"Nagging" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... place the whole race under a common condemnation because of the slothfulness and lawlessness of some of its members; it would hardly be fair even if this percentage were larger than it is, and it is hardly worthy of a people to continue nagging at, and seeking to arouse further prejudice against its own race. No man can reach the elevated plane of good character and worth who drags behind him a great load of little and mean dislikes for his fellowman. The possibilities of higher professional standing of colored men and ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... certificated by the College of Spiritual Athletics. Terms for ordinary nagging, two shillings and ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... the same moment they became aware that a common incident of Saturday night was occurring had got thus far on their way home, the wife's shrill tongue in the street below. A half-tipsy man and a nagging woman running over every scale of scurrility and striking every note of ingenious malice. The man was at length worked to a pitch of frenzy, and then—thud, thud, mingled with objurgations and shrill night-piercing yells. Fury little short of murderous ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... her liveliness; he could not even see that she was good-looking now. "She's nothing but chaff, chaff, chaff!" he thought. "Thank goodness, Matilda isn't given that way. Chaff before marriage means nagging after!" ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... third star just before he flew down to Rio de Janiero for the toss that finally settled the nagging quarrel between Britain and Argentina as to who owned the ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... inquisition had dragged along until everybody looked drowsy and tired but Joan, Brother Seguin, professor of theology at the University of Poitiers, who was a sour and sarcastic man, fell to plying Joan with all sorts of nagging questions in his bastard Limousin French—for he was from Limoges. ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... difficulties which her thoughtless words had produced. That the union of her parents was unclean, that it was altogether foul and by far worse than a divorce, she still felt confident, but she saw that her mother was totally unable to comprehend the difference between a clean separate life and the nagging poison dealt out as daily bread to the husband with whom she lived; but she saw that because of that very inability to understand the difference, the mother must be left to find the light in her own way. ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... is made a privilege by the expert teacher, school procedure becomes well-nigh automatic and there is never any occasion for nagging, hectoring, or badgering. Such things are abnormal in life and no less so in the vitalized school. They are a confession on the part of the teacher that she has reached the limit of her resources. She admits that she cannot do what Tom Sawyer did so well, and so proclaims her inability ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... Sosia (slave of Amphitryon), in the service of Alcmena. A nagging termagant, who keeps her husband in petticoat subjection. She is not one of the characters in Moliere's comedy of Amphitryon.—Dryden, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... for them, crowded the street leading to the quay, and camels, strung in groups of five, came swinging in, or kneeling in the dust, waved their long, bird-like necks, and lifted up a mournful bellow, as if protesting in a bored, Oriental way, at a fate which compelled them to bear burdens for the nagging race of men. ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... air-baths, cold water plunges, or cold water sponges, every morning. Fix your mind upon having a sound and energized body and you will attract it. Exercise, walk, run, play, work, and learn to rest. Change your habits of living. Cut out the grouch. Stop nagging. You're sour because your pores are stopped up; get a buck-saw and take a sweat. You're morbidly blue because your solar plexus has gone to sleep; give it half an hour of internal vibration. Don't knock the weather, like ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... there is something to be said: he had escaped the sin of despising the physically strong—a sin against which the physically weak must guard. But here was Dawes returning again and again to the subject of the University, full of transparent jealousy and petty spite, nagging, nagging, nagging, like a maiden lady who has not been invited to a tea-party. Rickie wondered whether, after all, Ansell and the extremists might not be right, and bodily beauty and strength be ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... much impressed by the event of the evening to inquire. And so, with a few cases of hysterics to occupy the attention of the younger women, some whimpering of frightened children and comforting or chastened nagging by mothers, some unwonted prayers muttered secretly and forgettingly, and a good deal of subdued blasphemy, Cunnamulla sank to its troubled slumbers—some of the sleepers in the commercial and billiard-rooms and parlours at the Royal, to start up in a cold ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... would think your speaking mere nagging. Preserve an ominous silence if he speaks. His school-fellows ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his pipe and gave vent to his feelings, as follows: 'If I had had a four-year-old club at the supper table to-night, I felt so boiling mad that I would have knocked hell out of him. To hear him go on a nagging and fault-finding with that little woman of his. There she has been a-working hard all day, set three good meals, doing the churning and all the housework besides; and all she gets for her patient labor is a growl.' 'Yes,' said another man, ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... outlines of the story, because Ebenezer and Helen had been abroad most of the time, and his impatient spirit chafed to know the intimate particulars of Tessibel's life. Jealousy of Young tormented him. Hopeless brooding over his situation, and Madelene's continual nagging had made him a neurasthenic wreck. Worn by insomnia and almost starved by a nervous dyspepsia, he could no longer maintain even a pretense of usefulness in the business. Madelene, thoroughly disillusioned, herself worn out by his ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... upset than I've ever seen him—they've got what they wanted, and they're sailing before long, I hear, to live in Florence. Father said he couldn't stand the constant persuading—I'm afraid the word he used was "nagging." I can't understand people behaving like that. George says they may be Ambersons, but they're vulgar! I'm afraid I almost agree with him. At least, I think they were inconsiderate. But I don't see why I'm unburdening myself of all this to you, poor darling! We'll have ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... a chemist's crucible, I pray you to think twice whether the mind that fashioned the crucible be not greater than the crucible; whether the Master-mind that shaped the laws of the universe be not greater than the universe; whether when man's mind loses grip—as you call it—of the little, nagging, insistent realities it may not leap free like the jagged lightnings from peak to peak of a consciousness that overtowers life's commoner levels! Spite of our boastings, each knows neither more nor less than life hath taught him. For me, I know what the dream-voice ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... and tired. You keep on nagging me all the time and I can't stand it any more. You will ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... smooth.' 'Well,' she said, 'Mr. Freeland and I will take Tryst and the little ones in at present.' Good-hearted people, do a lot for the laborers, in their way. All the same, she's a bit of a vixen. Picture of a woman, too, standin' there; shows blood, mind you! Once said, all over—no nagging. She took the little girl off with her. And pretty small I felt, knowing I'd got to finish that job, and the folk outside gettin' nastier all the time—not sayin' much, of course, but lookin' a lot!" The agent ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... went to school with father out in this gosh awful land of the grasshopper,—he is the limit. He never lets a day go by without some slur about my grandfather or some other member of the family who existed long before I was born. Thinks he's witty. He is always nagging at me about cigarette smoking. I wish you could see the way he mishandles a cigar. As you know, I seldom smoke more than a half dozen cigarettes a day, but he swears to God I am everlastingly ruining my health, and it has got on my nerves so that if I stay on here another week ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... why you should feel sorry for them," said Fidelia, angrily. At which the Little Colonel was more embarrassed than ever. She could not tell Fidelia that it was because a little poodle received the fondling and attention that belonged to them, and that it was Fidelia's continual faultfinding and nagging that made the boys tease her. So after a pause she changed the subject by asking her what she wanted most to ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... him and administered a sound trouncing. The resulting tangle was even worse, but Buck took good care to keep the traces clear thereafter; and ere the day was done, so well had he mastered his work, his mates about ceased nagging him. Francois's whip snapped less frequently, and Perrault even honored Buck by lifting up his feet ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... and certain other ill-treated women about the place. Mrs. Bundle could be very severe on the dirt and discomfort which "drove some men to the public as would stay at home if there was a clean kitchen to stay in, and less of that nagging at a man and screaming after children as never made a decent husband nor a well-behaved child yet." Yet in certain cases of undeserved brutality, like Robin's, I fear she sometimes counselled resistance, on the principle that it "couldn't make ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... disturbances of the pelvic organs, association and summation may play a large role. On this hypothesis many cases of neurasthenia may well be explained. From the behavior of the individual as a whole we may well conclude that summation is but a scientific expression for "nagging." Many other pathologic phenomena may be explained in a similar manner. Thus we can understand the variations in the gastric analyses in a timid patient alarmed over his condition and afraid of the hospital. He is integrated by fear, ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... been many moments without my senses. When I recovered them there was a great to-do in the garden, but I had the drawing-room to myself. I sat up. Rosenthall and Purvis were rushing about outside, cursing the Kaffirs and nagging ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... part of some of the suffrage Members of this House is on an exact equality with the acts of these women militants who have spent the last summer and fall, while they were not in the district jail or workhouse, in coaxing, teasing, and nagging the Presi dent of the United States for the purpose of inducing him, by coercion, to club Congress ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... September 2003, respectively - the country continues to struggle to boost investment and agricultural output, and ethnic reconciliation is complicated by the real and perceived Tutsi political dominance. Kigali's increasing centralization and intolerance of dissent, the nagging Hutu extremist insurgency across the border, and Rwandan involvement in two wars in recent years in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo continue to hinder Rwanda's efforts to ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... often lends retired officers a guise of excessive spick-and-spanness had gradually combined with an easier bearing to give his figure a natural elegance. To be sure, six years had passed since, displeased by a nagging major, he had definitely hung up the dragoon's coat ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... cajoling her, watching her, dodging her, nagging her, driving her, he got her off to bed at last. Being alone, he looked around, listened, shut the doors of the parlour and the kitchen, put the bolt on the door of the stairs, the chain on the door of the porch, took off ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... realm could be brought to England for trial, should be put into operation against the colonial agitators. When the Virginia legislature protested against this step, it was dissolved. Hillsborough and North acted as though they believed that a policy of scolding and nagging, if made sufficiently disagreeable, would bring the colonists to their senses. That the Whigs did not cease to pour contempt and ridicule on the folly of such behaviour was probably one reason why the government persisted in its course. The American question was coming ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... a bit of French and considerable Spanish, Rockyfeller's valet spoke Russian very (I did not have to be told) badly. The Young Pole, perhaps sore at being rolled on the floor of The Enormous Room by the worthy Sheeney, set about nagging him just as he had done in the case of neighbour Bill. His favourite epithet for the conqueror was "moshki" or "moski" I never was sure which. Whatever it meant (The Young Pole and Monsieur Auguste informed me that it meant "Jew" in a highly derogatory ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... on connubial acquaintance. He was lazy and sloven of mornings, and since he had no office to go to he grew more neglectful of his appearance than ever. His end-to-end cigarettes got on Kedzie's nerves and cost a nagging amount of money, especially as she could not learn to like ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... negotiate successfully a charter at the going rates in a stiff market, but skippers are, in the final analysis, the Genii of the Dividends. And Cappy knew skippers. He could get more loyalty out of them with a mere pat on the back and a kindly word than could Mr. Skinner, with all his threats, nagging and driving, yet he was an employer who demanded a full measure of service, and never permitted sentiment to plead for an incompetent. And his ships were his pets; in his affections they occupied a position but one degree removed from that occupied by his ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... both for a month, with Italian, and tea, and manna of sentiment, and late hours, and every restful thing a young husband could need for the refreshment of weary limbs and a sore conscience, and a nagging sense ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger
... drudge from dawn to dark for a hire that barely kept him going. The farmer was the owner of Jimmie's time, and Jimmie disliked him heartily, because he was surly-tempered and stingy, abusing his horses and nagging at his hired man. Jimmie's education in farm-economics was not thorough enough to enable him to realize that John Cutter was as much of a slave as himself—bound by a mortgage to Ashton Chalmers, President of the First National Bank of Leesville. John ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... she's really reformed?' I says. 'Do you think nine months is long enough to have taught her a lesson?' I didn't want to damp him, but personally I have never known but one case of a woman being cured of nagging, and that being brought about by a fall from a third-story window, resulting in what the doctors called permanent paralysis of the vocal organs, can hardly ...
— The Observations of Henry • Jerome K. Jerome
... plaguy business," answers Jove, "for me to offend Juno and put up with all the bitter tongue she will give me. As it is, she is always nagging at me and saying I help the Trojans, still, go away now at once before she finds out that you have been here, and leave the rest to me. See, I nod my head to you, and this is the most solemn form ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... Her genial and warm-hearted sympathy was an almost irresistible lure. Mr. Thrush's present fate had been brought about by a tragic circumstance, the death of his only child, a girl of twelve, who had been run over by an omnibus in Oxford Circus and killed on the spot. Left alone with a peevish, nagging wife who had never suited him, or, as he expressed it, "studied" him in any way, he had gone down the hill till he had landed near the bottom. All his love had been fastened on his child, and sorrow had not strengthened but had ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... mean by singular? I have known Annie ever since she was that high. It never struck me that she was any more singular than other girls, except she stood an awful lot of nagging without making a kick. Here you all say she is singular, as if you meant she was"—Tom hesitated a second—"crazy," said he. "Now, I know that Annie is saner than any girl around here, and that simply does not go down. What do you ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... for the unfortunates who swabbed the floors, scraped out the jets, realigned the drive mechanism, or did any other tidying work. Their jobs were never done; they always suffered from the nagging thought that just a little more work might bring the inspection rating up a decimal ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... eyes, and I knew that Madame Renard was boiling with rage, for she kept on nagging at me: 'Oh, how horrid! Don't you see that he is robbing you of your fish? Do you think that you will catch anything? Not even a frog, nothing whatever. Why, my hands are tingling, just ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Well, after our return, I suppose the delight of having Roger back again put the whole affair out of my uncle's head, but lately he hasn't been very well—at least that is the most charitable way to look at it—and he has been perpetually nagging at me about the contents of the cupboard, and asking ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... I tell you. I'm not grumbling, am I? I know as well as you do she's miles too good for me. Haven't I said so? Then what the devil do you keep on nagging at me ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... dislike to steady industry and slow gains. Moreover, domestic service is a kind of employment which, if not sweetened by personal affection, is extraordinarily full of wear and tear. In it there is no real end to the day, and in small households, the pursuit and oversight, and often the "nagging," of the employer, or, in other words, the presence of an exacting, semi-hostile, and slightly contemptuous person is constant. This and confinement in a half-dark kitchen produce that nervous crisis which sends male mechanics and other male laborers, ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... between the undrawn curtains. A figure stirred upon the bed within, and Fanny, not clearly aware whether she had slept or not, longed to search the room for some heavier covering which, warming her, would let her sink into unconsciousness. Her slowly gathering wits, together with the nagging cold, forced her at last from the high bed on to the floor, and she crossed the room towards the light. In the walled garden below strange lights of dawn played, red, green and amber, like a crop of flowers. The railway lines beyond the garden wall disappeared in fiery ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... through the school, I noted everywhere a happy and courteous relation between pupils and teachers. They spoke pleasantly to one another. I heard no nagging or scolding. I saw no one sulking or pouting or in bad temper. And yet there was every evidence of respect and obedience on the part of the pupils. There was none of that happy-go-lucky comradeship which I have sometimes seen in other modern schools, and ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... you're an aged man, I know, And learned too, I doubt not, in the law; And a head white with many a winter's snow (I wish, however that your heart would thaw) Claims reverence and honor; but the jaw That's always wagging with a word malign, Nagging and scolding every one in sight As harshly as a jaybird in a pine, And with as little sense of wrong and right As animates that irritable creature, Is not a ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... nowhere in the wasted area for the tired soldiers to find relief from their monotony. War is a dreary thing. With one fixed idea in the mind—to wait, to watch for some careless head over the mounded earth, and then to kill—war is drearier than slave labor, more nagging than an imperfect marriage, more dispiriting than unsuccessful sin. The pretty brass utensils of the dwellings had been pillaged. Canvas, which had once contained bright faces, was in shreds. The figures of Christ and his friends that had stood ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... your own without hearing mine, Ivory, and anyway they are not big afflictions, heavy sorrows, like those you have to bear. Mine are just petty, nagging, sordid, cheap little miseries, like gnat-bites;—so petty and so sordid that I can hardly talk to God about them, much less to a human friend. Patty is my only outlet and I need others, yet I find it almost impossible ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... act like old-fashioned wives, I suppose," his daughter answered cheerfully, "and keep nagging till it is there. We'll keep up such a nagging," she added, in sweet even tones, "that you'll get the money by hook or crook, to save yourselves ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... comply with his father's wishes. They could easily do that, or thought they could, by making life at the ranch unbearable for him. That, he was convinced, was the reason that Betty had adopted her cold, severe, and contemptuous attitude toward him. She expected he would find her nagging and bossing intolerable, that he would leave in a rage and allow her and Taggart to come into possession of the property. Neither she nor Taggart would dare make off with the money and the idol as long as he was at the ranch, for they would ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... friends were up to, it is possible that they might now have been left in peace for some time; for the crowd, seeing no chance of further sport from Coaldust, began to melt away. But a fresh character entered the scene to keep alive the nagging interest of the drama. ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... his wife for one of the seven following reasons:—Want of children, adultery, neglect of his parents, nagging, thieving (i.e. supplying her own family with his goods, popularly known as "leakage"), jealous temper and leprosy. To the above, the humanity of the lawgiver has affixed three qualifying conditions. He may not put her away on any of the above grounds if she has duly passed through the period ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... the country was increased by the nagging of the legislature; for so early as December, 1693, the representatives passed the first of a long series of resolves, "that the president of Harvard College for the time being shall reside there, as hath been accustomed in time past." [Footnote: Court Rec. vi. 316.] Now this ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... had her old influence," one read in another popular journal,[171] "the Great Powers would not be bringing pressure to bear on Rumania with the object of saving Hungary from richly deserved punishment." "Instead of nagging the Rumanians," wrote an eminent French publicist, "they would do much better to keep the Turks in hand. If the Turks in despair, in order to win American sympathies, proclaim themselves socialists, syndicalists, or laborists, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... I did say something," Henley reluctantly admitted. "He was nagging the life out of me at the store about what you intended to do, and holding me up to ridicule, and I reckon I did say that I wouldn't be here—that my business would keep me in Texas. As for that matter, I told you about the trip long before this queer—long ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... oh, don't! I can't tell you because I don't know, and it's mean of you to keep nagging at me on the sly, when Father Bhaer told you not to plague me. You wouldn't dare to if Dan ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... he had so frequently demonstrated its truth on the person of his unsuspecting partner. No one could argue Varr into doing anything, much less drive him, but Jason had more than once succeeded in overcoming that granite obstinacy by a species of gentle, persistent nagging. So adept had he become in this delicate accomplishment that Simon Varr would have sworn at the end of a campaign that he had never deviated from the original purpose that had ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... substantives [posion] The butcher lays thee low, [the] Thus the Comic Latin Grammar is lepidissimus, funniest [lipidissimus] it has not different persons, as taedet, it irketh [taedat] the magging or talkative mood [probably error for "nagging"] Amavissem, I should have loved [Amivissem] Amandum, to love, if you 're doom'd, have a care. [you 'r] Ab, ad, ante, &c. prepositions. [printed as shown: missing "are"?] From neco, necui, and mico, word [printed as shown: missing "a" ("a word")?] And (which perhaps is the most pursuasive argument ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... don't let me alone I'll put you out—all of you nagging and picking at me; a saint couldn't stand it!" Crowder rose, but she whirled round on him, the comb held out in an arresting hand. "No, don't go yet. I'll give you another chance. I want to ask you something. I saw a woman the other day and I want to know who she is—at ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... had a half-patronizing, half-nagging way of treating me that I simply could not put up with. I was doing all the business, earning all the money that was made, and this man was entitled to fifty per cent of the net results. I stood it for a few months, ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... we do is to go on nagging in this way," Pao-yue remarked smiling, "will I any more be afraid to die? on the contrary, it would be better ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... difficulties of locomotion, being buried under the Pelion on Ossa of a mountain of fat. She inhabits a cave of Adullam on the edge of the Inferno—i. e., the 'theatre'—below stairs, and has a small dog with a bad heart and broken wind always nagging on her knee. I call her the Chief Broker in Breakages and Head Dealer in Diseases, and she is only seen once a day when she comes round to take stock. You have to be nice with her Majesty,' for she can haul you up at the weekly board, and put ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... amusing to watch two middle-aged ladies nagging each other, at two o’clock in the morning, on a public square, as they do in Lohengrin? Do people find the lecture that Isolde’s husband delivers to the guilty lovers entertaining? Does an opera produce any illusion ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... as you seemed? Was it possible that you didn't know. And if you did know, was it possible that you were—waiting? That it only needed a word of mine to put everything between us on a different basis? I couldn't get rid of that idea. It kept nagging at me. But after what you told me last night—and you certainly told it straight—that idea's exploded. What you said explains everything about you. I know now that I haven't a chance in the world. From now on, I imagine, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... planting. By nature, he was a student. The help he had sporadically given his father had always been given rebelliously and been accompanied by the mental resolve that the first moment escape was possible, he would leave the country and its nagging round of drudgery and take up a ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... ever occurred to you to put them together?" asked she. "They are impossible people; so, naturally, you have selected the very mildest and most Christian women to endure their nagging. They can't live with the saints of the earth. Experience has proved that. Put them into one room, and let them fight ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... what I can, Susan Jane." The gray head nestled close to the strong young shoulder. The nagging woman rested, breathing deep. The fierce storm was rolling away; darkness was giving place, outside, to the sunset glow which, during all the terror and gloom, had ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... man! To be led like a cow," groaned Mrs. Kohler. "Oh, it is good that he has no wife!" She was reproaching herself for nagging Fritz when he drank himself into foolish pleasantry or mild sulks, and felt that she had never before ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... taken all their capacity. Outside of their business they knew absolutely nothing; they were even ignorant of Paris. To them the great city was merely a region spreading around the Rue Saint-Denis. Their narrow natures could see no field except the shop. They were clever enough in nagging their clerks and their young women and in proving them to blame. Their happiness lay in seeing all hands busy at the counters, exhibiting the merchandise, and folding it up again. When they heard the six or eight voices of ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... gave way to an extraordinary fit of nagging anger. He got up and stood upon the hearthrug to deliver his soul the better. It was an altogether unexpected and illuminating outbreak. He was flushed with guilt. The more angry and eloquent he became, the more profoundly ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... to the dining-room, any reversion to such tactics must be firmly reprehended, and the child should understand that continued offense means a return to the nursery. But before company it is best to say as little as possible, since too much nagging in the presence of strangers lessens a child's incentive to good behavior before them. If it refuses to behave nicely, much the best thing to do is to say nothing, but get up and quietly lead it from the ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... hectored his parents into sending him to our school. They were probably feeling, on their own account, that they had come to town for better things than they had been getting; and likely enough they met his demands halfway. There was usually a certain element of cheeriness in his nagging; but the cheeriness was quite ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... and being, the vindication achieved of two ordinarily rather maligned novels, The Old Curiosity Shop and Little Dorrit, and the insight shown into Dickens's portraiture of women, more particularly those of the shrill-voiced and nagging or whining variety, the 'better halves' of Weller, Varden, Snagsby and Joe Gargery, not to speak of the Miggs, the Gummidge, and the M'Stinger. Like Mr. Swinburne and other true men, he regards Mrs. ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... shrugged. "You probably know what a lot of nagging little worries a ranchman has, and sometimes it seems to me they all have to come at once. I suppose even a man gets a bit ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... can keep track of your men in a sneaking way that will make them despise you, and talk to them in a nagging spirit that will make them bristle when they see you. But it's your right to know and your business to find out, and if you collect your information in an open, frank manner, going at it in the spirit of hoping to find everything all right, instead of wanting ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... nap, a thing that had not happened in years. He stayed on the front gallery and kept count. Those moving distant black specks typified uneasiness for the squire—not fear exactly, or panic or anything akin to it, but a nibbling, nagging kind of uneasiness. Time and again he said to himself that he would not think about them any more; but ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... suffering face, and paid no attention to her objections. As soon as he carried her off, Jim Edwards glumly took out that one of the twins I had at first supposed to be the elder, the remaining Thornhill girls moved on Dr. Bowman and began nagging him to hunt partners ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... positive: the Cherokees, he insisted, would not join the Ohio tribes, despite the murder of Oconostota's brother. Could the people of the Clinch and Holston have felt the same confidence, they would have spared themselves much nagging. ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... Peter Moore grew tired of the nagging to which his position on the supervisor ship gave him privilege, for he shortly made application for a berth in the China run. Now every operator on the Pacific cherishes the hope that his fidelity will some day be rewarded by a China run, and there are applications ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... nagging at Toad for?" inquired the Badger, rather peevishly. "What's the matter with his English? It's the same what I use myself, and if it's good enough for me, it ought to be ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... door close, and he knew that at last he was alone. He flung out his arms, ecstatically. Free! He would see no more of that nagging beggar Ryan until tomorrow. Free to put into execution the idea that had been bubbling all day long in his head, like a fine champagne, firing his blood ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... there was a long period of blessed darkness, of peace, of non-remembering, then his mind clawed upward toward consciousness. The fear and uncertainty were with him again—nagging, nibbling, gnawing ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... Corporal punishment must be done away with not because it is painful but because it is profoundly immoral and hopelessly unsuitable. Repress the egoistic demands of the child when he interferes with the work or rest of others; never let him either by caresses or by nagging usurp the rights of grown people; take care that the servants do not work against what the parents are trying to insist on in ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... tiny, nagging disturbing thought in his mind. It had to do with Mike Fueyo and the Silent Spooks, and a lot of red Cadillacs. But he pushed it resolutely away. It had nothing to do with the evening he was about to spend. ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... ethically, he will probably concede the point, provided,—and don't overlook this,—you "go about it in the right way, and in the right spirit." It isn't likely you will be given a patient hearing, if in the past you have been in the habit of nagging and browbeating him. Don't look upon tactful ways of gaining your point as evidence of weakness. It is distinctly an evidence of strength of character, and, each time you win a point in a friendly debate with your husband, you will have gained much. He will respect you all the more ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... punctilious examination. La Peyrade had now reached a point when he was forced to see that, in order to restore his influence, which was daily evaporating, he must strike some grand blow; and it was precisely this nagging and vexatious fancy about the proofs that the barrister decided to take as the starting-point of a scheme, both deep and adventurous, which came ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... was strong in the opposite sense. "We want to din into the constituencies," he wrote, "that the Government policy is one of continual, petty, fruitless, unnecessary, and inglorious squabbles—all due to their bullying, nagging ways." This was consonant with the Birmingham leader's fierce opposition to Jingoism; and for once he shared the view of his ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... somebody other than the emperor. When not even this sufficed, he hit upon the following third means of raising money. There was a senator, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, who had noticed that the roads during the reign of Tiberius were in bad condition and was always nagging the road commissioners about it and furthermore kept making a nuisance of himself before the senate regarding the matter. Gaius took him as a confederate and through him attacked all those, alive or dead, who had ever been road commissioners and had received money for repairing ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... an extremely puzzled young man who rode and rode that night in pursuit of that evasive, nagging, altogether maddening tinkle. Always just over the next little rise he would hear it, or down in the next little draw; never close enough for him to discover the trick; never far enough away for him to give up the chase. The stars he ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... meaning that he will take only one of my stones[FN488] and leave me the other." So he ceased not running and the other followed after him, but being unable to catch him he returned to his guests and served them with somewhat of bread and so forth, whilst the woman kept blaming him and nagging about the matter of the geese which she said had been carried off, but which had been given by her to her lover. The husband enjoined her to silence; however she would not hold her peace[FN489] and on this wise he was balked of the meal to feed his wife's friend. And ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... an uncomfortable little thought nagging at her breast. Was he really so simple as she had decided? Had he not baited her into losing her temper—and insisting on his coming to dinner? Surely he could not know ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... fulfilled. Bud fought back, telling Marie how much of a snap she had had since she married him, and how he must have looked like ready money to her, and added that now, by heck, he even had to do his own cooking, as well as listen to her whining and nagging, and that there wasn't clean corner in the house, and she'd rather let her own baby go hungry than break a simp rule in a darn book got up by a bunch of boobs that didn't know anything about kids. Surely to goodness, he finished his heated paragraph, it wouldn't break any woman's back to pour a ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... returned. "If your sanity doesn't make you happy, I can tell you it's worth a great deal less than my craziness. Look at that dandelion, now—it has filled two hours chock full of thought and colour for me when I might have been puling indoors and nagging at God Almighty about trifles. The time has been when I'd have walked right over that little flower and not seen it, and now it grows yellower each minute that I look at it, and each minute I see it better than I did the one before. There's nothing in life, when you come to ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... in unusual cases, there is absolutely nothing by which people know that they are going to be properly mated. If a man with a tendency to neurasthenia breaks down and is tied to a nagging wife, that is usually the last straw in the ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle
... he began, "I want you and Sidney to come over and live at Quien Sabe. I know—you can't make me believe that the reporters and officers and officious busy-faces that pretend to offer help just so as they can satisfy their curiosity aren't nagging you to death. I want you to let me take care of you and the little tad till all this trouble of yours is over with. There's plenty of place for you. You can have the house my wife's people used to live in. You've got to look these things in the face. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... finally a curiously malevolent newspaper representing the worst type of Protestant ignorance and prejudice, which exists on its libelous and indecent and dishonest assaults on Catholicism wherever it may be found. These are not alone, for the condition of ascerbity and nagging is practically universal. It merely echoes the pulpit and a portion of the general public. We all know of the so called "church" in Boston that is the forum of "escaped nuns" and "unfrocked priests," but in many places of better repute the sermon that bitterly attacks ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... had been to them one of constant sparring and unhappiness, for which Mrs. Holt blamed Kate. Her son had returned expecting to court Kate Bates strenuously; his disappointment was not lightened by his mother's constant nagging. Monday forenoon she went to market, ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... him as he fell, carrying him to his bench. While they massaged his limp body and cleansed the wound, all of his attention was turned inward. He was in reverie, sliding along the borders of consciousness. The nagging memory of the previous night loomed up then, and he turned it over and over in his mind, ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... feeling in my heart, realising how superior you are to all of his favourites." It was the insidious effect of poisoned flattery like this, which made the Baroness a ruling power in the Cheney household, and at the same time turned an already cold and unloving wife into a jealous and nagging tyrant who rendered the young statesman's home the most dreaded place on earth to him, and caused him to live away from ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Jo's tooth. This abscess had been nagging all the time, it had vigorously tried to get between Jo and the scenery. We had sought dentists in Salonika, rejecting one because his hall was too dirty, a second because she (yes, a she) was practising on her father's certificates, the third, a little Spaniard, had red-hot pokered ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... now, Stan! You've been nagging me ever since last camp. Why'n thunder can't you see I'm doing my best? Other men don't row me as you do, or stand up for the 'tacks.' I tell you that fellow Lee never loses a chance of skinning me: he takes chances, by gad, ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... subjects is lamentably small. For these reasons it has been, as you know, my constant endeavour to reduce the number of our complaints. I may sometimes have abstained when I ought to have protested from my great dislike of ineffectual nagging. But I feel that the attempt to remedy the hundred-and-one wrongs springing from a hopeless system by taking up isolated cases, is perfectly vain. It may easily lead to war, but will never lead ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... She knew it was going to rain, and she had not let him have a nickel for car fare—she who had five thousand dollars. She let him walk the streets in the cold and in the rain. "Miser," he growled behind his mustache. "Miser, nasty little old miser. You're worse than old Zerkow, always nagging about money, money, and you got five thousand dollars. You got more, an' you live in that stinking hole of a room, and you won't drink any decent beer. I ain't going to stand it much longer. She knew it was going to rain. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... show, and, soon after, the proprietor of a second-class vaudeville house. Just when the moving picture had passed out of the stage of a curiosity and become a promising industry he was an ambitious young man of twenty-six with some money to invest, nagging financial ambitions and a good working knowledge of the popular show business. That had been nine years before. The moving picture industry had borne him up with it where it threw off dozens of men with more financial ability, more imagination, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... absolutely wrong to punish or to crush the spirit of these children. Constant nagging and taunting, even if done in the hope of shaming the child into a cure, will simply make a coward of him and will not aid in improving matters, but will ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... his wifie," half sneered the officer in a nagging way, that irritated me, though the remark was, doubtless, true. "Home with his wifie," he repeated in a sing-song, paying no attention to the elucidation of a subject he had raised. "Good old man, Hamilton, but since marriage, utterly gone ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... outside his own heart. Even his family did not share his belief. When he married, as he did when he was nearly fifty, his wife was impatient with his Faith—indeed, fearful of it, and with persistent, nagging reasonableness urged his return to the respectable paths of Presbyterianism. To his pain, when his girl, his Philippa, grew up she shrank from the emotion of his creed; she and her mother went to the brick church under the locust-trees of Lower Ripple; and ...
— The Voice • Margaret Deland
... have I inhabited, some which my soul loathed, and some which pleased me well; but never till now with that sense of security which makes a home. At any moment I might have been driven forth by evil hap, by nagging necessity. For all that time did I say within myself: Some day, perchance, I shall have a home; yet the "perchance" had more and more of emphasis as life went on, and at the moment when fate was secretly smiling on me, I had ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... up her persistent nagging and remonstrances, and tried to receive her husband with affectionate words, the sharpness of the bigot showed through, and one speech would often undo ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... alike blamed Alcazar the machinist for everything, as if the systematic contrariness of Petra, who seemed to enjoy nagging the man, were not enough to exasperate any one. Petra had always been that way,—wilful, behind the mask of humility, and as obstinate as a mule. As long as she could do as she ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... it; if not grin and bear it without complaint. Here is practical wisdom. But to worry over a thing that can be changed, instead of changing it, is the height of folly, and if a matter cannot be changed why worry over it? How utterly useless is the worry. Then, too, worry is the parent of nagging. Nagging is worry put into words,—the verbal expression of worry about or towards individuals. The mother wishes her son would do differently. Can the boy's actions be changed? Then go to work to change ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... towards rendering his baseless suspicions a reality, his unjust accusations justified. And, of course, what is true of the husband is also true of the wife. Many a wife has driven her indolent husband into the hands of prostitutes or mistresses by her incessant nagging, false accusations and vicious epithets applied to all ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... and set himself to the finishing of Brian's winter task. That sacrifice, at least, he decided, nagging Don into hours of study that were a godsend to them both, should not become an anticlimax. He had paid once—in ragged money. For Joan's sake he would pay willingly again in time. Brian and Joan and Don—and he himself, with indolence for once in his life unwelcome, would be happier for the ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... of which his own record is: "I was without friends, experience, or connection in the sphere of human business, was of sly humor, proud enough and to spare, and had begun my long curriculum of dyspepsia." This nagging illness was the cause of much of that irritability of temper which frequently led him to scold the public, and for which he has been harshly ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... a most reverent servant to the soul. But in fact, and particularly in hours stately with momentous things, what a sacrilegious trick it has of nagging its holy mistress with triflet light as air—small as gnats yet ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... their sullen tempers in various ways, either by plunging, pulling, or setting up other defences against our authority. If we insist on our orders being obeyed, they show fight, or more usually a sullen nagging resistance that continues the whole time we remain on their backs, and they carry out the same programme every time we ride them. With such nasty tempered brutes, breaking is of no avail, for they are quiet as long as we allow them to set the pace and carry ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... was her father's custom to spend long hours in his library, sometimes far into the gray dawn. He found this preferable to the presence of his sharp-tongued second wife, who was always nagging him for more money, or to put his property into her name as proof positive of his ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... of her first employment there was constant danger of catching her fingers in the machinery; the air was bad; the forewoman was harsh and nagging, and perpetually hurrying the workers. The jar of the wheels, the darkness, and the frequent illnesses of workers from breathing the particles of the pencil-wood shavings and the lead dust flying in the air all frightened and preyed upon her. She earned only $4 a week ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... negative manner they did one surprising and fortunate thing: in leaving out the amusing notes they did not attempt to replace them, and consequently the nursery had one book free from that advice and precept, which in other verse for children resulted in persistent nagging. The illustrations were entirely redrawn, and Abel Bowen and Nathaniel Dearborn were asked to do the engraving for this ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... all the student can stand without becoming a drone. Criticism? Yes, but no quibbling, no nagging. Criticism is something more than fault-finding. The teacher exalts his profession, ennobles his art, and begets consideration for himself when he maintains the highest standards for himself and ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... protection. Like all deaf-mutes, he was very suspicious, and very readily perceived when they were laughing at him or at her. One day, at dinner, the wardrobe-keeper, Tatiana's superior, fell to nagging, as it is called, at her, and brought the poor thing to such a state that she did not know where to look, and was almost crying with vexation. Gerasim got up all of a sudden, stretched out his gigantic hand, laid it on the ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... won conquest and David's apparent lack of prowess, Jud continued his jeering and nagging, but David set his lips in a taut line of finality and endured in silence until there ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... Newman's brothers. Perhaps most of us can count a "Charles Robert" in our environment. Someone whose "worm i' the bud" of their character has so completely spoilt its early flower on account of the "one ruinous vice" of "censoriousness," of perpetual nagging, and fault-finding developed to such a pitch that it has eaten out at last the fair heart of human forbearance and kindness which is the birthright of everyone. Such a person makes the true, free development of others in his proximity a harder ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... nightingale from a hawk. Messer Folco was at first very stern and then very angry at his daughter's attitude, but he was stern and angry alike in vain. The more Messer Folco stormed, the less he effected. Though Beatrice seemed to grow paler and frailer at her father's nagging, she grew none the less stubborn, and Messer Folco's fury flamed higher at her unwonted obstinacy. His naturally choleric disposition got the better of his philosophic training and his habitual ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... she seemed everlastingly nagging at the children. It was a habit, but they didn't seem to mind. Most Bushwomen get the nagging habit. I remember one, who had the prettiest, dearest, sweetest, most willing, and affectionate little girl I think ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... also not efficacious. We are justified in having our indignation aroused at times and in letting the offender feel our displeasure. There is something calm and impressive about genuine indignation, while scolding is apt to become nagging and to arouse contempt in ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... drudgery, weariness of mind and body and perhaps of soul, the nagging of unco-operative patients, and the demands on her sympathies of the suffering; when she can meet these as challenges to develop a strong will—a will not only to endure, but to find happiness and give service through it all—then the nurse has learned the art of making every ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... tons of turkeys not only to voters, but to families who are represented by no vote. By a judicious management some families get three or four turkeys apiece; but what of that, the alderman has none of the nagging rules of the charitable societies, nor does he declare that because a man wants two turkeys for Christmas, he is a scoundrel who shall never be allowed to eat turkey again. As he does not distribute his Christmas favors from any ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams |
