"Smugness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never went to late suppers. Some of them complained: "When you try to make love to her she laughs at you!" She wasn't really laughing at them. She was laughing at what she knew about life. Occasionally men now married, and living dully content in the prim suburban smugness of Pelham or New Rochelle, boasted of past friendship with her, wagging their heads doggishly. "Little Fuller! I ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... the southern foot-hills of the Adirondacks was as much a real camp as the pretentious constructions at Newport are real cottages. A modesty, akin to smugness, designates them all with Heep-like humbleness under a nomenclature now tolerated through usage; and, from the photographs sent him, Hamil was very much disgusted to find a big, handsome two-story ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... boudoirs, new scenes constantly presented themselves; one house was never like the next, one hostess never resembled another; wealth itself was presented to her under innumerable aspects ranging all the way from that false modesty and smugness known as meekness, to fevered ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... being moved from the Earth freighters, and Duke swore again. Five billion Earthmen would read of their "generosity" to Meloa, and any guilt they felt for their desertion would vanish in a smug satisfaction at their charity. Smugness was easy in a world without dust or carrion smell or ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... father, their grandfathers of my grandfather's class. As a small landlord I had my gentlemanly leisure; but as well as I know my name, I realize now that I could never return to that life again. Looking back, I see its intolerable narrowness, its petty smugness. By comparison it's like the relative clearness of the atmosphere there and here. There, perhaps I could see a few miles: here, I look away over leagues and leagues of distance. It's symbolic." The voice paused; the face, turned directly toward his companion's, ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... relationship. It was very much the reverse. Its fundamental condition was the profoundest instinct that controlled living; there no merely admirable conduct could manage to be more than a false and degrading, a temporary, lie. How could he with a pandering smugness meet Fanny's purity of feeling? Yet, it seemed, exactly this was being done by countless other applauded men. But, probably, the difference between them and himself was that they had no objective consciousness of their course; happily they never stopped to think. It was thought, he ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... him through the inevitable net of marriage—although it is marriage to a fascinating woman whom he still loves. At first he had sacrificed his scientific ideal to the domestic and material needs. He had abandoned research in order to make Marjorie rich and to surround her with luxury and smugness. The comfortable house, the artistic surroundings, the social pleasures, and the ennui of acquaintances reveal themselves to him as frustrations of the life which man in his more glorious capacity seemed destined to live. He sees ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James |
