"Prepense" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a Frenchman is rude, his impoliteness is worse than that of other nations, because he knows better: he is rude with malice prepense. The lower classes have especially lost much of their courtesy since the Commune. I have seen a French workingman thrust a lady violently aside on a crowded sidewalk, with a scowl and a muttered curse that lent significance to the act. And the graceful, suave courtesy of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... an interminable anecdote of his shady past, when, it seemed, he had been a 'super' in some travelling company. The plot of the story, as far as Charteris could follow it, dealt with a theatrical tour in Dublin, where some person or persons unknown had, with malice prepense, scattered several pounds of snuff on the stage previous to a performance of Hamlet; and, according to the 'character', when the ghost of Hamlet's father sneezed steadily throughout his great scene, there was not a dry eye in the house. The 'character' had concluded that anecdote, and was half-way ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... different motives, holding to this method even in parts of the legend with which, so far as one knows, Map cannot have meddled. Before him this legend consisted of half a dozen great divisions—a word which may be used of malice prepense. These were the story of Merlin, that of Arthur's own origin, and that of the previous history of the Graal for introduction; the story of Arthur's winning the throne, of the Round Table, and of the marriage with Guinevere, also endless branchings ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... held, that if A of his malice prepense assaults B to kill him, and B draws his sword and attacks A and pursues him, then A, for his safety, gives back and retreats to a wall, and B still pursuing him with his drawn sword, A in his defense kills B; this is murder in A. For ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... all alike), or more properly for the tragical end of the two brothers whose exequies the next successor had leisure to perform when the siege was raised, and in the interval betwixt the poet's first action and his second, went out of his way—as it were, on prepense malice—to commit a fault; for he took his opportunity to kill a royal infant by the means of a serpent (that author of all evil) to make way for those funeral honours which he intended for him. Now if this innocent had been of any relation to his Thebais, if he had either ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... once, prepense; but, ere the deal Was dealt, your instinct seemed her loss to feel: 'There should be one card more,' You said, and searched ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti |
