"Exasperating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prevalent pattern, which were intended and are still supposed by simple-minded people to give every voter participation in government, do as a matter of fact effect nothing of the sort. They give him an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control. For twenty-five years I have been a voter, and in all that time I have only twice had an opportunity ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... set of quarters is next to ours, so we all got ready together, and I must say that the deliberate way in which each girth was examined, bridles fixed, rifles fastened to saddles, and other things done, was most exasperating. But we finally started, about seven o'clock, Lieutenant Baldwin and I taking the lead, and Faye and ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... drawing-room. She was to him like the light of a shrine; he might kneel and adore from afar, but he might not approach. The goddess had come to him like the moon to Endymion. He knew nothing, not even if he were welcome. Each visit was the same as the preceding. A sweet but exasperating changelessness reigned in that drawing-room—that pretty drawing-room where mother and daughter sat in sweet naturalness, removed from the grossness and meanness of life as he knew it. Neither illicit whispering ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... General Massena to the citizen First Consul; but it seemed to me you were a fine lot of victims! Only, my poor friends, you will have to bid farewell to all that for the present; disagreeable, unlucky, exasperating, no doubt, but the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... that his son might attain such a distinguished position, M. Violette's father, a watch-maker in Chartres, had sacrificed everything, and died penniless. The Silvio Pellico official, during these exasperating and tiresome hours, sometimes regretted not having simply succeeded his father. He could see himself, in imagination, in the light little shop near the cathedral, with a magnifying-glass fixed in his eye, ready to inspect some farmer's old "turnip," and suspended over his bench thirty silver and ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... that you are sleeping on a bed in the open air, foretells that you will have delightful experiences, and opportunity for improving your fortune. For you to see negroes passing by your bed, denotes exasperating circumstances arising, which will interfere ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... largely by the exercise of the most trying—and, to those who do not possess it, the most exasperating—of all the virtues: Patience. Patience which, moreover, was coupled with a rare sense of homely humor. When pettifogging scandal-mongers sneaked up to him with tales that Grant, his most successful ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... their proffered hands with an air of condescension which was most exasperating. He puffed out his chest, and at once began talking of some of his alleged exploits in the secret service ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... George. I've told all the Blackstable people that I've forgiven her and that Sir Herbert has written to say he wants to make my acquaintance. And I've got a new dress on purpose to go to the wedding. Oh! she's a cruel and exasperating thing, George; I never liked her. You were always ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... His compliments to most people are varied with astonishing grace and ingenuity; his accounts of his condition often sufficient to bring the tears into the manliest eyes; and his ceaseless and vain efforts to procure his liberation mortifying when we think of himself, and exasperating when we think of the petty despot who detained him in so long, so degrading, and so worse ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... only too well, but now his evident trouble troubled her and she loved him too well to accept the temptation to use the exasperating phrase, "I always told you so." "You can do nothing, James, without more certainty. You will ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... of Lull, Daniels and Whicher within a single week was undoubtedly exasperating to the head of the Pinkerton agency, and had he not been personally embittered thereby he probably would not have avenged ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... said Pringle in his most complacent tones. "I want to talk about myself, always, Stella May Vorhis; we've come thirty miles and I've heard Christopher Foy, Foy, Foy, all the way! It's exasperating! It's sickening!" ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... trying to his patience. He looks at the map of the German Empire and painfully admits that the present frontiers and area are practically those bequeathed by the great William. To a divine-right monarch this is exasperating. The loftiest ambition of a sovereign is to have the national area ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... and the more I looked the more annoyed I became to find that, instead of being blended together into a divine face by the mind within, they were the reluctant slaves of as picayune a soul as ever maintained its microscopic existence in a human body. It is exasperating to think what that face might be, and to see what it is. How can nature make such absurd blunders? The idea of building so fair a temple for such an ugly ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... former as brothers, towards the latter as foes. This it was that led the Pistojans to come voluntarily under our authority while the others have done and do all in their power to escape it. For there seems no reason to doubt, that if Florence, instead of exasperating these neighbours of hers, had sought to win them over, either by entering into league with them or by lending them assistance, she would at this hour have been mistress of Tuscany. Not that I would be understood to maintain that recourse is never to be had to force and to arms, but that these are ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... to the periscope of his turret the India-rubber Man was fidgeting and swearing softly under his breath at the exasperating treachery of the fog. The great guns under his control roared at intervals, but before the effect of the shell-burst could be observed the enemy would be swallowed from sight. Once, at the commencement of the action, he thought of ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... going on, the cannibals had drawn nearer to the Black Bear, pressing forward from both banks in canoes and pounding at the panels with their arrows. It seemed only a question of time when they would board the craft and force the panels. Their shouts of victory were shrill and exasperating. ...
— Boy Scouts in an Airship • G. Harvey Ralphson
... what Ma has been doing," interposed Lavvy, over the maternal shoulder, "ever since we got up this morning. It's all very well to laugh, Bella, but anything more exasperating ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... Dante was a Catholic Calvinist. There was a determined optimism about Hunt, and a buoyancy as of a cork or other light body, sometimes a little exasperating to men of less sanguine temperament.[22] He ends by protesting that Dante is a semi-barbarian and his "Divine Comedy" too often an infernal tragedy. "Such a vision as that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no better than the dream of an ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... quite unexpected," he answered in that superior manner which is so exasperating at times. "I got that note from Lanning for the purpose of getting the man to ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... vacuity of the refrain in this song which especially commends itself to the young. The simple statement, "Star of the evening," is again and again repeated with an imbecile relish; while the adjective "beautiful" recurs with a steady persistency, too exasperating to dwell upon here. At occasional intervals, a base voice enunciates "Star-r! Star-r!" as a solitary and independent effort. Sitting here in my balcony, I picture the possessor of that voice as a small, stout young man, standing a little apart from the other singers, with his hands ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... Relaxation, of Shivering and Heat, of Agitation and Sinking; insomuch, that we were obliged constantly to endeavour at the expulsion of the noxious Ferments lodged in the primae Viae, or dispersed through the whole Mass of Blood, without exasperating them at the same time; or to correct and lessen their Action, without weakening the Patient. We ought, for Example, to vomit or purge without irritating or exhausting; to procure a free Perspiration or Sweating, without too much animating or inflaming; to fortify without augmenting ...
— A Succinct Account of the Plague at Marseilles - Its Symptoms and the Methods and Medicines Used for Curing It • Francois Chicoyneau
... world to understand why, when Dr. Leslie was anything but prone to gossip, Marilla should have been possessed of such a wealth of knowledge of her neighbors' affairs. Strange to say this wealth was for her own miserly pleasure and not to be distributed, and while she often proclaimed with exasperating triumph that she had known for months some truth just discovered by others, she was regarded by her acquaintances as if she were a dictionary written in some foreign language; immensely valuable, but of no practical use to themselves. It was sometimes difficult not to ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... interior. They are both of unpretending manners, polite and affable, and during the pauses of the game they call for and drink their beer in true democratic fashion. M. Forgues learns that his charge lives two leagues out of town, and, hugging his exasperating valise—which, we may here remark, was delivered safely to the charge next day—he returns in company with the captain to the steamer, where, seated on the deck, he listens with horror to the stories told by a citizen of divers murders committed in the town and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... months and ten days older and has his ears cropped. His father, Martin Farquhar Tupper, was sickly, and died young, but he was the sweetest disposition.—His mother had heart disease but was very gentle and resigned, and a wonderful ratter." —[** As impossible and exasperating as this conversation may sound to a person who is not an idiot, it is scarcely in any respect an exaggeration of one which one of us actually listened to in an American drawing room —otherwise we could not venture to put such ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... worked to death by people who don't know its meaning, I would have added that he was a votary of the kultur of his race. His ideal, I suppose, was more the Renaissance virtu than our milk-and-water virtue. He made me feel that I was a worm. In short, he was a very interesting, provocative and exasperating humbug, and his very existence seemed to me sufficient reason for turning Aliens into a book which would shed a flickering light upon the fascinating problem ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Janet's business to speak. She listened with the blandest attention. She waited with the most exasperating silence to hear more. ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... so, for the daring and successful rescue of the prisoner under sentence of death stirred the city of Liege to its very depths. To the people it was an example of courage and self-sacrifice joined to determined and skilful leadership; to the Germans it was most exasperating evidence of their inability to crush this people notwithstanding their many and varied methods of repression. The affair was hushed up by the governor so far as he was able to do so, but it eventually became known that it had been ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... is no easy matter, chiefly from the necessity of rapidity in the work; while the smuts from the funnel are most exasperating, settling on the paper just where clear lights are most desirable, and—well, paint in oils on a rough day at sea, with a strong wind blowing the smoke towards you, and judge ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... muttered. "Devilish incomprehensible! They must know we're here. Been waiting fifteen minutes now, begad! Getting beyond a joke—deuced exasperating, Perry, y' know. Dammit, man, why can't you say something, do something, instead of sitting there so devilish calm and serene, staring before you like ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... demanded Jimmie, with an exasperating grin. "Then perhaps you can tell me if the motor boat we're goin' to have ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... sex and at the same time become the wife of the man she had long wished me to marry. The power of money was dear to her. She understood it well, and my failure to appreciate it properly was peculiarly exasperating to her. Discussion was useless. It never got farther than where it started. If I said that which I wanted much to say, it would merely mean hearing again what I did not want to hear. Concerning the pursuit of a happy livelihood we were ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... last, everything being declared to be in order, you receive a new "pass" for the Army Corps in which you have been arrested. The moment you venture into another Army Corps, even if you return into that from which you were first released, arrest follows and the whole exasperating rigmarole has to be repeated. The Army Corps are as arbitrarily defined as anything to ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... cookery book. It makes no attempt to replace a good one; it is rather an effort to fill up the gap between you and your household oracle, whether she be one of those exasperating old friends who maddened our mother with their vagueness, or the newer and better lights of our own generation, the latest and best of all being a lady as well known for her novels as for her works on domestic economy—one more ...
— Culture and Cooking - Art in the Kitchen • Catherine Owen
... to decide concerning Paul's proposal within three months. This is most exasperating, but there is no help. He will take a trip to Calcutta, and postpone ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... liberal and literary reading of the Bible, his manner is quiet, suave, and gently persuasive. At other times, as in Friendship's Garland, he shoots the arrows of his sarcasm into the ranks of the Philistines with a delicate raillery and scorn, all the more exasperating to his foes, because it is veiled by a mock ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... himself the laughing-stock of everybody. He is complimented on his patience under his wife's attack—congratulated on having come out of it with a whole skin. He pushes his claim for a divorce on the obvious ground of infidelity! is met by a counter-claim on the ground of—cruelty! One exasperating circumstance fellows another. At last he hears of the birth of a child, which will be falsely represented as his heir; and then the pent-up passion breaks forth, and in one great avenging wave ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... if he would like to fly at the boy, the very mention of the milk exasperating him to such an extent. But at every movement he felt himself more tightly held, and knowing from sad experience that it was waste of energy to contend with the iron-muscled fellow who gripped his ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... drifting into the Colleges. It, one suspects, must have had much to do with the evocation of what is called the Oxford spirit—that gentlest spirit, so lingering and searching, so dear to them who as youths were brought into ken of it, so exasperating to them who were not. Yes, certainly, it is this mild, miasmal air, not less than the grey beauty and gravity of the buildings, that has helped Oxford to produce, and foster eternally, her peculiar race of artist-scholars, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... the radicals had succeeded in persuading a judge to let out McCormick and the rest of the conspirators on fifty thousand dollars bail apiece. That was most exasperating to Peter, because it was obvious that when you put a Red into jail, you made him a martyr to the rest of the Reds you made him conspicuous to the whole community, and then if you let him out again, his speaking and agitating ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... slaves, and civil power has pressed ever nearer and nearer to the abolition of slavery. In all the confusion of war, the trumpet-tones of justice have rung through our national halls with no uncertain sound. With a pertinacity most exasperating to tyrants and infidels, but most welcome to the friends of human rights, Northern Senators and Representatives have presented the claims of the African race. With many a momentary recession, the tide has swept irresistibly onward. Hopes have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... all those admiring remarks rising from a sea of spines, ended by exasperating Claude; and seized with a longing to see the faces of the folk who created success, he manoeuvred in such a way as to lean his back against the handrail hard by. From that point, he had the public in front of him in the grey light filtering through the linen awning which kept the centre ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... a tone that made her still more angry. 'Hein'! a French ejaculation which he had the habit of uttering in a most exasperating manner. ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories, tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom .. you design for my bedfellow —a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... advancement from war; and supposing his power and glory would by little and little decrease by his lying quietly out of action, he was eager by every means to excite some new commotions, and hoped that by setting at variance some of the kings, and by exasperating Mithridates, especially, who was then apparently making preparations for war, he himself should be chosen general against him, and so furnish the city with new matter of triumph, and his own house with the plunder of Pontus, and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... harvest bugs) are so utterly unendurable as the "little, busy, thirsty fly." It seems odd, too, as he neither stings nor bites, that he should be so objectionable; but his tickly method of walking over your nose or down your neck, and the exasperating pertinacity with which he refuses to take "no" for an answer when you flick him delicately with a handkerchief, but "cuts" and comes again, maddens you until you rise, bloody-minded in your wrath, and, seizing the nearest ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... inimitable—but you 're inimitably exasperating." Miss Sandus gave him up, with a ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... a state of coma. He was trying, as well as an exceedingly severe headache would permit, to recall the salient events of the previous night. At present his memories refused to solidify. They poured about in his brain in a fluid and formless condition, exasperating to one who sought for ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... exclaimed Martha. "How queer you act, Calvin. Do you intend to do anything, after all?" Tears sprang to her eyes and overflowed, but she paid no attention to them as she gazed distractedly at the exasperating lawyer. ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... remember being struck with the kindly look of his eyes, and indeed they did not belie his nature, for he always treated me with great kindness, patience and indulgence, which is somewhat remarkable considering my age, and how exasperating I must have been sometimes. I soon began to regard him as a never-failing fount of wisdom, and as one who could answer any question one liked to put to him. Of this latter fact I was not slow to take advantage. I plied him with every kind of question my imaginative ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... promptly and effectively as an over-exposure to the July sun or an attack of influenza. It is even practically impossible to pick out from such a wealth of origins two or three, or even a score of, conditions which are the most frequent, most important, or the most interesting causes. The most exasperating thing about dealing with a headache is that we never know, until its history has been most carefully examined, whether we have to do with a mere temporary expression of discomfort and unbalance, due to overfatigue, errors in diet, a stuffy room, lack of exercise, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... over, no janitors to cuss at, no, not even any housecleaning to do before you depart—just move and nothing more. Just dump a little outfit into a canoe and then paddle away from all your tiresome environment, and travel wherever your heart dictates, and then settle down where not even an exasperating neighbour could find you. What would you give to live such a ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... the purposes of the war has been hampered by the tricks, the failures to understand, and the almost instinctive disloyalties of private owners. The raising of rents in Glasgow drove the infuriated workmen of the Clyde district into an unwilling strike. It was an exasperating piece of private selfishness, quite typical of the individualistic state of mind, and the failure to anticipate or arrest it on the part of the Government was a worse failure than Suvla Bay. And everywhere the officials of the Ministry of Munitions find private ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... interests and prejudices of the whites, at the expense of the coloured population; and in many cases, it was assumed that the conductors of this association were aware of this, and accessory to it. And the style in which the thing was done was at once offensive, inflammatory, and exasperating. Denunciation, sneers, and public rebuke, were bestowed indiscriminately upon the conductors of the enterprise, and of course they fell upon many sincere, upright, and conscientious men, whose feelings were harrowed by a sense of the injustice, the indecorum, and the unchristian ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher
... fallen in love with her, a von if you please: but his parents opposed a marriage with a person of her condition, and she had been sent to Heidelberg to forget him. She could never, never do this, and corresponded with him continually, and he was making every effort to induce an exasperating father to change his mind. She told all this to Philip with pretty sighs and becoming blushes, and showed him the photograph of the gay lieutenant. Philip liked her best of all the girls at the Frau Professor's, and on their walks always tried to get by her side. He blushed ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... home with her and saw the boy. In the early heat of her Tennyson- worship Mrs. Amyot had christened him Lancelot, and he looked it. Perhaps, however, it was his black velvet dress and the exasperating length of his yellow curls, together with the fact of his having been taught to recite Browning to visitors, that raised to fever-heat the itching of my palms in his Infant-Samuel-like presence. I have since had reason to think that he would have ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... with sad but unconquerable conviction; "because ye're both, so to speak, in a line o' idees and business that draws ye together,—to lean on each other and trust each other ez pardners. Not that YE are ezakly her ekal," he went on, with a return to his previous exasperating naivete, "though I've heerd promisin' things of ye, and ye're still young, but in matters o' this kind there is allers one ez hez to be looked up to by the other,—and gin'rally the wrong one. She looks up to you, Mr. Editor,—it's part of her po'try,—ez she looks down inter ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... inquired about her, timidly, of the sheriff, who had looked at him with a slow wink, then formed his mouth into an egg-shaped aperture and held it so an exasperating while, as if he meant to whistle. The sheriff's clownish behavior nettled Joe, for he was at a loss ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... terrifying plunge and splashed straight at the canoe. Only the quickest kind of work saved us. Simmo swung the bow off, with a startled grunt of his own, and I paddled away, while the bull, mistaking us in the dim light for the exasperating cow that had been calling and hiding herself for a week, followed after us ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... exercise the least captaincy on his expenses. He wasted what he would; he allowed his servants to despoil him at their pleasure; he sowed insolvency; and when the crop was ripe, notified his father with exasperating calm. His own capital was put in his hands, he was planted in the diplomatic service and told ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... keeping my temper in my life than at that moment. I succeeded, however, in repressing a very disrespectful expression on the subject of monks in general, which was on the tip of my tongue, and made another attempt to conquer the old man's exasperating reserve. Fortunately for my chances of succeeding with him, I was a snuff-taker myself, and I had a box full of excellent English snuff in my pocket, which I now produced as a bribe. It ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... about as difficult. The thread springs into a coil in the shape of the spool. No hem stays turned; the cloth you try to sew springs into its original folds in a most exasperating manner. ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... agitation. When this was the case he generally modified or withdrew them. It was thus that he cancelled Wood's patent in compliance with the absurd outcry of the Irish. It was thus that he frittered away the Porteous Bill to nothing, for fear of exasperating the Scotch. It was thus that he abandoned the Excise Bill, as soon as he found that it was offensive to all the great towns of England. The language which he held about that measure in a subsequent session is strikingly characteristic. Pulteney had insinuated ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the grade crossing while "Number Twenty-seven" went lumbering by. It shrieked a high, exasperating whistle as it passed, exulting in its trembling, shaking twenty-five miles ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... possible in order to show that she knew how to receive. Toward the end of the supper she was very tipsy. It made her miserable to think of it, but champagne had a way of intoxicating her almost directly! Then an exasperating notion struck her. In behaving thus improperly at her table, these ladies were showing themselves anxious to do her an ugly turn. Oh yes, she could see it all distinctly. Lucy had given Foucarmont a wink in order to egg him on against Labordette, while Rose, Caroline and the others were ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... with the same exasperating coolness he had shown after his first exclamation, "I wish I could say that, but it ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... at the close of the next Sabbath. The day had been dreary, painful and exasperating beyond all endurance, and he felt that he could never stand the strain of another. And so, having detained his mother in the sitting room after the rest of the family had retired, he paced the floor for a few moments, and after several unsuccessful ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... off his hat and passed a hand over his forehead. She noticed, as she had a hundred times, how fine his hair was at the roots, and was angry again because he would not, with his exasperating ways, let any woman love him as she might. He seemed to have nothing to say, but she knew the picture of lone 'Delia sitting on the steps was far from moving him. It did cause him an honest trouble, for he was kind; but not for that ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... anxious hope for relief. There was not even a lull in the exasperating withdrawals of gold. On the contrary, they grew larger and more persistent than ever. Between the 4th day of December, 1894, and early in February, 1895, a period of scarcely more than two months after the second ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... exasperating composure, to hear what the proposed compliment might be. The furrow between his eyebrows looked deeper than ever. There were signs of secret trouble in that dark face, so grimly and so resolutely composed. The school, without Emily, presented the severest trial of endurance that ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... undergone. The close coupling-together, in this line, of the names of Cain and Christ, was not likely to conciliate antagonists; and indeed one may safely surmise that it was done by Shelley more for the rather wanton purpose of exasperating them than with any other object.—In this stanza Urania appears for ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... afterwards—invariably a musical comedy. Although Honora did not care particularly for musical comedies, she always experienced a certain feverish stimulation which kept her wide awake on the midnight train to Rivington. Howard had a most exasperating habit of dozing in the corner of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... calculated to aggravate youth. With years, he assured Beardsley, men learned to value law and order in art, as in the state, at their worth; and, more and more inspired by his theme, as was his way, he grew preposterously wise and irritating, and he talked himself so successfully into every exasperating virtue of age that I could not wonder at the fierceness with which Beardsley turned upon him and denounced him roundly as conventional and academic and prejudiced and old-fashioned and all that to youth is most odious ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... to become a member of the British Empire, to participate in its greatness, and to enjoy the benefits of its protection. He had absolutely no idea of exasperating the feelings of the Dutch part of its population. He had the best intentions in regard to President Kruger himself, and there was one moment, just at the time of the Bloemfontein Conference, when a modus vivendi between President Kruger and the Court of St. James's might have ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... his sufferings as one hides those of some disgraceful disease. He wrapped himself in the endless silence, which no one knew how to make him break, filling the parsonage with his martyrdom and resignation, and exasperating La Teuse, who, at times, when his back was turned, would shake her fist ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... patiently everything they are told to do therein. Anyhow, it is only in this way that I can account for all these expensive miseries of matrimony. I can't understand a woman in full possession of her faculties deliberately exasperating the man she has to live with—I suppose all men submit to it under protest—for these stale and stereotyped antics. She ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... people, by occasional expenses that consumed their substance, and incidents that sowed the seeds of personal animosities; preparing the way for that dreadful convulsion which was near at hand. At the very time when the witchcraft frenzy broke out, they were in the crisis of an exasperating conflict with Topsfield, occasioned by a wrong done them by the General Court. This requires to be explained, as it can be, by a ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... me," he said with exasperating suavity. "You really want to talk with me because you regret that my sermon was ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... he was urged and required to open up the Mississippi to Flag-officer Davis's command (the Mississippi flotilla), then still above Memphis. This and other letters of the same date must have been peculiarly exasperating; for they were received early in June, when he had been up the river as far as Vicksburg and satisfied himself that without an adequate force of troops nothing could be accomplished. "The Department," he replies, "seems to have considered my fleet as having escaped all ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... was that ten thousand of his people would have to be extricated from the province and carried to the coast. After many and exasperating discussions, Stanley refused to wait longer, and Emin, who had become nearly blind, brought away with him about five hundred persons. The expedition then, over a southeasterly route, made its ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... the heartless wretch who used to persecute us that way. To be waked up and hauled out about day dawn on a cold, wet, dismal morning, and to have to hustle out and stand shivering at roll call, was about the most exasperating item of the soldier's life. The boys had a song very expressive of a soldier's feelings when nestling in his warm blankets, he heard the malicious bray of that bugle. It went ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... a hopeful temperament, she went about her work singing softly to herself at times, and would have been very happy that first week if Mr. O'Rourke had known a sober moment. But Mr. O'Rourke showed an exasperating disposition to keep up festivities. At the end of ten days, however, he toned down, and at Margaret's suggestion that he had better be looking about for some employment he rigged up a fishing-pole, and set out with an injured air for the wharf at the foot of the street, where ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... revivification which comes of a holiday-forgetfulness of the work-shop? I can always work after I've been to your house; and if you will come to mine, now, and hear the club toot their various horns over the exasperating metaphysical question which I mean to lay before them in the disguise of a literary extravaganza, it would just brace you up like ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... usually important mission. I needn't note down how I achieved it. Am I likely to forget my impotent speeches? Still, she had given me plenty of excuse for supposing she liked me, and I said so. And then Catherine laughed her exasperating little laugh that always dries up all sentiment on the spot, and makes my blood boil with anger. "I like you?" she repeated mockingly; "not at all! not in the least! What can you ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... These islands, and the coast of East Friesland, have had but one use in German hands, and that use has been the preparation of attacks on England. Clearly the British may decide to have no more of such attacks. Every advance in scientific warfare may make them more dangerous and exasperating. The British intend soberly and sanely to do their utmost to make a repetition of the present war impossible. To secure this they may find it necessary to have Germany out of the North Sea. But they have no desire whatever to take either the Frisian Islands or East Friesland, ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... Miss Laura Hanna of Denver, a petite, pretty young girl, whose remarks made a bonne bouche with which to close the feast. Interest in the subject rose to fever heat before October. Pulpit, press and fireside were occupied with its discussion. The most effective, and at the same time, exasperating opposition, came from the pulpit, but there was also vigorous help from the same quarter. The Catholic Bishop preached a series of sermons and lectures, in which he fulminated all the thunders of apostolic and papal revelation against women ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... his mission, for which he started on October 29th, 1887. It had for its object the negotiation of a treaty with America on several outstanding questions.] but a man of one-tenth of his talent ought to have seen the folly of widening breaches and exasperating all passions as a preliminary to charging himself with a business that eminently requires a ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... usually wastes how much! One of its worst kind of wastes, to say nothing of the rest, is that of irritating and exasperating men against each other by violence done; which is always sure to be injustice done, for violence ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... one of those exasperating books which you feel you ought to present to your young friends, yet find yourself unwilling to part with." WILLIAM B. WARREN, Former President ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... Amanda, that day. The old horse objected to the bits, and occupied twenty minutes in exasperating protest; the wheels had to be greased, and she lost a butter-napkin in the well. Finally, breathless with exertion, she went in to bid her mother good-by, and see that the matches were hidden and ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... and spoons came to be laid down, the storm seemed to lull, because these were comparatively light implements, so that this period—which in shore-going life is usually found to be the exasperating one—was actually a season of relief. But it was always followed by a terrible squall of scraping wooden legs and clanking human feet when the camp stools were set, and the men came in and ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... twang on their harp of a thousand strings. At breakfast, this morning, when Jack passed me the corn-bread, I said innocently, 'Why, what have we here?' 'It is manna that fell in the night,' answered Jack, with an exasperating snicker. 'You didn't know mutton, but I thought, being a Sunday-school teacher, you would know something about manna.' (N.B.—He alludes to that time I took the infant class for Miss Jones, and they all ran out to see a military ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was a borrowed one. It belongs to Forrest Felton. He has a theodolite which we use for fine work; and I've a little pocket-compass, given me by an old lady a few years ago. I wouldn't have lost this for twice its value,—it's a most exasperating trick!" Jack muttered. "And now it is suddenly ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... memory the image of a boy's face, a swarthy little boy, grinning, grinning with a horrible knowingness and pointing his finger—an accusing finger. It had been the most exasperating, humiliating, and shameful incident in the bishop's career. It was the afternoon for his fortnightly address to the Shop-girls' Church Association, and he had been seized with a panic fear, entirely irrational and unjustifiable, ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... like this housekeeper. I wonder their husbands don't slay them. If you would look out in my back yard, I fear you would see the bones of several of these tactless, exasperating housekeepers, bleaching in ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... sergeants and corporals were conscripted to the task of squad supervision and many exasperating occasions arose when a recruit got the wrong "foots" in place and was commanded ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... and character with which she was conscious of being richly endowed. Unhappily, she was triumphantly successful; perhaps far more so than she had intended. The changeful and susceptible king became completely entranced. He was continually by her side, exasperating Philip by his gallantry, and keenly wounding the feelings ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... had in a dream the exasperating, profitless experience of seeking something urgently desired at the moment, and the aching, weary sensation that follows each failure to track the thing to its hiding-place. Sometimes with a singing ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... Most exasperating, however, from the red man's point of view was the insatiable demand of the newcomers for land. In the years 1803, 1804, and 1805 Harrison made treaties with the remnants of the Miami, Eel River, Piankeshaw, and Delaware tribes—characterized by him as "a body of the most depraved wretches on ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Mann was quite at leisure, and, full of smiling interest, awaited his victim, laying forth his unpleasant little tools with the exasperating alacrity of his kind. Glad to be released from any share in the operation, Betty retired to the back window to be as far away as possible, and for half an hour was so absorbed in her book that poor Thorny might have ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... end in political shipwrecks, whenever the head of the government is an Elizabeth. She, indeed, sent down a prohibition to the house from all debate on the subject. But when she discovered a spirit in the commons, and language as bold as her own royal style, she knew how to revoke the exasperating prohibition. She even charmed them by the manner; for the commons returned her "prayers and thanks," and accompanied them with a subsidy. Her majesty found by experience, that the present, like other passions, was more easily calmed and quieted ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... anything like that? And he was so patient about it. It made me quite sorry for him. But he is exasperating, too, sometimes. Of course one would not do anything to vex him even if it were worth while. But it isn't. He's so jolly innocent that if you were to put your thumb to your nose and wave your fingers at him he would only wonder gravely to himself what ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... not cold, but damp, changeable, raw. The work on the fort was nearly completed, and Rene de Ronville would have soon been relieved of his servile and exasperating employment under the Irish Corporal; but just at the point of time when only a few days' work remained for him, he became furious, on account of an insulting remark, and struck the Corporal over the head with a handspike. This happened in a wood some miles from town, where he was ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... he took a pleasure in frightening me, though I never really lost my confidence in his protection, if he would only drop the fantastic aspects that he delighted to assume. Sometimes, but much more rarely, he teased me with exasperating banter; and, inheriting from some of my progenitors a vindictive temper, I once retaliated severely. We were in the sitting-room with my father and some others, while I was tortured. The chancery-suit was just then approaching its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... and underwear kept on. The hair should be arranged simply, but not allowed to hang in a loose braid, unless you are very sure you will not see any but the patient, and even then it may be unwise, as a braid of hair has an exasperating way of slipping from its proper place (hanging down the back) and dipping into whatever you are stooping over. Dressed thus, with night shoes to protect the feet, one can lie down on a lounge and sleep very comfortably, being freed from tight ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... Patras is a terror under ordinary circumstances. It begins in the early morning and ends in the twilight. To Coleman, having just come from Patras to Athens, this journey from Athens to Patras had all the exasperating elements of a forced recantation. Moreover, he had not come prepared to view with awe the ancient city of Corinth nor to view with admiration the limpid beauties of the gulf of that name with its olive grove shore. He was not stirred by Parnassus, a far-away snow-field ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... the senate, regarding it as given him by heaven. Out of gratitude to his Christian soldiers, he published an edict, in which he confessed himself indebted for his delivery to the shower obtained, PERHAPS, by the prayers of the Christians;[8] and more he could not say without danger of exasperating the pagans. In it he forbade, under pain of death, any one to accuse a Christian on account of his religion; yet, by a strange inconsistency, especially in so wise a prince, being overawed by the opposition of the senate, he had not the courage to abolish ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... think a whiff of the Jersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to me. Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana still keep her vows through all the exasperating changes of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguided aspirants practise their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall? What do people go to see at the theatres, and what do they eat and drink in the world nowadays? Oh, let me die in Harlem!" she was ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... to the railing. Nothing was said, nor was anything done; for it would have been going farther than the students were prepared to proceed, had they attempted to seize and disarm the soldiers. This appeared to be understood, and, instead of wasting the moments and exasperating his enemies by a parley, the officer, as has just been said, went directly through them until he reached the railing. Once there, he began to encircle it, followed in the same order by his men. The first turn loosened the crowd, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... already, English to Karslake, French to the waiter; Sofia understood both and spoke them to perfection. So it was rather exasperating when, his absinthe having been served and the customary platitudes passed on the weather and their respective states of health, the conversation was continued in a tongue with which Sofia was not only unacquainted but which sounded like none she had ever ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... sort, the exotic heritage has tended to predominate; in Thomas Mann the correctness of the austere Hanseatic city and her old traditions seems to be the strongest element. Because he cannot escape the exasperating incompatibility between citizen and artist, between the instinct for conformity and the will to be different, he fights this battle again and again, and bitter meditation upon it has given him the themes of his ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... tired, should grow more cheerful. His thoughts kept harping upon Ferrand: "This must be something like what he described to me, tramping on and on when you're dead-beat, until you can cadge up supper and a bed." And sulkily he kept on ploughing through the mud with glances at the exasperating Crocker, who had skinned one heel and was limping horribly. It suddenly came home to him that life for three quarters of the world meant physical exhaustion every day, without a possibility of alternative, and that as soon as, for some cause beyond ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... what is our Navy doing?" "Oh, but that's only one little hill; the Germans will have it back soon enough." Surely this kind of pessimism, except where the victim of it is not really responsible, must be as offensive to God as it is exasperating to man. ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... Neither Steve nor Tom were quarrelsome, nor had they had more than a boy's usual share of fist battles, but the bullying speech and attitude of the round-faced youth was so uncalled for and exasperating that Steve's temper got the better of ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... associates, but this particular one was a special and persistent source of irritation to her from the fact that he figured prominently and more or less successfully in the public life of the day. There was something peculiarly exasperating in reading a brilliant and incisive attack on the Government's rash handling of public expenditure delivered by a young man who encouraged her son in every imaginable extravagance. The actual extent of Youghal's influence over the boy was of the slightest; Comus was quite capable of ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... saw his eager look and the bunch of flowers which he carried in his hands, a feeling of exasperating jealousy seized her. Where was he going with those flowers? "Alas!" she thought bitterly, "he has a rendezvous with some pretty lass. I will follow him and ascertain, if possible, ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... M. Pancaldi, how good it was of him to tell me what I wished to know! I knew, however, that by exasperating him, I should end by picking up the missing clue in what he said. It was just as though one were to hand some one a flint and steel and suggest to him that he was to use it. In the end, the spark is obtained. In my case, what produced ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... from the young girl confirmed her good impressions. As a result, sufficient work was found or made to give Mildred steady employment. Mr. Jocelyn was comparatively quiet and much at home. Often he was excessively irritable and exasperating in words and manner, but no longer violent from bestial excess. He put off the project of going to a curative institution, with the true opium inertia and procrastination, and all efforts to lead him to definite action ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... had taken upon itself that appalling and exasperating calmness of very good people who never get angry, but drive others to frenzy by the simple occlusion of an adamantine veil between their own feelings and their opponents'. "I'll tell you all about it after I've put up ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... domestic matters were a trial to his nerves. It seemed to him an act of unaccountable folly to marry a woman from whom one differed diametrically on subjects that lay at the root of life; and of children he could hardly bring himself to think at all, so exasperating the complication they introduced into social problems which defied common-sense. He disliked children; fled the sight and the sound of them in most cases, and, when this was not possible, regarded them with apprehension, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... my procedure and the time-honoured methods of "strong" Governors must have seemed exasperating to those who waited, respectful, but with nerves on edge, in the canvassed and tented regions behind the Headquarters clearing. Indeed, the Foreign Office, could it have witnessed my unpardonable hesitation, might well have dismissed me on ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... of work too wearifu' for one person by her lane. She hoped that the bonfire wasna built o' Mrs. Sinkler's coals nor Mr. Macbrose's kindlings, nor soaked with Mr. Cameron's paraffine; and she finished with the customary but irrelative and exasperating allusion to the exceedingly nice family with whom she ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... naturally some good qualities, he had been so humored and indulged that his own will had become his law; he loved to tease, and hated to be thwarted in the slightest degree, and this made him often very exacting and tyrannical. Miss Higginson called him a "most exasperating boy," and she wasn't far wrong. He teased Kate and Eva so much that they hated to go into his room, or even in the gondola when he took, now and then, an airing. But, to everybody's surprise, he and Stevie got on ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... that there was a five-year-old making a trip all by himself. Of course, he was not to be bothered, but everybody wanted to talk to him, to ask him how he was, to chatter endlessly at him. Jimmy did not want to talk. His experience in addressing adults was exasperating. That he spoke lucid English instead of babygab did not compel a rational response. Those who heard him speak made over him with the same effusive superiority that they used in applauding a golden-haired tot in high heels and a strapless ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... of thought without following out any one of them to its conclusion, are characteristic of this type of definitions. They are as devoid of vitality as a long drawn-out yawn, and their want of logic is exasperating. The merest tyro can see that one can profess the principles they embody without being a Jew. There are many sects that would heartily subscribe to all of them. Universalists, Deists, Theists, Unitarians, and even Ethical Culturists hold these doctrines. As matters stand ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... detained by contrary winds. Ralegh boasted to Cecil that he was indifferent to good fortune or adversity. But in another letter he confessed: 'This wind breaks my heart.' The delay was the more exasperating that other ships had run out, 'bound to the wars, a multitude going for the Indies.' He was afraid the chiefest places of his enterprise might be attempted, and he should be undone. Others would reap no advantage; for he knew 'they would be ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... been a clear writer in verse; Modern Love requires reading and re-reading; but at one time he had a somewhat exasperating semblance of lucidity, which still lurks mockingly about his work. A freshman who heard Mallarme lecture at Oxford said when he came away: 'I understood every word, but not a single sentence.' Meredith is ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... something of the kind for yourself. But let that pass. All I am suggesting to you as a 1921 amendment is that you should bank in a more accessible part of your clothing. Waiting for change in this weather (especially with the flag still down) can be an exasperating experience. Won't you make a resolution during the coming year to keep your money ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... look exasperating. He saw everything and he enjoyed everything. Plainly he was the miscreant. He was waddling round on his stout little legs, flourishing a huge jack-knife, and grinning as if he were going to have a big ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W. |
