"Cross-grained" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The cross-grained old maid did not speak to him during the entire meal. She sat prim and erect, barely glanced at him, and as Frank arose from the table, half choked with the unwelcome food he had eaten, he resolved ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... mischievous pleasure, now and then, in slyly rubbing the old man against the grain, and then smoothing him down again; for the old fellow is as ready to bristle up his back as a porcupine. He rides a venerable hunter called Pepper, which is a counterpart of himself, a heady cross-grained animal, that frets the flesh off its bones; bites, kicks, and plays all manner of villainous tricks. He is as tough, and nearly as old as his rider, who has ridden him time out of mind, and is, indeed, the only one that can do any thing with him. Sometimes, ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... and Ralph liked him for keeping it. The young fellow watched everything going on in the cab in a shrewd, interested fashion, but he neither got in the way of the cross-grained Fogg, nor pestered ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... mien I shall have while scenting the dust of your carpets! Oh! sire, I regret sincerely, and you will regret as I do, those times when the king of France saw in his vestibules all those insolent gentlemen, lean, always swearing—cross-grained mastiffs, who could bite mortally in days of battle. Those men were the best of courtiers for the hand which fed them—they would lick it; but for the hand that struck them, oh! the bite that followed! A little gold on the lace of their cloaks, a slender stomach in their hauts-de-chausses, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... suppose must we, in our extreme ignorance of the precise category of nomenclature to which the feelings that actuated him belonged. Honest man! bigoted and selfish as he was, he was neither cruel by nature nor cross-grained; and he was even moved by the pathetic and frank avowal which Barbara made to him on the state of her heart. But, though touched by her tears, he understood them not, treated them but as the natural mawkishness of girlish sentimentality; nor had her assurance that she could ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... don't suppose I mean anything, do you?" retorted the cross-grained Tony. "What's the use ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... life of Pericles, and that of Fabius Maximus, who carried on the war against Hannibal, men alike, as in their other virtues and good parts, so especially in their mild and upright temper and demeanor, and in that capacity to bear the cross-grained humors of their fellow-citizens and colleagues in office which made them both most useful and serviceable to the interests of their countries. Whether we take a right aim at our intended purpose, it is left to the reader to judge by what he ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... on the bed in the dingy room next door. His heart was beating violently. He had risked all on this throw. How would they decide? And all the while that this agonized questioning went on within him, he talked flippantly to Conrad, enraging the cross-grained doorkeeper to ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... justly and with a sort of severe kindness. Army officers on the frontier—especially when put in charge of Indian reservations or of French or Spanish communities—have almost always been more or less at swords-points with the stubborn, cross-grained pioneers. The borderers are usually as suspicious as they are independent, and their self-sufficiency and self-reliance often degenerate into mere lawlessness and defiance of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... see this creature at her best, you had to see her doing the dutiful to her old father. If ever there was a peevish, cross-grained, crabbed, unreasonable old sinner in this world, that sinner was Duncan McKay, senior. He was a widower. Perhaps that accounted to some extent for his condition. That he should have a younger son—also ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... confused mind. He was standing, and he suddenly felt dizzy, and sat down. The giddiness vanished, but left him with twitching fingers, a clouded vision. He might get them all together, explain, persuade.... Goddy! it was for their good. They needn't be cross-grained. There it would be, the offer, for them to take or leave. But, if they delayed, watch out! Railroad people couldn't be fooled with. They might get ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... hearing all this from his wife, said, for that he was an old man and maybe therefore somewhat cross-grained, 'What nightingale is this to whose song she would sleep? I will yet make her sleep to the chirp of the crickets.' Caterina, coming to know this, more of despite than for the heat, not only slept not that night, but suffered not her mother to sleep, still complaining of the great heat. ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... musician, too, and a prosperous fellow—quite the antithesis of his father. It takes a lot of love to bring up a child, and the miracle of mother-love is a constant wonder to every thinking person. Without mother-love how would the cross-grained, perverse little tyrant ever survive the buffets which the world is sure to give? It is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... take back my word, though he be not in even friendship with all men." After that she told Thord of the slaying of Hall, and that Thorolf who was come there was the man who had killed him. Thord was very cross-grained at this, and said he well knew how that Ingjald would take a great deal of money from him for the sheltering that had been given him already, seeing that doors here have been locked after this man. Vigdis answered, "Ingjald shall take none of your money for giving one night's shelter ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous
... but Teunis Van Gieson was an easy-tempered man, and, having no child of his own, looked upon his nephew with almost parental indulgence. His patience and good-nature were doomed to be tried by another inmate of his mansion. This was a cross-grained curmudgeon of a negro, named Pluto, who was a kind of enigma in Communipaw. Where he came from, nobody knew. He was found one morning, after a storm, cast like a sea-monster on the strand, in front of the Wild Goose, and lay ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... was of taking tea at the Gilpin house in company with Genevieve and Allan Whittredge. Mild, fair-faced Miss Anne and her grim-visaged, cross-grained brother were a strangely assorted pair. Celia's childish soul had been filled with awe on these occasions. She had difficulty in keeping her seat in the stiff old haircloth chairs, or in crossing the polished floor of ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... The old cross-grained, whiggish, ugly, slanderous Miss ——, with all the poisonous spleen of a disappointed, ancient maid, stops me very unseasonably to ease her bursting breast, by falling abusively foul on the Miss Lindsays, particularly on my Dulcinea;—I hardly refrain ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Tai-yue smiled. "Yes," she observed, "your servant-girls must, I fancy, have been too lazy to budge, grumpy and in a cross-grained ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... my mind, for want of your telling me how he [Byron] looks, what he says, if he is grown fat, if he is no uglier than he used to be, if he is good-humoured or cross-grained, putting his brows down—if his hair curls or is straight as somebody said, if he has seen Hobhouse, if he is going to stay long, if you went to Dover as you intended, and a great deal more, which, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... back, with two fingers twisted together; and his chief difficulty appeared to be to reduce his own stride to the parrot march of the captain. His features were sharp and lean as was his body, and wore every appearance of a cross-grained temper. ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... my fellow-clerks during those two days I was the most cross-grained and obnoxious comrade conceivable. My only relief seemed to be in quarrelling with somebody, and as they all laid themselves out to bait and tease me one way or another I had a pretty lively ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... fact that they had been deaf and dumb from infancy is taken into consideration, with the further fact that the greater part of their fifty odd years had been spent in the lonely and precarious calling of Atlantic fishermen. They were rough and gnarled and cross-grained, like the sloop whose deck they trod; yet, in spite of all, like that same sloop, they ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... "Come back to me now, Laura." His wife leant over him, unfaltering, though she had known for some time that she was dealing with the abnormal. "Kiss me." Laura touched his lips. "That's better, old girl. I am a cross-grained devil and I make your life a hell to you, don't I? But don't—don't leave me. Don't chuck me over. Let me have your love to cling to. I don't believe in God, I don't believe in any other man, often enough I don't believe in myself, I feel, I feel unreal . . . ." He stopped, shut ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... him is that he's a cross-grained, old curmudgeon, living about a mile out of Farnham, who scrapes money together by lending small sums upon notes-of-hand at short dates, and at a thundering interest. Flint Jackson folk about ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... him; they had flanked him; they had surrounded him; they had driven him to centre; he was at bay, bristling with a sullen rage that was excusable, if viewed from the standpoint of an earnest town officer. Viewed from the standpoint of the populace, he was a selfish, cross-grained old obstructionist. ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... wanted to fight something, so I pitched into the Spitz dog. He was a snarly, cross-grained creature, no friend to Jim and me, and he would have been only too glad of a ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... also used playfully monkey. Telling you, a good thing for you. Thir, these. Thrawn, cross-grained. Toon, town. Two-names, local soubriquets in ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you are cross-grained, moody. The fact is, you are watching her, that's all! In short, you keep her within a small circle of friends, for she has already embroiled you with people on ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... said nothing. Jules had been quite cross-grained since the twenty-fifth of January, when he had met the gnome, and they had learned to pay but little attention ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... somehow never told any one of his little encounter with the crippled boy, but those plaintive words often rang in his ears. He had even wondered sometimes whether it would do any good if he should seek an interview with the crabbed, cross-grained old man, and try to persuade him to change his belief that he was doing right in sheltering the cripple from a rude world. But up to the present Jack had not been able to make up his mind to ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... a cross-grained reviewer should treat thy cherished book with scorn, and presume to ridicule thy sentiment and scoff at thy style (which Heaven forfend!), console thyself that thou livest in peaceable and enlightened times, and needest fear that no greater evil can befall thee on account ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... if my back is crooked and my legs queer," she declared. "Then, when any of those Miss Nancy Seniors make fun of me behind my back, I can punch 'em!" for there were times when Mercy's old, cross-grained moods came upon her, and she was not ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... cross-grained censor; we need not mind his maundering, Gods. We have it from the admirable Demosthenes: imputations, blame, criticism, these are easy things; they tax no one's capacity: what calls for a statesman is the suggesting of a better course; and that is what I rely upon the rest of you for; ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... boy stiff-necked Thet stomps an' swears he wun't come in to supper; She mus' set up for him, ez weak ez Tupper, Keepin' the Constitootion on to warm, Tell he'll eccept her 'pologies in form: 180 The neighbors tell her he's a cross-grained cuss Thet needs a hidin' 'fore he comes to wus; 'No,' sez Ma Seward, 'he's ez good 'z the best, All he wants now is sugar-plums an' rest;' 'He sarsed my Pa,' sez one; 'He stoned my son,' Another edds, 'Oh wal, 'twuz jes' his fun.' 'He tried to shoot our Uncle Samwell dead.' ''Twuz only tryin' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... tincture (H.) of White Bryony (Bryonia alba) is of special service to persons of dark hair and complexion, with firm fibre of flesh, and of a bilious cross-grained temperament. Also it is of [68] particular use for relieving coughs, and colds of a feverish bronchial sort, caught by exposure to the east wind. On the contrary, the catarrhal troubles of sensitive females, and of young children, ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Adrian, with deliberation, "I freely confess that I am not an effete and blase old thing, like—like one who shall be nameless. There is a variety of fruit (the husbandman's despair), a tough, cross-grained, sour-hearted variety of fruit, that dries up and shrivels, and never ripens. There is another variety of fruit that grows rounder and rosier, tenderer and juicier and sweeter, the longer it hangs on the tree. Time cannot wither it. The child of the sun and the zephyr, it is honey-full ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... ample reason to know before I was done with her—was a very safe boat for a person of my height and weight, both buoyant and clever in a sea-way; but she was the most cross-grained, lop-sided craft to manage. Do as you pleased, she always made more leeway than anything else, and turning round and round was the manoeuvre she was best at. Even Ben Gunn himself has admitted that she was "queer to handle till you knew ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you be glad to take a minor part to help on the whole, or would you be huffy and cross-grained because your powers were not brought to the front? In the Wagner music at Baireuth, the singers take the good parts in turn, and the best prima donna, as Kundry in "Parzival," in one whole act has ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... a always coming home for his tea; b always giving his wife new dresses; c cross-grained; d good; e hanging up his hat on the gas-jet; h kept in proper order; k methodical. ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... Although cross-grained, Mr. Ede was not always an unpleasant man, and often in sudden flashes of affection the kind heart of his ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... suggested no mental reservation. "I know how it is, Cicely. Allyn has been my baby and my boy; but, much as I love him, I can't help seeing that he is cantankerous and cross-grained at times. But it is only at times, ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... opportunity of informing you, that I've lost your sister Ella, and have now no child saving yourself, who, if you behave well, will be my only heir. Sometimes I wish you were here, for it's lonesome living alone, but, I suppose you're better off where you are. Do you know any thing of that girl Sarah? Her cross-grained uncle has never written me a word since he left England. If I live three years longer I shall come to America, and until that time, adieu. ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... black eyes sparkled at me, whether with fun or malice I knew not, but certainly as if the Devil were peeping out of them. "Among your fraternity, I understand, there is a certain holy and benevolent blacksmith; a man of iron, in more senses than one; a rough, cross-grained, well-meaning individual, rather boorish in his manners, as might be expected, and by no means of the highest intellectual cultivation. He is a philanthropical lecturer, with two or three disciples, and a scheme of his own, the preliminary step ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... complaint to a committee for that purpose; and the Minister, though a hundred miles from London, should appear there, and give satisfaction, or be sequestered;—and you may be sure no Parish could want a covetous, or malicious, or cross-grained complaint;—by which means all prisons in London, and in some other places, became the sad habitations of ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... tender as a child, but he had a way of spluttering and growling that made him seem grouty and cross-grained. He seemed to take real satisfaction in picking a quarrel ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... I had ample reason to know before I was done with her—was a very safe boat for a person of my height and weight, both buoyant and clever in a sea-way; but she was the most cross-grained, lopsided craft to manage. Do as you pleased, she always made more leeway than anything else, and turning round and round was the maneuver she was best at. Even Ben Gunn himself has admitted that she was "queer to handle till ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... softening of heart and manner visible in Aunt Hepsy at the time of Tom's departure disappeared before the lapse of many days. You see, she had gone on in the old, sour, cross-grained way so long, she felt most at home in it. She did not feel unkindly towards gentle, patient Lucy; but her manner was so ungracious, and her words so sharp, you will not wonder that Lucy could not read beneath the surface. She was very quiet, very sober, and very listless; striving, too, to do ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... sich orders it'll be worth your while to stop a spell; for he's as cross-grained as a broncho when matters don't go to his likin', an' might make trouble ...
— Dick in the Desert • James Otis
... fourpence took him to one of the little alleys near Gray's Inn, and there he got down, and threading the well- known locality, through Bedford Place and across Theobald's Road, soon found himself at the door of his generous patron. Oh! how he hated the house; how he hated the blear-eyed, cross-grained, dirty, impudent fish-fag of an old woman who opened the door for him; how he hated Mr. Jabesh M'Ruen, to whom he now came a supplicant for assistance, and how, above all, he hated himself ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Hawthorne's attempts to break away from himself—from the man that heredity, and circumstance, and the divine gift of genius had made him. He naturally "haunts the mouldering lodges of the past"; but when he came to England (where such lodges are abundant), he was ill-pleased and cross-grained. He knew that a long past, with mysteries, dark places, malisons, curses, historic wrongs, was the proper atmosphere of his art. But a kind of conscientious desire to be something other than himself—something more ordinary and popular—make him thank Heaven that his chosen atmosphere was rare ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... comical and jocose a little fellow as ever chirped out a devil-may-care song, without a hitch in his memory, or drained off a good stiff glass without stopping for breath. But notwithstanding these precedents to the contrary, Gabriel Grub was an ill-conditioned, cross-grained, surly fellow—a morose and lonely man, who consorted with nobody but himself, and an old wicker bottle which fitted into his large deep waistcoat pocket—and who eyed each merry face, as it passed him by, with such a deep scowl of malice and ill-humour, as it was difficult ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... cleanliness, she may supplement her kitchen commands by going up stairs through some of the bedrooms; but after a kind word of advice to the housemaid if she is sweet-tempered, or a harsh word of censure if she is of the cross-grained type, her work in that department will be done, and her duties for the day are at an end. There is none of the clever marketing by which fifty per cent. is saved in the outlay if a woman knows what she is about, and how to buy; none of the personal ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... some kind of crabbed, semi-perverse, though still manful existence of his own; which indeed is no despicable thing. His "more than prophetic egoism,"—alas, yes! It is of such material that Thebaid Eremites, Sect-founders, and all manner of cross-grained fanatical monstrosities have fashioned themselves, —in very high, and in the highest regions, for that matter. Sect-founders withal are a class I do not like. No truly great man, from Jesus Christ downwards, as I often ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... pier was being built by divers. His object was to sound our surly friend David Maxwell about joining him in his intended trip to the antipodes, for Maxwell was a first-rate diver, though a somewhat cross-grained man. ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... himself quite a man, yielded to his mother's wishes and attended the school, which was presided over by a cross-grained Dominie that used the birch with right good earnest ...
— Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, Vol. I, No. 1. - Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood • Prentiss Ingraham
... hobbled off, as he spoke, and the boys raised "three groans for Jack Ketch," and then rushed away by the other entrance to their own dinners. The fact was, the porter had brought ill will upon himself, through his cross-grained temper. He had no right whatever to interfere between the boys and the cloisters; it was not his place to do so. The king's scholars knew this; and, being spirited king's scholars, as they were, would not ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... return," he said, "with the design of saying something which it might have profited you to learn, but now I apprehend it is too late. What a pity you are so violent and impatient; you would not have heard me, in all probability, this morning. You cannot think how cross-grained and intemperate you have grown since you became a saint—but that is your affair, not mine. You have buried your little daughter this morning. It requires a good deal of that new attribute of yours, faith, which judges all things by a rule of contraries, and can never see anything but ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... smugglers'!" retorted Spink; "an' as to bein' cross-grained, you've naethin' to boast o' in that way. Na, na, Swankie, ye may do't yersel, I'll hae nae hand in't. I'll no objec' to tak a bit keg o' Auchmithie water [Footnote] noo and then, or to pick up what comes to me by the wund and sea, but I'll steal ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... a fat farmer in a long blouse, with a jovial, red face, framed in white whiskers. The other was younger, was dressed in corduroy and had lean, yellow, cross-grained features. Each of them carried a gun slung over his shoulder. Between them was a short, slender young woman, in a brown cloak and a fur cap, whose rather thin and extremely pale face ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... into the blacksmith shop returning at seven for his breakfast. He followed the usual rule the next morning but when he returned, Joanna had no breakfast ready for him. There was a cold lunch set out on the table but there was no fire in the kitchen stove and no tea made. He was a rather cross-grained man but he knew it was never safe to antagonise his daughter and so he called rather mildly up-stairs, "Hi, there Joan, you ain't sick are you?" but Joanna did not answer and he mounted the stairs slowly grumbling about the young ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... therefore, whose grain is lengthwise, becomes a standard, retaining always the same precise length. That which has its grain crosswise, dilates with moisture, and contracts for the want of it. If the right hand piece be the cross-grained one, when the air is very moist, it lengthens, and forces its companion to form a kind of interior annulus of a circle on the left. When the air is dry, it contracts, draws its companion to the right, and becomes itself the interior annulus. In order to show this dilation and contraction, an index ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... existence, they astounded her by leaving her a handsome legacy; which, with the consent of another party concerned—one who greatly relished the mere name of the bequest, as a proof that nobody could ever resist Lady Betty—she shared with a cross-grained grand-nephew whom the autocratic pair had cut off ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... done my best; but what living being could succeed in pacifying such a cross-grained, ill-tempered old fellow? However, I managed to mollify him ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... did not mean to hurt him, Sprott," said the Parson, more politely I fear than honestly—for he had seen enough of that cross-grained thing called the human heart, even in the little world of a country parish, to know that it requires management, and coaxing, and flattering, to interfere successfully between a man and his own donkey—"I am sure you did not mean to ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... brought down with me from Sydney a white carpenter—one of the most obstinate, cross-grained old fellows that ever trod a deck, but an excellent workman if humoured a little. At his own request he lived on board the wrecked barque, instead of taking up his quarters on shore in the native village with the rest of the wrecking party. One ...
— John Corwell, Sailor And Miner; and, Poisonous Fish - 1901 • Louis Becke
... woman, and a scribe however learned," she answered bitterly, adding, "Oh! if the Prince is not mad, certainly he drives others to madness, and me, his spouse, among them. That throne is his, his; yet he suffers a cross-grained dolt to take his place, and sends ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard |
