"Querulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the pleasant little bed-chamber which the good-hearted lady told Ruth was to be her own for that night, they heard voices in the sitting room— the voice of Mr. Curtis and the querulous one. But it was not so sharp and strained as it seemed before. However, on opening the door, Mr. Curtis was revealed sitting alone and there was no sign of the owner of the sharp voice, which Ruth supposed must ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... querulous. Have noticed sometimes, when a man hopelessly in the wrong, he is inclined to turn on his best friend and rend him. This Clongorey business, truly, a bad one. When, just now, SEXTON moved adjournment of House, in order to call attention to it, Conservatives rose with one accord and went forth. ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... at one another with fear in their eyes and some of the ladies raised their voices in querulous beseeching for reassurance. They had their answer even as they asked. The Albanian Giacomo, who was now virtually the provost of the Castle, appeared suddenly at the gates with half a score of men. He raised a warning hand, which compelled the Lord Giovanni to pause; then he rasped out ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... be seen. Could they have wandered up the hill road,—the discontented, "traipsing," exasperating things? She started in that direction, when she heard a crash in the Croft kitchen, and then the sound of a boy's voice coming from an inner room,—a weak and querulous voice, as if ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... interview the cook when he returns from the bazaar. Herr Krauss is something of a gourmand and rather querulous about his food, and he often brings in one or two men ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... bitterly troubled in spirit. He had spent the whole morning at the Vatican, and the manner of his reception there had been so curiously divided between flattery and reproach that he had not known what to make of it. The Pope had been tetchy and querulous,—precisely in such a humour as one naturally expects so aged a man to be when contradicted on any matter, whether trivial or important. For with such advanced years the faculties are often as brittle as the bones, and the failing powers of the brain are ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... three or four other gulls will follow him, trying to take it away. How he turns and twists and dodges, and how cleverly they head him off and hang on his airy trail, like winged hounds, giving tongue with thin and querulous voices, half laughing and half crying and altogether hungry. He cannot say a word, for his mouth is full. He gulps hastily at his booty, trying to get it down before the others catch him. But it is too big for his gullet, and he drops it in the very act and article of happy deglutition. ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... Mr Forester Dale as he preferred to be styled, was a somewhat querulous individual, with an unhappy knack of looking at the dark side of everything. Add to this the fact that he entertained a very exalted idea of his own (imaginary) excellences, and believed himself to be almost, if not quite, infallible, ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... hast thou seduced from the plough tail, the carpenter's bench, the schoolmaster's desk, the rural scene, to plunge them into misery and contempt in this, the abiding-place of their betters, thou unhanged cheat? Hence the querulous piping against the world and the times, and the neglect of genius, and appeals to posterity, and damnation of managers, publishers, and the public; hence cliques, and claqueurs, and coteries, and the would-if-I-could-be aristocracy of letters; hence bickerings, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... Calaeis, her star of beauty; thus sweetly reproving and as sweetly forgiving the temper of her Horace—for he is her Horace still—and who can wonder at that? She will bear with all—will live, will die with him. I look, Eusebius, upon this ode as a real consolation to your lovers of an ambiguous and querulous age. Seeing what we are daily becoming, it is a comfort to think that, should such untoward persons make themselves disagreeable to all else of human kind, there will be, nevertheless, to each, one confiding loving creature, to ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... province of wisdom is not to lament over our wrongs: it is to find their remedy. Querulous complaint (Pardon me, if my words or expressions have any ill-timed severity: indeed that is far from my intention.) Querulous complaint is worthy only of the infancy of understanding. The world is unjust: and why? Because it is ignorant. Ought that to excite either complaint or anger? Would ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... has come seems evident from your conversation last night. All that fine optimism which your friends have admired seemed to have deserted you. There was a querulous note which was strangely out of keeping with your usual disposition. It was what you have been accustomed to stigmatize as un-American. When you discussed the present state of the country, you talked—you will pardon me for saying ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... unnatural life she had lived so many years had seriously undermined the stamina of her constitution; and, after the birth of her third child, her health failed altogether. Lillie thus became in time a chronic invalid, exacting, querulous, full of troubles and wants which tasked the patience of all around her. During all these trying years, her husband's faithfulness never faltered. As he gradually retrieved his circumstances, she was first in every calculation. Because he knew that here lay his greatest ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... colour of a turtle dove, that haunts the camp fires and with any amount of assurance helps himself to pemmican and other articles of food, if a bag is left open or the provisions exposed to his keen eye. Still sounding in their ears were his strange, querulous notes, forming not half so sweet a lullaby as the music of the waves that beat and broke a few ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... seemed like a patch of snow that had survived the rigours of the English summer, but suddenly it rose as if blown by the wind and came towards us in tiny flakes of white that turned to seagulls. They sailed high above us uttering that querulous cry that seems to have in it all the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... misery, "Lord Burleigh," says Granger, "who it is said prevented the queen giving him a hundred pounds, seems to have thought the lowest clerk in his office a more deserving person." Mr. Malone attempts to show that Spenser had a small pension, but the poet's querulous verses must not ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... he asked in a querulous voice. Then his eyes fell on Teddy the elf. He scowled until his little pin-pricks of eyes almost disappeared. "Ugh! there's one of those nasty gamblesome elves," he said. ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle
... not sold it; had yielded its exercise, and not the thing itself; France might administer the government as she chose, but annexation was another matter. She appealed to the fairness of the King and the National Assembly to safeguard her treaty rights. Her tone was querulous, her words without force. In the Assembly the protest was but fuel to the fire. On January twenty-first, 1790, occurred an animated debate in which the matter was fully considered. The discussion was notable, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... demanded a rather querulous voice, and at the end of the hall appeared the figure of a slender girl, her abundant yellow hair brought down over her forehead to the eyebrows, and tied in place by a blue ribbon looped up at one side in a flaunting bow. Her frock ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... with casual servants, querulous, sensitive, and lodged for a day in a sphere they resent, can hardly comprehend the friendliness and sympathy that existed between the master and the slave. He cannot understand how the negro stood in slavery days, open-hearted and sympathetic, full of gossip and comradeship, the companion of the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... either sailing gracefully in circles high overhead or gliding on outstretched pinions over mountain and valley, with head pointing downwards, looking for the refuse on which they feed. To mistake a kite is impossible. Throughout the day it makes the welkin ring with its querulous chee-hee-hee-hee-hee. Some kites are larger than others, consequently ornithologists, who are never so happy as when splitting up species, have made a separate species of the larger race. This latter is called Milvus melanotis, the large Indian kite. ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... said Semenoff suddenly in quite a different voice, thin and querulous. "If you knew how I dread dying.... Especially on such a bright, soft night as this," he continued plaintively, turning to Yourii his ugly haggard face and glittering eyes. "Everything lives, and I must die. To you that sounds a hackneyed phrase, I feel certain. 'And I must die.' But it is ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... Dramatic Technique.—His Success.—It is not to be wondered at, then, that Galds found himself hampered by the time limit of the play. He uttered now and then rather querulous protests against the conventions (artificial, as he regarded them) which prevented him from developing his ideas with the richness of detail to which he was accustomed.[3] Such complaints are only confessions of weakness on the part of an author. One has only to study the ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... Progress," a work on folk-lore, and several Bibles. The saut-backet, or salt-bucket, stood at the end of the fender, which was half of an old cart-wheel. Here Cree worked, whistling "Ower the watter for Chairlie" to make Mysy think that he was as gay as a mavis. Mysy grew querulous in her old age, and up to the end she thought of poor, done Cree as a handsome gallant. Only by weaving far on into the night could Cree earn as much as six shillings a week. He began at six o'clock in the morning, and worked until ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... That is all the philosophy I can extract from such depression, and, in some mysterious way, it helps us, after all, when it is over; makes us stronger, more patient, more compassionate; and it is worth some suffering, if one lays hold of true experience instead of wasting time in querulous self-commiseration.—Affectionately yours, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sick man witheringly. "That's right—ask the maids, and get all the servants talking; all come down on the heels of a poor little girl like a pack of yapping wolves! I suppose if she was plain and unattractive—I should think you'd be ashamed," he went on, changing his high and querulous key to one of almost priestly authority and reproof, "Upon my word, it's beneath your dignity. My little girl comes to me, and she explains the whole matter. Pickering admires her—she can't help that—and she has an influence ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... ignored the querulous words. "You must see your father at once," he said gravely. "At once," he repeated, noting how Walter's eyes ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in the mountains of Tennessee once had dinner with a querulous old mountaineer who yarned about hard times for fifteen ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... incredible feat of making Hilary Vane ashamed—and when such men as Hilary are ashamed, their usefulness is over. Mr. Flint had seen the thing happen with a certain kind of financiers, one day aggressive, combative, and the next broken, querulous men. Let a man cease to believe in what he is doing, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... admission of this fact made Barter's case seem hopeless to himself. If he had brow-beaten, or blustered, if he had shown anger or impatience, or had been querulous, there might have seemed to exist some slenderest chance for him. But Steinberg was so unmoved that he ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... silent too. The sweet voices of pleading affections, the loud cry of desires and instincts that roar for their food like beasts of prey, the querulous complaints of disappointed hopes, the groans and sobs of black-robed sorrows, the loud hubbub and Babel, like the noise of a great city, that every man carries within, must be stifled and coerced into silence. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was already come; and so was her mother—a little querulous chip of an old lady with a peevish face, who, in right of having preserved a waist like a bedpost, was supposed to be a most transcendent figure; and who, in consequence of having once been better off, ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... passed through the press during his life, and when their number and value were discovered after his departure to another world, it was whispered that they had been composed in hours of banishment from a hearth where a scolding wife made misery for all who came within the range of her querulous notes. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... the gown being ready by Easter. It would be shipped at the earliest convenience, but it could hardly catch the necessary boat. Helen had a good cry, and then came a wild rush to get John Taylor's cloth ready. Still, Helen was querulous. She decided that silk embroidery must embellish the skirt. The dressmaker ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... congregation!" The intellectual isolation of his sect preyed upon him; for, of all the terrible things to natures like his, the most terrible is to belong to a minority. No person that looked at his thin and sallow cheek, his sunken and sad eye, his tremulous lip, his contracted forehead, or who heard his querulous, though not unmusical voice, could fail to see that his life was an uneasy one, that he was engaged in some inward conflict. His dark, melancholic aspect contrasted with his seemingly cheerful creed, and was all the more striking, as the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the querulous and restless Nature of Man: When I trace the human Propensities through the Records of Ages and Nations: In all the Histories of those States who had least Cause of Complaint: Throughout the Commonwealths of Asia Minor, the Archipelago, the Grecian Continent, Italy, ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... querulous protests of the passengers began to weary him. Also, he had been receiving terse memoranda from the Chief Engineer that the coal was getting low in the bunkers and that something must be queer in the navigating department. This seemed very ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... a daze. And no wonder! For a week the "little boss" had not once beamed, the spirited hop had gone out of his walk, a new querulous note had come into his voice. When a matter went wrong—which, it seemed, happened oftener than usual—he reminded the delinquent of the fact, not gently, but sadly, as though deeply aweary of the frailty of men. ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... for my dinner, with a few potatoes, but it's enough to keep body and soul together, and what more does a wretched being like me want?" he said in a querulous voice. ...
— Ned Garth - Made Prisoner in Africa. A Tale of the Slave Trade • W. H. G. Kingston
... frightful contrast to the stony rigor of his features, and the fiendlike brilliancy of his eyes. "Who are you, and whence come you?" said Stanton, in a tone that was meant to be interrogatory and imperative, but which, from his habits of squalid debility, was at once feeble and querulous. His intellect had become affected by the gloom of his miserable habitation, as the wretched inmate of a similar mansion, when produced before a medical examiner, was reported to be a complete Albino.—His skin was bleached, his eyes turned white; he could not bear the light; ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... these noises had upon him. He winced as a dog winces when you crack a whip over him; the only question was whether by a powerful effort he could regain his composure or whether his suffering would overcome his self-restraint to the extent of making him gloomy or querulous during the rest ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... a weary day for me. Phelps was still weak after his long illness, and his misfortune made him querulous and nervous. In vain I endeavored to interest him in Afghanistan, in India, in social questions, in anything which might take his mind out of the groove. He would always come back to his lost treaty, wondering, guessing, ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... selection from the letters,[2] "underwent a great change, and she who for years had found all her happiness in ministering to her afflicted friend, and seemed to have no thought but for his welfare, now became querulous and exacting, forgetful of him and mindful, apparently, only of herself. Unable to move out of her chair without help, or to walk across the room unless supported by two people, her speech at times ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... thou shake thy beard at thine evil fate, kept down by the taunts of thy mistresses, when thy paramour galls thy ear with her querulous cries. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... seven were pealing. Captain Harewood hurried into the hotel, to prepare for the evening; and Wilmet was mounting the stairs, still under the spell of her newly-found joy, when she was startled by Alda's voice in a key of querulous anger. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The quick, sharp, querulous answers—that last refuge of a fictitious strength that was momentarily breaking down—he saw it all, this good man, this generous, pitiful-hearted man, who knew what sorrow was, and who for a whole year had watched her with the acuteness which love ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control. Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid. All New York was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed into corporations, were demanding a new type of man — a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type — for whom they were ready to pay millions ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... others, by far more dangerous. These make their appearance daily in the morning press, thrusting their pessimisms across our breakfast tables, beleaguering our faith with ill-natured judgements and querulous warnings. One of our London Dailies, for instance, specializes in annoying America; it works as effectively to breed distrust as if its policy ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... seems to have shared none of Isabella's scruples in regard to bringing the enemy to battle. On the contrary, he indulges in a most querulous strain of sarcasm against the Catholic king for his remissness in this particular. "Quar elucescente die moniti nostri de Gallorum discessu ad eos, at sero, concurrerunt. Rex Perpiniani agebat, ad millia passuum sex non brevia, uti nosti. Propterea sero id actum, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... the morning the whole house was in silence, when there was heard the rattle of a latchkey in the stairway door, followed by footsteps in the corridor and then the querulous tinkling of the music-box upon the vestibule-table, ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... below her empty as a handful of shells on a lone shore; and in the overpowering stillness each least sound stood out crisp and clear-cut as twigs against a winter sunset; the fitful rustle of bedclothes; Rob breathing peacefully in a distant corner; the whisper of the punkah; the querulous creaking of the rope answered by a whine from the back verandah, where a resigned coolie swayed a basket of damp straw, packed with bottles of milk and soda-water for Denvil's consumption during ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Captain Stewart, with an elderly man's half-querulous certainty. "Yes, the name is Powers. I remember it well. And I remember—Yes, it was odd, was it not, your meeting him like that, just as you were talking of Arthur? You—oh, you didn't speak to him, you say? No, no, to ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... up just before six; and, hearing a complaining voice, thought at first that his military friend was still speaking. The voice got more and more querulous with occasional excursions into the profane, and the seaman, rubbing his eyes, turned his head, and saw old Thomas ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... afar are dim 'Neath the tremulous tread of the seraphim, Shall not our querulous hearts prevail, That have prayed for the peace ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... rather than querulous criticism in the question, often asked, Why does not religion produce a higher and stronger type of moral character? Enthusiasm for the teachings of Christ often is cooled by contact with some flabby-willed, narrow-minded professed ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... cottage. As he spoke the words, he saw a change pass over his grandfather's face—the sharp features seemed to wither up on a sudden; the eager expression to grow vacant and death-like in an instant. The voice, too, altered; it was harsh and querulous no more; its tones became strangely soft, slow, and solemn, when the old man ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for those innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost their gust with me. Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts. I am impatient and querulous under culinary disappointments, as to come home at the dinner hour, for instance, expecting some savoury mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter ill melted—that commonest of kitchen failures—puts me beside my ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Palladian palaces have sunk, or are sinking, in the general decay. Of the "gentiluomo Veneto," the name is still known, and that is all. He is but the shadow of his former self, but he is polite and kind. It surely may be pardoned to him if he is querulous. Whatever may have been the vices of the republic, and although the natural term of its existence may be thought by foreigners to have arrived in the due course of mortality, only one sentiment can be expected from the Venetians themselves. At no time were the subjects of the republic ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... niece and her beautiful children walking at a distance; and, as she has not only prevented their admission to his house, but concealed their visits, intercepted their letters, making him believe they are absent from Paris and have forgotten him, she now precludes their meeting; while to his querulous murmurs at being hurried along, she answers that the alley she has taken him to is ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... to meet now and then, from some of them. But, poor souls! they needed help and comfort all the more, because of their unreasonable anger, or their querulous discontent. Her kindest words, and softest touches, and longest patience were for these. And when the cloud parted, and a light from Heaven shone in upon one sitting in darkness, or when, for a moment, the troubled and angry spirit was made to feel what the coming of God's ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... night by hauling on a rope, was noisily getting ready to strike two. But for Mrs. Lessways' disorderly and undesired assistance, Hilda's task might have been finished a quarter of an hour earlier. She passed quietly up the stairs. When she was near the top, her mother's voice, at once querulous and ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... possess you at Limmeridge, Mr. Hartright," he said in a querulous, croaking voice, which combined, in anything but an agreeable manner, a discordantly high tone with a drowsily languid utterance. "Pray sit down. And don't trouble yourself to move the chair, please. In the wretched state of my nerves, movement of any kind ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... and did not know the human character. I had not sufficient conversation with him to judge of this. He was intimate with d'Invernois, who spoke highly of him. He had certainly none of our Irish vivacity, and fulness of imagery. He was rather querulous and prolix, than piquant, and declaimed rather than said sharp things. I said to him, "Why do you not endeavour, in your writings, to accommodate yourself more to the public taste?" He answered, in despair, "I cannot—I have no turn that way. I know the value of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... off one company or another. And if so by day, by night there was no long peace under the large stars. Desperate stampedes, the scattering of camp-fires, trampling, grunting in the dark; ghostly horsemen looming and vanishing suddenly in the half-light; and in the lull the querulous howling of ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... the ancient dame who traveled with her she had been from the start, and more than querulous to the two black-eyed maids whose sole apparent duties were to divine my lady's wishes before they could be ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... whinnying for his corn; And, sharply clashing horn on horn, Impatient down the stanchion rows The cattle shake their walnut bows; While, peering from his early perch Upon the scaffold's pole of birch, The cock his crested helmet bent And down his querulous challenge sent. ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... dear old thing, you! where have you been? Didn't you know I was coming by the early stage?" she exclaimed in a half-querulous tone. ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to be such as I have sketched; that the sceptical view of the gloom in which we are placed is the true one, and that the Christian's is false; which, nevertheless, is likely to be not merely the happier, but the nobler being,—he who sits down in querulous repining or slothful inactivity, as the result of doubt, or he who, buoyant with faith and hope, encounters the gloom, and, while longing for the dawn, is confident that it will come? But if that sketch be a true one,—if ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... might generally be made but for foolish quarrels, or misunderstandings, as they are well named! It is our own fault if we are querulous or ill-humored; nor need we, though this is less easy, allow ourselves to be made unhappy by the querulousness or ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... susceptible. Her prettiness had soon faded, and there was no other attraction to eke it out; but her husband was big-hearted and gentle, and he strove hard not to let her see he thought her changed. Still, she was a querulous, peevish woman by this time, poor girl, and her numerous olive-branches had been more than a stronger woman could have managed. Forrest's house was not the jolliest in the garrison, and he was given to drifting ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... such as it was, had finished, and there would be no one till next spring. As Mrs. Herriton had often observed, Lilia had no resources. She did not like music, or reading, or work. Her one qualification for life was rather blowsy high spirits, which turned querulous or boisterous according to circumstances. She was not obedient, but she was cowardly, and in the most gentle way, which Mrs. Herriton might have envied, Gino made her do what he wanted. At first it had been rather fun to let him get the upper hand. ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... girls were generally young women at fourteen years of age. She was never ruddy or robust, always pale, delicate-looking and fragile-seeming, never actually ill, but usually ailing, peevish, limp and querulous. Life in the Atrium largely consisted in the effort to keep Meffia well, to make sure that she was not overtired, to foresee and forestall opportunities for her to blunder, to repair the consequences of her mistakes, generally ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... more cheerful than she had been, assumed the care of Piney. Only Mother Shipton—once the strongest of the party—seemed to sicken and fade. At midnight on the tenth day she called Oakhurst to her side. "I'm going," she said, in a voice of querulous weakness, "but don't say anything about it. Don't waken the kids. Take the bundle from under my head and open it." Mr. Oakhurst did so. It contained Mother Shipton's rations for the last week, untouched. "Give 'em to the child," she said, pointing ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... of five weeks in the shining cities of the Mediterranean and in Paris, they re-entered the British Empire by the august portals of the Chatham and Dover Railway. They stood impatiently waiting, part of a well-dressed, querulous crowd, while a few officials performed their daily task of improvising a Custom-house for registered luggage on a narrow platform of Victoria Station. John, Mr. Norris's man, who had met them, attended behind. Suddenly, with a characteristic movement, the husband lifted his head, ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... household with, a bride's new joy in domestic tasks. But Maizie was a knowing little woman, too wise to imperil her dream of Love's completeness with a disturbing element like her mother, growing daily more helpless, querulous, dependent. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... we are querulous creatures! Little less Than all things can suffice to make us happy: And little more than nothing is ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... ground his knuckles into the corners of his eyes, emitting that snore final and querulous of a middle-aged man awakened rudely. With a gesture brusque but flaccid he plucked aside the net and peered around. The bales of cotton cloth, the beads, the brass wire, the bottles of rum, had not been spirited away in the night. So far so good. The faithful servant ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... themselves, had done little but disease their mind and heart. They resorted more and more to those arts which are the weapons of crafty, ambitious, and unprincipled women. They were too apt to be cunning, false, intriguing. They were personally cowardly, as their own chronicles declare; querulous, passionate, prone to unmanly tears; prone, as their writings abundantly testify, to scold, to use the most virulent language against all who differed from them; they were, at times, fearfully cruel, as evil women will be; cruel with that worst cruelty which springs ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... to him was the fretful, querulous voice of an old, bedridden woman as he lifted the latch and opened the door of a poor house upon the ramparts, which had no entrance into the street; and where he lived alone with his mother, cut off from all ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... cottonwood trees marked the line of an irregular homestead; and the Ranger swung into a gate extemporized from barb wire on two adjustable posts. Behind the gate, stood a log shack; on the windows, cheap lace curtains; behind the lace curtains, a vague movement of peeping faces and a querulous termagant voice: "I ain't a goin' to have you mixed up in no scrap; ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... wife. She sat opposite the window, and the pale light reflected from the banks of snow made her face look more than usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened the three parallel creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous lines from her thin nose to the corners of her mouth. Though she was but seven years her husband's senior, and he was only twenty-eight, she was already ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... (disapprove) 932. cry out before one is hurt, complain without cause. Adj. lamenting &c v.; in mourning, in sackcloth and ashes; sorrowing, sorrowful &c (unhappy) 828; mournful, tearful; lachrymose; plaintive, plaintful^; querulous, querimonious^; in the melting mood; threnetic^. in tears, with tears in one's eyes; with moistened eyes, with watery eyes; bathed in tears, dissolved in tears; like Niobe all tears [Hamlet]. elegiac, epicedial^. Adv. de profundis ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... forward with terrible swiftness, they knew not where, like one that hath a dream of sinking; and outside the shell a rushing, gurgling noise, and a noise as of shouting multitudes, and muffled multitudes muttering complaints and yells and querulous cries, told them they were yet speeding through the body of the depths in the belly of the fish. Then there came a shock, and the shell was struck with light, and they were sensible of stillness without motion. Then a blow on the shell shivered it to fragments, and they were blinded with seas ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... packed properly and the finishing touches put to it. Mrs. Buck was wandering around the kitchen making futile attempts to help. Jeff, who was sitting outside on a bench under the syringa bushes, could hear her querulous drawl and ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... beneath Impossible willows; the wide-throated hearth Bristling with faded pine-boughs half concealing The piled-up rubbish at the chimney's back; And, in sad keeping with all things about them, Shrill, querulous-women, sour and sullen men, Untidy, loveless, old before their time, With scarce a human interest save their own Monotonous round of small economies, Or the poor scandal of the neighborhood; Blind to the beauty everywhere ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... other clothes away in the closet and she seized the chance to push the breakfast tray out of the door, and smooth up the bed, while she composed her features and her ideas to receive her visitor. Both, from long habit rather than from any cause or reason, were of a querulous cast, and her ordinary tone was a snuffle expressive of deep-seated affliction. She was at once plaintive and voluable, and in moments of excitement her need of freeing her mind was so great that she took herself into her own confidence, and found a more sympathetic ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... very suddenly. Then she threw back her head and laughed; peal on peal of deliciously childish laughter rang through the ancient net-shed, until, overhead, the passing gulls echoed her mirth with querulous mewing, and the sea-hawk, towering to the ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... I should never get here,' she went on, raising her voice to an odd querulous pipe. 'I'd no notion it was such an out-of-the-way place, it's so many years since I ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... on the part of the other, have given birth to the meek maiden waiting for her fate, to the typical disconsolate and forlorn "superfluous woman," to the two standards of morality for the sexes, to the mercenary marriage with all its attendant miseries, to the selfish, exacting, querulous wife, to the disappointed or tyrannical husband; and of late, with the wider possibilities of individual pleasure and satisfaction, to the growing aversion of young people to matrimony, and the rush of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... accepted the exuberant greeting of the girls with evident pleasure. Her colour was clear, her eyes shone like stars. They had plenty to tell her of Thore. He was very rich, they said, and a widower. He had had a querulous and sick wife, and had always treated her well. He was not exactly "near," but thought twice about what he spent. He had a stone-built house up the country. A just man, and one who did not bend his knee to any one. Eric Red had often quarrelled with him. Except Theodhild ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... an accomplished writer and eloquent speaker, yet he was a poor parliamentarian, a careless member in committee, and utterly unfit to conduct an appropriation or tariff bill in the House. He was impatient of details, querulous when questioned or interrupted, but in social life and in intercourse with his fellow Members he was genial, kind and courteous. On one occasion, when I was called home, I requested him to take ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the circle with a stick, there came a poor blind man, of diminutive stature, squeezing beneath his left arm a suffocating accordion, which, every now and then, as he stumbled against the uneven planks of the wharf, gave a querulous squeak, doleful in its cadence as the feeble quavers evoked by Mr. William Davidge, comedian, from the asthmatic clarionet of Jem Bags, in the farce of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... Montague Shirley?" was the querulous greeting from the old gentleman, when he was admitted to the drawing-room. "You kept me in anguish the entire night, with your silly words. The telephone bell rang at intervals of half an hour until dawn: I may have missed some important business ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... Another querulous voice broke in: "For heaven's sake, Connie, don't stand here any longer. Our reputations are bad enough as it is. Good night—Roxbury!" He distinctly heard the heartless Edith giggle. Then came the soft, quick swish ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... Johnson himself. Behind all his learning lay something which no learned language could conceal. "On s'attend a voir un auteur et on trouve un homme." Authors then, as now, were often thought to be fantastical, namby-pamby persons, living in dreams, sharing none of the plain man's interests, eager and querulous about trifles and unrealities, indifferent and incapable in the broad world of life. Nobody ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... pines, and already the water lay in black shadow at their feet, rippled by the small, bitter breeze creeping in from seaward, and stirring the sedge into faint whisperings and moanings; night birds, awaking in the depths of the forest, uttered querulous cries, and strange, vague sounds within the covert suggested prowling beast or savage ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... short, I was killing myself with conjecture, when of a sudden a great beating at the door took place, and, as it opened, the clatter of slippers was heard, attended by the mingled sounds of many female voices, amongst which the well-known querulous tone of the khanum was prominent. Several lanterns passed to and fro, which showed me the forms of the women, amongst whom, as they threw off their veils, I recognized that of my Zeenab. I determined to watch, in the hope that I might still be blessed with an interview; and, in fact, ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... which, rivalling charity, truly beareth all things however grievous, that it may attain to the honours of this world and the praise of men. If we were humble and laboured to gain our own souls rather than hunt after vain glory, few of us, indeed, would endure such annoyances." He details, with querulous humour, all the grievances of his position, from the ingratitude of the prince to the sordour of the table-cloths, and the hardness of the black bread. But hardest of all to bear is the contempt shown towards literature. "In the courts of princes literary knowledge is held a crime; and great is ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... the males are in the majority; they sit in the spruces calling by the hour, with lonely querulous notes. In a few days however, the females appear, and then the martial music begins, the birds' golden trumpeting often turning to a desperate clashing of cymbals when two males engage in combat, for "the Oriole has a temper to match his flaming ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... future' Descriptive Ethical, 'the highest of all See also Poets, self-educated ones Lord Byron's list of celebrated poets of all nations Unfitted for the calm affections and comforts of domestic life Querulous and monotonous lives of Female See also Polidori, Dr. Some account of Anecdotes of His 'Vampire His tragedy Political consistency Politics Pomponius Atticus Pope, Alexander, a self-educated poet Lord ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... now an excellent opportunity for beginning a new and better life, had the queen been so minded; but events proved her to be in a more querulous, treacherous, and discontented mood than ever. "Her Grace considereth now, the honour of England, and the poverty and wretchedness of Scotland," wrote Magnus to Wolsey, "which she did not afore, but in her opinion esteemed Scotland equal with England,"* and her complaints ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... allegiance to the growing family of her young master and mistress, and predominated proudly in gorgeous raiment with her butterfly turban over a rising race of young Marvyns. All the care not needed by them was bestowed upon the somewhat querulous old age of Cato, whose never-failing cough furnished occupation for all her spare ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... had once sighed for would be accorded to her. Was she always to lead this life? Was her father to pass the still long career which probably awaited him in ministering to the wearisome caprices of a querulous invalid? This was a sad return for all his goodness: a gloomy catastrophe to all his bright hopes. And if she could ever consent to blend her life with another's, what individual could offer pretensions which might ensure her tranquillity, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... the number of chapels he had to attend, about the gown he wore, about the master's treatment of him, about the want of plums in the pudding, as old men and schoolboys grumble. It was wonderful what a liking John James took to this odious, querulous, graceless, stupid, and snuffy old man, and how he would find pretexts for visiting him at his lodging in the old hospital. He actually took that journey that he might have a chance of seeing Clive. He sent Clive notes and packets of drawings; thanked him for books lent, asked advice about ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... too high. "Droves of six hundred swine"—I have seen (by reading in those old books) certain noble gentlemen, "of Putlitz," I think, driving them openly, captured by the stronger hand; and have heard the short querulous squeak of the bristly creatures: "What is the use of being a pig at all, if I am to be stolen in this way, and surreptitiously made into ham?" Pigs do continue to be bred in Brandenburg: but it is under such discouragements. Agriculture, trade, well-being and well-doing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... recess in the rear. But it was on the parlor floor, that fetich of a devoted life. Crippled and useless, Treesa was an object of unobtrusive care. She kept her shrunken savings about her person, more unwilling than ever to trust the unexplored fields of finance. She grew querulous. She must be getting to her work again. Would the mistress be after letting her earn something—on the parlor floor, she tremulously added. Smiling sadly, permission was granted. Fondly the old creature took up her broom and duster—bought anew ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... impress us as the winds do. Mandeville never comes in that I do not feel a north-wind vigor and healthfulness in his cordial, sincere, hearty manner, and in his wholesome way of looking at things. The Parson, you would say, was the east wind, and only his intimates know that his peevishness is only a querulous humor. In the fair west wind I know the Mistress herself, full of hope, and always the first one to discover a bit of blue in a cloudy sky. It would not be just to apply what I have said of the south wind to any of our visitors, but it did blow a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... while the old people curiously watched the matron's group, and listened eagerly to the conversation they kept up. Polly, too, was silent, gazing with a curious fascination at the long line of aged faces, some peaceful, others querulous, but all so alike that the row of them seemed to become an endless perspective of white caps and wagging jaws. Her reverie was interrupted by Miss Bean, who leaned across the table to say reprovingly to Jessie, as she refused the ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... dictate. If I were a business man, I could conduct my business. But I am a soldier, and not a clever soldier. Jealousy, a continual and irritable curiosity—there is no Paul Pry like your blind man—a querulous claim upon your attention—these are my special dangers." And Ethne laughed gently in ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... I can not speak confidently," she answered modestly. "They are proud—they pass the Egyptian in pride; they have kept their blood singularly pure for such long residence among us; they are stubborn, querulous and unready. But above all they are a contented race if but the oppression were lifted from their shoulders. They are an untilled soil—none knows what they might produce, but the confidence of their leader, who is a wondrous man, bespeaks them a capable people. To my mind they are mistreated ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... ceaseless prayer. Dimly she could see the tried leader, her soldier husband, sitting in saddle at the bank. Bravely she answered the flutter of his handkerchief in farewell. Then all was swallowed up in the shadows of the distant prairie, and from the nursery adjoining her room there rose a querulous wail that told that her baby daughter was waking, indifferent to the need that sent the soldier father to the aid of distant comrades, threatened by a merciless foe, and conscious only of her infantile demands and expectations. Not yet ten years wed, that brave, devoted wife ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... of the places where he might be able to find a temporary home. From that time, for the next few months, all things were ordered there with reference to Morely. It was a poor place enough, for Muir's wages were not large; but it was neat and comfortable. His mother was his housekeeper,—a querulous old body, with feeble health, one who little needed any additional burden of household care. But when she knew that in a poor home, far away, a mother of little children was waiting, hoping and praying for the well-doing ...
— Stephen Grattan's Faith - A Canadian Story • Margaret M. Robertson
... hair still and forever hanging about her ears, was seated on a rush-bottom chair, reading a tattered novel; and from the parlour window was heard the querulous voice of Mrs. Leslie, in high ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of BURNE-JONES'S best; "SALLIE" was snub-nosed and showily drest; I sought her visage in querulous quest, When oh, what a surprise! Plump in the midst of a "puddingy" face, Coarse-cut in feature, devoid of grace, Nature capricious had chosen to place Two ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... doubted whether that government was not, during the first months of its existence, in more danger from the affection of the Whigs than from the disaffection of the Tories. Enmity can hardly be more annoying than querulous, jealous, exacting fondness; and such was the fondness which the Whigs felt for the Sovereign of their choice. They were loud in his praise. They were ready to support him with purse and sword against foreign and domestic foes. But ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... understood to make these things subject for reproach or complaint; I dare not do so; respect for my sister's memory forbids me. By her any such querulous manifestation would have been regarded as an unworthy ...
— Charlotte Bronte's Notes on the pseudonyms used • Charlotte Bronte
... glad life seemed to have fled. The watchful Hamish was the first to notice that his master began to take less and less interest in the shooting and boating and fishing; and at times the old man was surprised and disturbed by an exhibition of querulous impatience that had certainly never before been one of Macleod's failings. Then his cousin Janet saw that he was silent and absorbed; and his mother inquired once or twice why he did not ask one or other of his neighbors to come over to Dare to have ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... and a little querulous, and dragged heavily at his mother's hand. Humphrey offered to carry the boy, but he resented that as an indignity, and murmured that he had not seen Mr Sidney, and he wanted ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... service seems a holiday—a general enjoyment of gala dresses and friendly greetings, very different from the silence, immobility, and noli me tangere aspect of an English congregation. Over all drones, rattles, snores, and shrieks the organ; wailing, querulous, asthmatic, incomplete, its everlasting nasal chant—always beginning, never ending, through a range of two or three notes ground into one monotony. The voices of the congregation rise and sink above it. These southern people, like the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... any men but their own relations to look at them; but I suppose the promised beads acted as an inducement, and so he sent away for some old lady who had charge, and who alone is allowed to open the doors. While we were waiting we could hear the girls talking to the chief in a querulous way as if objecting to something or expressing their fears. The old woman came at length and certainly she did not seem a very pleasant jailor or guardian; nor did she seem to favour the request of the chief to allow us to see the girls, as she regarded us with ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... ever a few ready to drop upon her dainty embroidered handkerchief when the occasion commanded it; and her visitors, when they agreed among themselves, what a soft gentle woman that poor Mrs. Sankey was, but sadly delicate you know—had no idea of the querulous complaining and fretfulness whose display was reserved for her own ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... pleasure should be known. He was very miserable. He had joined Pompey with confessed reluctance, and family quarrels had followed on Pompey's defeat. His brother Quintus, whom he had drawn away from Caesar, regretted having taken his advice. His sons and nephews were equally querulous and dissatisfied; and for himself, he dared not appear in the streets of Brindisi, lest Caesar's soldiers should insult or injure him. Antony, however, encouraged him to hope. He assured him that Caesar was well ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... stranger. In the midst of an excited discussion an exclamation came from those nearest the door, and the camp stopped to listen. Above the swaying and moaning of the pines, the swift rush of the river, and the crackling of the fire rose a sharp, querulous cry,—a cry unlike anything heard before in the camp. The pines stopped moaning, the river ceased to rush, and the fire to crackle. It seemed as if Nature had stopped to ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... and met her son as he came into the hall. "Oh, Theo, are you going to leave us to-day? I thought you would have stayed with us to-day," she said, with what an unfavourable judge would have called a querulous tone in her voice. It was in reality fatigue and weariness, and a great desire for her boy's affection and comforting care; but the other explanation was not ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... pulled a little farther down over his eyes as he mounted the steps and entered the hallway. He listened a moment. A sort of subdued, querulous hubbub seemed to hum through the place, as voices, men's, women's, and children's, echoing out from their various rooms above, mingled together, and floated down the stairways in a discordant medley. Jimmie Dale stepped lightly down the length of the hall—and ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... Roberts sat talking. The lawyer was sparely built and tall, of sympathetic appearance. The features of the face were refined and fairly regular, the blue eyes pleasing, the high forehead intelligent-looking. Yet— whether it was the querulous horizontal lines above the brows, or the frequent, graceful gestures of the hands—Mr. Hutchings left on one an impression of weakness, and, somehow or other, his precise way of speaking suggested intellectual narrowness. It ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... stir in the house. They would be making tea now for the men and women who said they were mourners.... The querulous voice of his wife's mother came to him as some one led her from the heated house into the coolth of ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... festival. I recognized Grandma Holly, with her soft white hair, and I thought I could tell which were Mis' Ailing and Mis' Burney and Mis' Norris. And the faces of them all, the gentle, the grief-marked, even the querulous, were grown kindly with the knowledge that somebody had cared about ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... was now querulous and her lip drawn up, giving her not a joyful, but an animal, squirrel-like expression. She paused as if she felt it indecorous to speak of her pregnancy before Pierre, though the gist of ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... to decline the mission, as his wife, whom he loved with devotion rarely equalled, and perhaps never surpassed, was sick and dying. Arthur Lee, then in Europe, was elected in his stead. He was a querulous, ill-natured man, ever in a broil. A more unsuitable man for the office could scarcely have ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... be feared in a phosphorescent birch stub, even with the drip of rain from the leaves making stealthy, ghostly footfalls all through the wood and the voice of the east wind in the trees overhead beginning to take up a querulous, wordless complaint that moved back and forth with the footfalls. Foxfire is a common enough phenomenon. It is easy to explain it all as I do now. The strange part of such things is always that, at the time, no matter what a man's training and experience, he feels ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... next speech, uttered in a querulous tone, was distinguishable, from which Esther concluded she had come ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... my room I came suddenly upon the Prince, in a recess of the upper hall, addressing somebody through an open door with a querulous protest, whose wild extravagance of statement was grotesquely balanced by its utter feeble timidity of manner. "It is," said the Prince, "indeed a grave affair. We have here hundreds of socialists, emissaries from lawless ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... tatters and themselves worn and cadaverous. A nimbus of mosquitoes buzzed about each man's head. Their faces were coated with blue clay. Each carried a lump of this damp clay, and, whenever it dried and fell from their faces, more was daubed on in its place. There was a querulous plaint in their voices, an irritability of movement and gesture, that told of broken sleep and a losing struggle with the ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... wife, you must begin by showing her, even before you are married, that you have no suspicions, no fears, no doubts, with regard to her. Many a man has been discarded by a virtuous girl, merely on account of his querulous conduct. All women despise jealous men; and, if they marry such their motive is other than that of affection. Therefore, begin by proofs of unlimited confidence; and, as example may serve to assist precept, and as I never have preached that which I ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... Maxence. I was abroad a little after six the next morning. The air was biting, and smelt of frost. In an open place a score of women wrangled together over the day's market; and the noise of their negotiation sounded thin and querulous like that of sparrows on a winter's morning. The rare passengers blew into their hands, and shuffled in their wooden shoes to set the blood agog. The streets were full of icy shadow, although the chimneys were smoking overhead in golden sunshine. If you wake early enough at this ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hungered and of which they have been deprived so long. It was easy to strip ourselves of everything when we thought we were going to die. But now that we know we're going to live we're tempted to recover some of our lost years by violence. You must be patient with us, Terry; we're sick children, querulous, eager to take offense and over-exacting. I was like that when I blackmailed you into meeting me this morning. It was unworthy of me to have treated that child's ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... the child, and his eyes grow lustrous. Stooping down, he kisses the baby brow. Giving Esther a querulous smile, he ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... woods were full of feathered songsters. There was a redbird that would come every morning about sunup and perch himself in the tall black-oak tree in our company street, and for perhaps an hour he would practice on his impatient, querulous note, that said, as plain as a bird could say, "Boys, boys! get up! get up! get up!" It became a standing remark among the boys that he was a Union redbird and had enlisted in our regiment to ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell |
