"Cantankerous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if this cantankerous contraption isn't going wrong again! I wonder if it's going to have a fit here in this lonely place. It acts just as if it was. Bless my very existence! Hold on now. Be nice! ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-boat - or, The Rivals of Lake Carlopa • Victor Appleton
... he declared, "it's no small b'y's job to keep that fahmily in arder!" and he proceeded to describe them as a cantankerous lot, to be ruled only by that ideal justice tempered by mercy which he was apparently a master ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... "Jake's a cantankerous cuss, boy. Let 'im gas; 'e don't cut any figger anyway. Say, you keep yer eye peeled on some o' the young heifers on the far side o' the bunch. They're rustlin' some. They keep mouching after new grass. When the moon gits up ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... there been any likelihood of extracting therefrom the germs of a luminous footnote. He perused the manuscript, making notes as he went along. This wretched monk, he concluded, must have possessed a damnably intimate knowledge of Nepenthean conditions, and a cantankerous and crapulous turn of mind, into the bargain. He never lost an opportunity of denigrating the island; he was determined, absolutely determined, to see only the bad side of things, so far ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... breaks her back for her," was his unholy wish; for he hated Sara intensely, desiring to be with the lions or elephants rather than dancing attendance on a cantankerous female monkey there ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... skipper has had two or three applications, but although the owner has no objection to his taking them, he considers the trouble is more than they are worth. Of course, he would make something out of their passage, but there would, almost certainly, be some cantankerous beggars among them, and of course the table costs a good deal more when there are passengers, especially as he will have the apprentices to mess with him. I am sure I am glad indeed that we ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... "You cantankerous old tyrant," she drawled in a whisper, "you do love to haze me around, don't you? Just to spite you, I'll do it!" She went in and left him standing there, smoking and leaning against the post, calm as the ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... proud woman," said the lawyer to himself, as he watched her driving away. "She looks well, too, when her eyes flash, and she puts on that haughty air. Odd that she should be so fond of that cantankerous old father. I wonder if the report is true which I heard of an Australian lover turning up for her. Well, there are worse-looking women than Frances Kane. I thought her very much aged when she first came into the office, but when she told me that she didn't much like me, she looked ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... seem in his eyes." Her own outspoken words seemed to burn through her body. "But how could I know where to wear my rose? I have read in English books that gentle ladies wear them there." And these lines of Tennyson [Footnote: I must say here for the benefit of the drivelling, cantankerous critic, with a squint in his eye, who never looks for anything good in a piece of writing, but is always in the search for a flaw, that I send passages from Tennyson floating through Annette's brain with good justification. She had received a very fair education at ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... has become a patron to Khalid. Shakib the poet, who himself should have a patron, is always ready to share his last dollar with his loving, though cantankerous friend. And this, in spite of all the disagreeable features of a friendship which in the Syrian Colony was become proverbial. But Khalid now takes up the newspapers and scans the Want Columns for hours. The result being a clerkship in a lawyer's office. Nay, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... morning, to escort his daughter to the station, an act of parental solicitude she had not expected from him. He took his departure immediately afterwards, being let out of the shop-door by Luke Tulliver, who was in a very cantankerous humour, and took no pains to disguise the state of his feelings. The lawyer Mr. Medler had pried into everything, the shopman told Percival Nowell; had declared himself empowered to do this, as the legal adviser of the deceased; and had seemed as suspicious as if he, Luke ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... just been ejected for being drunk and insolent, and refusing to leave without an extra sixpence. I befriended him. He was indeed saturated with alcohol and honeycombed with disease; repulsive in appearance, and cantankerous in character, his earnings were so slender that he was pitifully clad, and without a night's lodging oftener than not. He had not a friend in the world, and was suffering from an incurable malady of which ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... penny to hear you," replied the other angrily, "for a more bad-natured, cross-grained, cantankerous person than yourself I never met among womankind. It's what I said to a man only yesterday, that thin ones are bad ones, and there isn't any one could be ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... him into scrapes, just as Mr. Winkle's sham sportsmanship was to get him into embarrassments. In fact, the first appearance in Seymour's plate—the scene with the cabman—shows him as quite a different Pickwick; with a sour, cantankerous face; not in "tights," but in a great coat; he is scarcely recognisable. Seymour was then determined to show him after his own ideal. But when the poor artist destroyed himself the great man was brought up to the fitting type. So undecided were the parties about that type that the author ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... man reached out and touched her arm. "Excuse me, Beth. I feel like a cantankerous old sore-headed bear this morning. Of course, you come home to help me. I didn't mean ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... I suppose my cantankerous daughter wouldn't have you, Piercy; not if I said anything to her about it. But if she would—-and ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... all the good brave things he has done for me. For years he has been missing; that wretched Overend and Gurney smash broke him, and he disappeared. And, Frank, you foolish fellow, I have been searching for you high and low to tell you that that cantankerous old lady, your aunt, was dead, and had changed her mind at the last moment, quarrelled with that lot who had got hold of her, sent for her solicitor, and left Greylands and every farthing she had to you. Thank goodness I have found you at last. Now sign your ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... him as Everard Constable, a touchy, ill-conditioned, cantankerous brute if ever there was one, who does not care a straw for anyone but himself. I can't think what she sees in him. But an Earl's an Earl. I always forget that. I have lived so much apart from the world ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... says I am on the verge of being a sick man. Well, that may be true enough while I am lying abed all day trying to persuade his cantankerous, rebellious medicines to agree with each other; but when I come out at night and get a welcome like this I feel as young and healthy as anybody, and as to being on the verge of being a sick man I don't take any stock in that. I have been on the verge of being an angel all my ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... an' tyrannical, an' perverse, an' cantankerous a critter ez ever lived, with no feelin's, nor softness, nor perliteness in him—but he's a square man. He'll do the fair thing—every time," the coroner ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... who it is," he replied. "It takes a lot o' time, goin' up stream, to get back to our start, an' a cantankerous passenger in as narrow a place as a rowboat would make it mighty onpleasant for me an' this lunkhead, Ike, my nephew. Wouldn't ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... writer has the bad taste to praise Lydgate more than Chaucer, yet we may put this down to his love for his old master, and may rest assured that though the cantankerous Ritson calls the Bury schoolmaster a 'driveling monk,' yet the larking schoolboy who robbed orchards, played truant, and generally raised the devil in his early days (Forewords to Babees Book, p. xliv.), retained ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... you say, George," persisted his wife; "he may be a disagreeable, cantankerous old brute—I don't say he isn't. All the same, the man is going away, and we may never see ...
— The Cost of Kindness - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... though what on earth there was to guard against was more than I could have said just then. Some cross-grained streak in my nature made me both cantankerous and suspicious, and while the mood was on me I would have contradicted or queried the word of ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... have been a great triumph for him had Glory Goldie stood on the boat that day in all her pomp and splendour, so that Praestberg could have seen her. However, since she had not come, there was nothing for him but to go back home. As he was about to leave the pier cantankerous ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... Skeaton-on-Sea and its delights, about the church and its marvellous east window, about the choir and the difficulties with the choir-boys and the necessity for repairing the organ, about the troubles with the churchwardens, especially one Mr. Bellows, who, in his cantankerous and dyspeptic objections to everything that any one proposed, became quite a lively figure to Maggie's imagination, about the St. John's Brotherhood which had been formed to keep the "lads" out of the public-houses and was doing so well, about ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... be scalded in Mr. Constant's pot, when that cantankerous kettle should boil, was not the coarse mixture of black and green sacred to herself and Mr. Mortlake, of whom the thoughts of breakfast now reminded her. Poor Mr. Mortlake, gone off without any to Devonport, somewhere about four in the fog-thickened darkness of a winter night! ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... otherwise; he smiles at old stories which would make him break out in yawns, were they uttered by any one but papa; he drinks sweet port wine for which he would curse the steward and the whole committee of a club; he bears even with the cantankerous old maiden aunt; he beats time when darling little Fanny performs her piece on the piano; and smiles when wicked, lively little Bobby upsets ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... don't think you are the attraction,' answered Urania, with a cantankerous glance ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... ingenious calculation, Causeth discombobulation only in the anxious mind That forecasts exhausted fuel, or the period when the duel Will have given their final gruel to French journalists; a kind Of cantankerous, rancorous spitfires, blusterous, braggart, boyish, blind, Who much mourning scarce ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... exactly," said the barkeeper. "He's the most cantankerous crank in the township. And say, let me give you a pointer. If the subject of 1812 comes up,—the war, you know,—you'd better admit that we got thrashed out of our boots; that is, if you want to get along with Hiram. He hates Yankees ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... very disagreeable. This was somewhat unusual, as he was generally very bland and polite, but to-night he was so cantankerous that I fancied he must have been drinking. To me he was especially insulting, and went so far as to hint that I, unlike other Englishmen, was a coward; that I hadn't courage to resist a man manfully, but would act towards an enemy in a ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... rather cold farewell of each other. The kind-hearted Maksim Maksimych had become the obstinate, cantankerous staff-captain! And why? Because Pechorin, through absent-mindedness or from some other cause, had extended his hand to him when Maksim Maksimych was going to throw himself on his neck! Sad it is to see when a young man loses his best hopes and dreams, when from before his eyes ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... are some people so cantankerous they will heat themselves in argument as to which side might be right or wrong in a war, or if wars should be in it at ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... think she isn't cantankerous. Quite selfish people never are; they just grab everything in sight, with a total serenity and regardless of any consequences. That is the reason Mrs. Brenton is such a good ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... smoke a pipe for my life unless I went to the barn. And I didn't use good enough grammar. Emily'd been a schoolteacher in her early life and she'd never got over it. Then she hated to see me eating with my knife. Well, there it was, pick and nag everlasting. But I s'pose, Anne, to be fair, I was cantankerous too. I didn't try to improve as I might have done . . . I just got cranky and disagreeable when she found fault. I told her one day she hadn't complained of my grammar when I proposed to her. It wasn't an overly tactful thing ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... no mental reservation. "I know how it is, Cicely. Allyn has been my baby and my boy; but, much as I love him, I can't help seeing that he is cantankerous and cross-grained at times. But it is only at ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... in the presence of woman he was tongue-tied and scarlet. He who would quell with his eye the sonorous youth whom the claret punch made loquacious, or smash with lemon squeezer the obstreperous, or hurl gutterward the cantankerous without a wrinkle coming to his white lawn tie, when he stood before woman he was voiceless, incoherent, stuttering, buried beneath a hot avalanche of bashfulness and misery. What then was he before Katherine? ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... Enoch, "'Specially when ye don't want 'em to be. The off one's stiddy enough. It's this cantankerous skewbald that started the tantrum. Whoa now, blame ye!" Calico's nose was in the air again and he ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... the fine things to be said for Aunt Charlotte; the arguments in her behalf—a splendid long golden list of them stretching back to their babyhood and beyond, binding them with ties stronger almost than blood ties to this faithful, loving, cantankerous, crotchety old soul. Aunt Charlotte had been born in servitude, the possession of their mother's mother. She had been their mother's handmaiden before their mother's marriage. Afterward she had been their own nurse, cradling them in babyhood on her black breast, ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... "They're sure a cantankerous lot all through!" grumbled the fat scout, looking carefully where he expected to plant his foot next; for, in spite of Rob's assurance, he was not quite so certain that the undergrowth beneath the bridge might not harbor some poisonous reptile which ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... such a d—— cantankerous fellow, and perhaps Lady C. may say that I oughtn't to have taken advantage of her absence. But, what's the odds? If she takes me there'll be an end of it. If she ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... like Jonah in the whale's belly. Now I charge you to be careful, woe's me, that ever I be going to leave you. My heart is just broke, but do, master Oscar, be good to your little brother, and don't put on him. He has a high spirit, and it is no doubt cantankerous, but he must be honourably treated, and there's never a finer temper to ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... benevolence on those who were so happy as to eat his salt, instead of taking to himself a madam, under whom there is no peace night or day? As he sits with his unemployed friends seeking the consolation of the never-failing beeree, the ex-butler narrates her ladyship's cantankerous ways, how she eternally fidgeted over a little harmless dust about the corners of the furniture, as if it was not the nature of dust to settle on furniture; how she would have window panes washed which had never been washed before; her meanness in inquiring ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... Every one spoke of his crusty temper and bullying disposition, invariably qualifying the statement with a commendation of his resources and capabilities. The devil of a driver, a hard man to get along with, obstinate, contrary, cantankerous; but brains! No doubt of that; brains to his boots. One would like to see the man who could get ahead of him on a deal. Twice he had been shot at, once from ambush on Osterman's ranch, and once by one of his own men whom he had kicked from the ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... himself that he mustn't be impatient. This, after all, was only the second day of Helen Brabazon's stay at Wyndfell Hall. Perhaps it was a good thing that her cantankerous old uncle had betaken himself off. Misfortune had a way of turning itself into good fortune where Lionel Varick was concerned; for he was bold and brave, as well as always ready to seize opportunity at ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... slew two goodly and most furious animals. He is wondrous sullen,-and only the divine Sah- luma is skilled in the art of soothing his troubled spirit. Therefore,—if thou hast aught of crabbed or cantankerous to urge against thy master's genius, thou hadst best reserve it for another time, lest thy withered head roll on the market-place with as little reverence as a dried gourd flung from ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of the letter, in which he assured her of his love, could not counterbalance the harshness of its contents. Madame Balzac, be it granted, was cantankerous; but how many sons who have never sponged on their mothers have supported them cheerfully, gladly, for long years out of meagre resources, and have borne with a smile the natural peevishness of old age, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... bad. If I owned a half in a payin' business with ye, I'd niver let th' sun go down on a quarrel,' he says. 'But if ye had a bad mouth I'd go into coort an' wriggle out iv th' partnership because ye'ar a cantankerous old villain that no wan cud get on with,' he says. 'If people knew they cudden't get away fr'm each other they'd settle down to life, just as I detarmined to like coal smoke whin I found th' collection wasn't big enough to put a new chimbley in th' parish house. I've acchally ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... have," said the Vicar, while Tom busied himself doing nothing to the telescope, and began to take a good deal of interest in the discussion about his enemy. "You will grant, I suppose, that Mother Warboys is about as unamiable, cantankerous an old woman as ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... pass. But coming from a native, to what depths of morbid discontent do they testify! Considering the recent progress of these regions that has led to a security and prosperity formerly undreamed of, one is driven to the conjecture that these words can only have been penned by some cantankerous churl of an emigrant returning to his native land after an easeful life in New York and compelled—"for his sins," as he would put it—to reside ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... cantankerous old barnacle," retorted Sartoris, "that's what you are. It'd serve you right if your daughter was to cut the painter and cast you adrift, and leave you ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... last only a few minutes, yet the artillery alone had been firing steadily for some five hours. When it was all over we were rather astonished to find ourselves still alive, somewhat dazed with the excitement and noise and with the cantankerous whine of machine-gun bullets still in our ears. A violent desire for a smoke was the first real sensation, but that desire was not destined to be gratified for some time, for our troubles were only ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... between ill-temper—whether of the irascible, the sulky, or the cantankerous kind—and something for which we have no name (poor-spiritedness). Friendliness comes between the excessive desire to please and boorishness. It is a social virtue which might be defined as goodwill plus tact. Sincerity [there is no English term quite corresponding to the Greek] is ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... peppery, fiery, passionate, choleric, shrewish, sudden and quick in quarrel [As You Like It]. querulous, captious, moodish^; quarrelsome, contentious, disputatious; pugnacious &c (bellicose) 720; cantankerous, exceptious^; restiff &c (perverse) 901.1 [Obs.]; churlish &c (discourteous) 895. cross, cross as crabs, cross as two sticks, cross as a cat, cross as a dog, cross as the tongs; fractious, peevish, acariatre^. in a bad temper; sulky &c 901.1; angry &c 900. resentful, resentive^; vindictive ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... fabula who is not "mafioso"; that the crude banditism which sits in every Corsican's bones has raised him to the elysium of martyrs and heroes and not, where he ought to have gone, to the gallows; that the Maltese are not merely cantankerous and bigoted (Catholic) Arabs, but also sober, industrious, and economical. I have lived with all these races in their own countries and—apart from a fatal monkey-like apprehensibility which passes for intelligence but, as a matter of fact, precludes it—have found chiefly this to admire ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... were perhaps the most divided pair that ever were yoked by Hymen. D. was a good-humored fellow, a jovial blade, full of high spirits—while his wife was one of the most cross-grained and cantankerous bodies that ever man was blessed with—and yet, to hear the sweet diminutives which they both employed in their dialogues, the world would have concluded that they were upon ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... family homestead in the wilds of northern British Columbia to visit me at the Great Oaks School. She had gotten into pathetic physical condition. Fifteen years previously she had remarried. Tom, her new husband, had been a gold prospector and general mountain man, a wonderfully independent and cantankerous cuss, a great hunter and wood chopper and all around good-natured backwoods homestead handyman. Tom had tired of solitary log cabin life and to solve his problem had taken on the care and feeding of a needy widow, my mom. He began doing the cooking and menu planning. Tom, a little ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... off my taxi, the driver of which was very cantankerous and abusive over his fare. As I came back to Professor Summerlee, he was having a furious altercation with the men who had carried down the oxygen, his little white goat's beard jerking with indignation. One of the fellows ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... adventure. I took risks. In these things there is invariably a certain amount of give and take, and it fell to me finally to do the giving reluctantly enough. Even when I had got out of everything, one cantankerous creditor saw fit to be malignant. Perhaps you have met that flaming sense of outraged virtue, or perhaps you have only felt it. He ran me hard. It seemed to me, at last, that there was nothing for it but to write a play, unless ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... Who reignest where The weather's seldom bleak and snowy, This boon I urge: In anger scourge My old cantankerous ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... cantankerous and conceited fellows sometimes speak the truth. They're like those cobwebbed, unwholesome-looking bottles which have lain a long time in cellars. You would hardly like to come in contact with them, and yet they often contain ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... dog with such a very bad name as Hoodie was really not to be envied. She loved her own god-daughter Maudie dearly, and she knew it to be true that she was a very nice child, but her heart was sore for poor cantankerous Hoodie. You see her patience had not yet been tried by her as had been the patience of all those about the little girl, so after all she could not ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... was a cantankerous old woman," began Uncle Geoffrey; and then he checked himself and added, "Heaven forgive me for speaking against the poor old creature now ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... white as those of my lady the Countess herself, for I would have a servant to wait on you. And your father would come and live with us and we would make him happy and comfortable too, and your mother . . . well! your mother would be happy too, and therefore not quite so cantankerous as she sometimes is." ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... carping, crabbed, contentious, cantankerous chap. Hoot mon! an' why shouldna I drap into Scotch gin I choose? An' I with a Mac in ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... Sergeant, until I count three. Then, if you haven't started, we'll simply have to bring you down like a cantankerous grizzly. Or, if you start and then stop again, we'll shoot just the same. We can't afford to ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... a mighty cantankerous, quar'lsome, aggervatin' critter!" Byers broke out irritably. "Ain't ye 'shamed o' this hyar hurrah ye hev kicked up fur nuthin'? accusin' ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... careful of us as a father of his children, and he grew as fond of us as we were of him, so that the final parting, after the journey was done, was really a moving scene. I have found the tribe of cabbies, in all countries, to be, as a rule, somewhat cantankerous and sinister; but Gaetano compensated for all his horse-driving brethren. To be sure, vettura driving is not like cabbing, and Gaetano was in the habit of getting out often and walking up the hills, thus exercising his liver. But he ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... rear of the car. "I can't see much," he said, "but it is evident that you two have been fighting. Why don't you live in peace and happiness? The trouble's all with Lee, too, you don't have to tell me that, Anette; he is too cursed cantankerous; and it would serve him right if you'd come up ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... haunt the kitchen, where her courtesy won even the cantankerous cook for a friend, and from her the girl learned so much of her art that the cook could teach her no more. In the laundry the good-natured Irish woman who presided over that department of household economy gave her always so warm a welcome ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... over with us a great deal, and I believe he did both Bigley and me a vast deal of good from being so cantankerous. He would do anything for us; fetch, carry, or turn himself into a crutch for Bigley to lean upon, as he hopped down the garden to a chair; but he must be allowed to snarl and find fault, and snarl ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... now, and the constable on night duty will attend to it. When your mother arrives, tell her the whole story, and send her to Miss Manning. Don't go yourself. You might meet Robert Fenley, and he would certainly be cantankerous. If your mother resembles you, she will have no difficulty in arranging matters with the ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... goin' anywhare. I only want to git outen this country. She's a holy terror an' I stood it jest as long as I could. All thets left of my farm is on this ere boat an' I don't reckon its goin' to cost me much trouble to take care of it an' locate anywhare outside of this country. This ere cantankerous river has done me up, done me ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... dismiss from their service that thorough-going Protestant, the Hon. George Morris. Then "the party,"—by which Barrington Erle probably meant the great man in whose service he himself had become a politician,—required that the candidate should be a safe man, one who would support "the party,"—not a cantankerous, red-hot semi-Fenian, running about to meetings at the Rotunda, and such-like, with views of his own about tenant-right and the Irish Church. "But I have views of my own," said Phineas, blushing again. "Of course you have, my dear boy," said Barrington, clapping him on the back. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... to shoot.' Sir Robert Inglis christened this 'odious' measure, a 'gigantic scheme of godless education,' and a large majority of Irish Roman Catholic Prelates have solemnly pronounced it 'dangerous to faith and morals,' Neither ministerial allurements, nor ministerial threats can subdue the cantankerous spirit of these bigots. They are all but frantic, and certainly not without reason, for the Irish Colleges Bill is the fine point of that wedge which, driven home, will shiver to pieces their 'wicked political ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... stars. There would not be a living soul on the shore for hours. From the harbour the nearest way to the House was by the sea gate, but where was the haste—with the lovely night around them, private as a dream shared only by two? Besides, to get in by that, they would have had to rouse the cantankerous Bykes, and what a jar would not that bring into the music of the silence! Instead, therefore, of turning up by the side of the stream where it crossed the shore, he took Clementina once again in his arms unforbidden, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... Sedley comes up for consideration at the next committee meeting. Sedley's rich uncle, a cantankerous old man, insulted him grossly; there was a quarrel; and the old man left, vowing to revenge himself by disinheriting his nephew and bequeathing his money to a cats' home. He died on his way to his solicitors, and Sedley was told of his good fortune ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... Western Canadian farmer it did not take him long to slip around behind the problems of the farming class; for there was no greater adept at poking a cantankerous problem about with a sharp stick than the Honorable George. It was natural for this short, stout, bearded Englishman to gravitate into the first Legislature of the newly-formed Province of Saskatchewan and just as naturally he moved up to ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... my motto to take Father Time by the fore-lock, for fear he should cut it off, or get away, or play some other trick upon me, which the cantankerous old chap (no parent of mine!) is fond of doing. Therefore, if I could, I would have had terms, destination, day and hour of starting definitely arranged before that miraculously-produced tea of Felicite's had turned to tannin. But man may not walk through a solid wall, or strive against such ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... painful struggles between his conscience and his need of living, sufficiently indicates the result; Charles Leslie, the gallant nonjuror, for example, or Abel Boyer, the industrious annalist, or the laborious but cantankerous Oldmixon, were keeping their heads above water by journalism, almost exclusively, of course, political. Defoe showed a genius for the art, and his mastery of vigorous vernacular was hardly rivalled until the time of Paine and Cobbett. ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... some strange irony of fate this man, who was by nature one of the most peaceable and peace-loving of men, singularly calm and dispassionate, not prone to disputation or given to wrangling, acquired the reputation of being perhaps the most cantankerous ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... offer comment, but was struck dumb with astonishment on hearing McKean's voice: it seemed he could talk. He was telling of an old Scotch peasant farmer. A mean, cantankerous old cuss whose curious pride it was that he had never given anything away. Not a crust, nor a sixpence, nor a rag; and never would. Many had been the attempts to make him break his boast: some for the joke of the thing and some for the need; but ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... She's out in the open, finally. She took that place for a month with one express object—to get him there, paint or no paint. She's fretful and cantankerous over every day of delay, and soon she'll be ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... considerations of trade, coupled with some faint conception of the hideous injustice the seafaring classes groaned under, and groaned in vain, here and there outweighed patriotism and dinners. Little by little a cantankerous spirit of opposition got abroad, and every now and then, at this point or at that, some mayor or alderman, obsessed by this spirit beyond his fellows and his time, seized such opportunities as office threw in his way to mark his disapproval of the wrongs the sailor ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... (1759) and The Man of the World (1764). His recognition that tragedy was not his forte and his self-criticism in THE COVENT GARDEN THEATRE, where he exhorts the audience to "explode" him when he is dull, reveal the comic spirit operative in his sometimes cantankerous personality. It is that strain, here seen in genesis, which develops full-fledged in his ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... out, relieved but cantankerous. V., still ignorant of the fire, wanted to know why my gun was silent during our first fight; and I wanted to know why he hadn't shut off the engine and listened when I shouted for the fire extinguisher. Some French gunners ran to meet us. The sight that met them must have ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... almost a roar. Spencer's temper, always uncertain, had been severely tried that morning, and was rapidly giving way under the strain of bitter disappointment. "I ran up against Foster in those Senate lobby charges, and of all the cantankerous—" He paused expressively, then added, "I used to have a high regard for his sagacity and business judgment until he lost his head over that Grey woman. Because she don't choose to be decently civil, he's ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln |
