has its tendency to benefit or ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... information to a certain point is general. Those who have knowledge are not shy of imparting it, and those who are ignorant take care not to seem so; but are sometimes agreeable, often amusing, and seldom betes. Nowhere have I seen unformed sheepish boys, nowhere the surliness, awkwardness, ungraciousness, and uneasy proud bashfulness, I have seen in the best companies in England. Our French friend Lucien has, at fifteen, the air and conversation of a finished gentleman; and our English friend C—— is at eighteen, the veriest log of a lumpish school-boy ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... If we ask for nothing for helping gentlemen to stand upright on their legs, and get it, we expect civility into the bargain. Moreover, there are reasons in nature why we choose to give sign of a particular surliness when our wealthy superiors would have us think their ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mind could devise. Whoever, in our circumstances, has made trial of pain, even with all the alleviations which, for us, usually attend it, must know the irritation that comes with it. Tom no longer wondered at the habitual surliness of his associates; nay, he found the placid, sunny temper, which had been the habitude of his life, broken in on, and sorely strained, by the inroads of the same thing. He had flattered himself on leisure to read his Bible; but there was no such thing as leisure there. In the height ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the Earl of Sunderland, minister to George I., who was partial to the game of chess. He once played with the Laird of Cluny, and the learned Cunningham, the editor of Horace. Cunningham, with too much skill and too much sincerity, beat his lordship. "The earl was so fretted at his superiority and surliness, that he dismissed him without any reward. Cluny allowed himself sometimes to be beaten; and by that means got his pardon, with ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... pitiably manifest. But the situation was still not without its comforts, since Dundas was to go too. Hence he was not poor company when once in the saddle, and was civil to a degree of which his former dismayed surliness had given ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... mother, at first, he would scarcely deign to have any communication. He said she was no longer one of the family. Why should he love her, as she had never been a mother to him? But it will give the reader an idea of the dogged obstinacy and surliness of the lad's character, when I mention one trait regarding him. It has been made a matter of complaint against me, that I denied him the education befitting a gentleman, and never sent him to college or to school; but the fact is, it was of his own choice that he went to neither. ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Dennis. "They can't find out that it's not I, but the ward. So every time there's trouble they lay it against me, and it's hard to keep them friendly. And I hate quarrels and surliness." ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... he paid better than his neighbors, but then the coin of a rich man seems always to be so much more acceptable. The landlord had always a pleasant word and a joke, to insinuate in the ear of the august Ramm. It is true, Ramm never laughed, and, indeed, maintained a mastiff-like gravity, and even surliness of aspect, yet he now and then rewarded mine host with a token of approbation; which, though nothing more nor less than a kind of grunt, yet delighted the landlord more than a broad laugh from a ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... La Boulaye had called her lover—standing with his back to the fire, his hands clasped behind him, the very picture of surliness. He made none of the advances that one might look for in a man placed as he was at that moment. He greeted her, instead, ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... then he was sent to Yale. He went handsomely equipped with "conditions," but otherwise he was not an object of distinction there. He remained at Yale two years, and then threw up the struggle. He came home with his manners a good deal improved; he had lost his surliness and brusqueness, and was rather pleasantly soft and smooth, now; he was furtively, and sometimes openly, ironical of speech, and given to gently touching people on the raw, but he did it with a good-natured semiconscious air that carried it off safely, and kept ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Even Paw's surliness lightened a bit by the time he had speared his tenth cake and walloped it in the bacon grease before sprinkling it thick with sugar and settling the eleventh cake on top. Casey was eyeing the fourteenth cake on Hank's plate when Joe looked up at him ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... men, it would have sufficiently reconciled me to the mediocrity of my fortunes, to see that these two great people of my neighbourhood—the nobly-descended baronet and rich parvenu—were miserable men; that, so long as I could remember, one or other of them had been given over to surliness and discontent. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... and defiant surliness before, now all had become obedience and worship. He understood enough of the barbarian psychology to know that power, strength and dominance—and these alone—commanded respect with ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... tried to make up for the mate's surliness; and he really was very pleasant indeed—telling me stories about the Coast, and giving me good advice about guarding against sickness there, and showing such an interest in my prospects with the palm-oil people, and in my welfare generally, that I ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... the guards, trampling on either side the crowd, who, accustomed to the sedate and courteous order of Rienzi's guard, fell back too slowly for many of them to escape severe injury from the pikes of the soldiers and the hoofs of the horses. Our friend, Luigi, the butcher, was one of these, and the surliness of the Roman blood was past boiling heat when he received in his ample stomach the blunt end of a German's pike. "There, Roman," said the rude mercenary, in his barbarous attempt at Italian, "make way for your betters; you have had enough ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... dear," said the cowpuncher, "but maybe they're worth the price." For all his surliness, however, ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... "coo" during this unforeseen spell of fierce weather. The storm had come on suddenly, and provender was low; so Peter had volunteered his services in his characteristically shy way (which a southron, perhaps, would have taken for an indication of surliness), and his sister, in equally characteristic Scottish fashion, had accepted the offer with the air of one who had a right to it. Yet all the while (I am sure, for I know the type well!) Peter was full of tender compassion for the poor beast, and Maggie Jean's heart overflowed ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... laconically. Clearly I was to take it or leave it, and I took it. We did not find our fellow-republicans flatteringly polite, but we found them firm, and, for all I know, honest. At least they seemed as honest as we were, and that is saying a great deal. What struck us from the beginning was the surliness of the men and the industry of the women; and I am persuaded that the Swiss Government is really carried on by the house-keeping sex. At any rate, the postmaster of Villeneuve was a woman; her little girl brought the mail up from the railway station in a hand-cart, and her old mother helped ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... painters of Europe were exhibiting or working on. He received a call from some of his humble companions, and in their presence he lamented the insolence of the younger generation, their disrespectful attacks, with the surliness of a famous artist who is getting old and thinks that talent has died out with him and that no one can take his place. Then the drowsiness of digestion seized him, as it did Cotoner, and he submitted ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... (though with mighty ill grace) and found little savour in the food for all my hunger; but she waited on my wants with heedful care, my surliness notwithstanding. ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... home." There was some consciousness in the girl's look and tone which did not escape her companion. She was evidently aware that her silence on the incident might appear strange to Gertrude. However, she frankly described her adventure, Daunt's surliness, and Winnington's appearance. ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the day Watusk must have thought better of his surliness for he sent a polite message to Ambrose at Simon Grampierre's house, requesting him and Simon to come to a tea dance ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... of a greeting is in the expression of the eyes. This is so nearly spontaneous that the most guarded cannot altogether veil the spirit that looks out of these "windows of the soul." The studied attitude and genuflection fail to hide surliness or contempt; and hostility, bitter and implacable, may reveal itself by the smoldering spark of anger in the eye, and destroy the effect of the most artful obsequiousness of manner. Since we cannot control this one impulsively-truthful medium of expression, it becomes a matter of policy as well ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... and to him she put some questions, concerning the stranger at Udolpho. Ugo, for this was his name, said, that there were several prisoners in the castle, but he neither recollected their persons, or the precise time of their arrival, and could therefore give her no information. There was a surliness in his manner, as he spoke, that made it probable he would not have satisfied her enquiries, even if he could ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... disposition had altered to a very considerable extent, and this improvement on his old surliness was of the greatest assistance to us on the occasion I must ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... furtive look in his restless, wild-animal eyes, smoky like the rest of him, and a surliness about his long, high-ridged nose which came down over his mustache like a beak. He wore a cloth cap with ear flaps, and they were down, although the heat of summer still made the September air lively ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... if he were tired of the conversation, the Mohawk dipped his paddle lower than before, and deliberately paddled away from his questioners. The surliness of the repulse made it quite effective, and the four Iroquois sat for several minutes as if undecided what they ought to do after such ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis |
