"Shrewish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... girl in short dresses, and I can't remember that I've ever had anything but misery from you in my life. It's damnable the things I've stood and yet I've always forgotten them afterwards, and remembered only the times you were soft and gentle and had ceased to be shrewish. Nobody on earth can be softer than you, Molly, when you want to, and it's your softness, after all, that has held me in spite of your treatment. Why, your mouth was like a flower when I kissed you, and parted and ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... follow. Your zephyr from the 'Athenaeum' was the first of it, gentle indeed in comparison with various gusts from other quarters. All fair it was from your standpoint, to see me as a prophet without a head, or even as a woman in a shrewish temper, and if my husband had not been especially pained by my being held up at the end of a fork as the unnatural she-monster who had 'cursed' her own country (following the Holy Father), I should have left the 'mistake' to right itself, without troubling the 'Athenaeum' office with the letter ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... and who is to hinder, if you please, good Master Fuller?" asked the young woman in a somewhat shrewish voice. ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... the first class, the Reminiscences are defaced by the shrewish spirit shown in the accounts of Wordsworth and other friends; nor can we depend upon them as records of fact. But our author had had exceptional opportunities to observe these famous men and women, and he possessed no little insight into literature and personality. As to the Autobiographic ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... those of King William and Queen Mary, or Sir Thomas Hope and Lord Stair, two distinguished Scottish lawyers. The pictures of the Lord Keeper's father and mother were also to be seen; the latter, sour, shrewish, and solemn, in her black hood and close pinners, with a book of devotion in her hand; the former, exhibiting beneath a black silk Geneva cowl, or skull-cap, which sate as close to the head as if it had been shaven, a pinched, peevish, Puritanical set of features, terminating in a ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... her patience and unremitting toil, her nimble fingers and bent back, her shapeless figure and unbounded and unexpressed (verbally, that is) love for her children. Pa Werner—sullen, lazy, brooding, tyrannical—she soothed and mollified for the children's sake, or shouted down with a shrewish outburst, as the occasion required. An expert stone-mason by trade, Pa Werner could be depended on only when he was not drinking, or when he was not on strike, or when he had not quarrelled with the ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... and wife bow to all the Dhanwars, who are subsequently regaled with liquor and goats' flesh, and the marriage is completed. Polygamy is permitted but is not common. A husband may divorce his wife for failing to bear him issue, for being ugly, thievish, shrewish or a witch, or for an intrigue with another man. If a married woman commits adultery with another man of the tribe they are pardoned with the exaction of one feast. If her paramour is a Gond, Rawat, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... success, and Wiley recognized it, but he rebelled against his fate. What fault was it of his that her father and his father had fallen out over the mine? He had shown by the stock that the treachery had been Blount's and neither of them was to blame. What fault was it of his that she had a shrewish mother who was bent upon ruining her life? Had he not endured abuse and suffered grievous wounds before he had asserted his rights? And with Virginia herself, when had there ever been a time when ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... pleasantries on the subject of women who wear breeches: and he used to jeer at his friend for letting himself be under their thumb. As a matter of fact he had no right to scoff: for he had himself been afflicted for twenty years with a shrewish cross-grained wife, who had always regarded him as an old scamp and had taken him down a peg or two. But he was always careful not to mention her. The stationer was a little ashamed, and used to defend himself feebly, and in a mealy ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... enough for Shade's wife to hear, and he saw her thin, worn, shrewish face turn eagerly— "I'll give ye just fifty dollars to stay here in the house an' git well fer two more weeks. You know why, an' you know hit's wuth it to ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... pray ye now, see there how shuttle-witted are these girls: to bemoan herself before that she had seen me! Do I bemoan myself? Not I. An I be to marry, I will marry dry-eyed! But if ye know her, prithee, of what favour is she? fair or foul? And is she shrewish ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... uncertain appearance, which was made even more ambiguous by his beardless face, marred only by a faint suggestion of a moustache, and his sexless features to which passion and ill-temper imparted all the evil quality of a shrewish woman's face. But in Germinie's eyes all these airs and this Jupillon style were of the ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... of their importunity during my investigations in the hot season. If I do not employ a bell-glass or keep an assiduous watch, rarely does the shrewish Dipteron fail to alight upon my patient and explore him with her proboscis. We will let her have her way ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... very small and very, very helpless—she was utterly spent. But there was something in her wide gray eyes—a dignity and a command—that completely dominated the shrewish wife of the hump- shouldered tailor, something that made the slatternly creature back out of the room, for Felicia Day, with her hand on the battered iron railing of the bed, had said clearly, ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... we may be permitted to offer an observation upon the peculiar and unaccountable influence which ladies of a shrewish turn so frequently exercise over—we can scarcely, in this case, say—their lords and masters; an influence which seems not merely to extend to the will of the husband, but even to his inclinations. We do not remember to have met with a single individual, reported to be under petticoat government, ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... regulations," said the intruder, in a somewhat shrewish voice. "You'd better light the lamp if you want to see'em; though the spelling ain't so ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... as it may, Morrow, the dapper young bank-clerk, found in the Pennold household a grizzled, middle-aged man, with shifty, suspicious eyes and a moist hand-clasp; behind him appeared a shrewish, thin-haired wife who eyed the intruder from the first ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... weary of quoting him. La Fontaine polishes his own exquisite style upon his model; and Voltaire calls him "the best of preachers." Hooker escapes with him to the fields to seek oblivion of a hard life, made harder by a shrewish spouse. Lord Chesterfield tells us, "When I talked my best I quoted Horace." To Boileau and to Wordsworth he is equally dear. Condorcet dies in his dungeon with Horace open by his side; and in Gibbon's militia days, "on every march," he says, "in every journey, Horace was always ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... and of another people, had little respect for the witch-doctor of her husband's tribe, and so, when he suggested that a further payment of two more fat goats would doubtless enable him to make stronger medicine, she promptly loosed her shrewish tongue upon him, and with such good effect that he was glad to take himself off with his zebra's tail ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... mounte, brave gallants all, And don your helmes amaine: Deathe's couriers. Fame and Honor call No shrewish teares shall fill your eye When the sword-hilt's in our hand,— Heart-whole we'll part, and no whit sighe For the fayrest of the land; Let piping swaine, and craven wight, Thus weepe and poling crye, Our business is ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... people in whose welfare and advancement their hearts are so entirely absorbed. This young girl sings and plays beautifully, paints and draws in a genuinely artistic manner, speaks French and German like a native, and yet she is ill-tempered and shrewish if circumstances happen to cross her inclination. Here is a young man who is possessed of a fine collegiate education, and who is also an excellent musician. Yet he can be rude and disrespectful ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... sake, Lady Dundas," said Pembroke, stepping between her shrewish ladyship and the trembling Euphemia, "do compose yourself. I dare say your daughter is pardonable. In these cases, the fault in general lies with our sex. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... gone their way, leaving the gunners high up on the bleak hillside to grill or mildew or freeze for weeks and months. Then she spoke. Her voice was higher pitched, it seemed, than ours—with a more shrewish tang to the speeding shell. Her recoil was as swift and as graceful as the shrug of a French-woman's shoulders; the empty case leaped forth and clanged against the trail; the tops of two or three pines fifty yards away nodded knowingly to each ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... to have a feeling of horror at the sight or thought of Philippina; she was dismayed too when, despite the darkness, she noticed the shrewish look of incorrigible wickedness in Philippina's face. An ineluctable voice put her on her guard. In so far as she could do it without grievously offending Philippina, she withdrew from further association ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... wrinkles. Around her pursed-up mouth lurked the knowledge of the number of available slices in a sirloin,—the judgment of the lump of butter that should leave no margin for prodigality. Warfare with market-men, shrewish watchfulness over servants, economy scarcely removed from meanness at the table, all were clearly indicated in her flushed and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various |
