"Cross-grained" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and Valgard the Guileful, set off to woo Unna, and she gave herself away to Valgard without the advice of any of her kinsfolk. But Gunnar and Njal, and many others thought ill of that, for he was a cross-grained man and had few friends. They begot between them a son, whose name was Mord, and he is long in this story. When he was grown to man's estate, he worked ill to his kinsfolk but worst of all to Gunnar. He was a crafty man in his ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... but there were some who enjoyed them the more in consequence; and Mervyn, who had been loudest in vituperation of his first, found the present perfectly delightful, although the chief of his time was spent in preventing Mrs. Holmby's cross-grained donkey from lying down to roll, and administering to the lady the chocolate drops that he carried for Bertha's sustenance; Cecily, meantime, being far before with his sisters, where Mrs. Holmby would gladly have sent him if bodily terror would have ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... forth for a walk to the Park, the irrelevant idea of going round to see his sister kept coming into his mind. He seated himself and fastened his attention upon the paper,—but off it slipped again to the old book-shop, and to that curious, cross-grained figure, its mistress. He abandoned himself to thinking about her—and discovered that a certain unique quality in her challenged his admiration. She was the only absolutely disinterested person he knew—the only creature in the world, apparently, who did not desire to make ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... take his leave, but in doing so, had nearly met with a fatal accident. It had been the pleasure of Raoul, who was in his own disposition cross-grained, and in person rheumatic, to accommodate himself with an old Arab horse, which had been kept for the sake of the breed, as lean, and almost as lame as himself, and with a temper as vicious as that of a fiend. Betwixt the rider and the horse was a constant misunderstanding, testified on Raoul's ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... laxity of discipline and carelessness of culture have reigned in that family? I know many who seem to be excellent men in society, but who are any thing but amiable men at home. In one they are pleasant, affable, kind, and charitable; in the other, cross-grained, hard, unkind, and unjust. I declare with all positiveness, that when a family or a neighborhood of children is bad, there is a reason for it outside of the children. There are bad influences which descend upon them, and work out their ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... my brother-in-law; and if that does not succeed—why, I will make love to the futur myself, and whisper in his ear that a comfortable little income available at once, and a willing old maid, are better than a cross-grained damsel with expectations only. You see I am resolved to make any sacrifice to effect ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... that her son was likewise bewitched; and when, the next morning, Stephen, who had been sent to inquire for the patient, reported him better, but still unable to be moved, since he could not lift his head without sickness, she became very anxious. Giles was transformed in her estimate from a cross-grained slip to poor Robin Headley's boy, the only son of a widow, and nothing would content her but to make her son conduct her to Warwick Inner Yard to inspect matters, and carry thither a precious relic warranted ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... offence; but question for question is all fair, you know. Pray, gentlemen, is not this same Hardcastle a cross-grained, old-fashioned, whimsical fellow, with an ugly face, a ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... order, baker's dozen, bamboozle, bay window, between whiles, bicker, blanch, to brain, burly, catcall, clodhopper, clutch, coddle, copious, cosy, counterfeit money, crazy (dilapidated), crone, crook, croon, cross-grained, cross-patch, cross purposes, cuddle, to cuff (to strike), cleft, din, earnest money, egg on, greenhorn, jack-of-all-trades, loophole, settled, ornate, to quail, ragamuffin, riff-raff, rigmarole, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... venture to say two men more disposed to go pleasantly down the current of life it were hard to meet with; and yet, such was the consequence of these confounded four months' sequestration from all other society, we became sour and cross-grained, everlastingly disputing about trifles, and continually arguing about matters which neither were interested in, nor, indeed, knew anything about. There were, it is true, few topics to discuss; newspapers we never saw; sporting ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... had no winter coats. They took great offence at this and were not content until they had vexed themselves into a jaundice. Then they died. One by one, they fell to the ground and at last they lay in a great heap over the old, cross-grained root. ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... kindly, "is there anything wrong with you below? Has that cross-grained little shrimp, Spokeshave, hang him! been bullying you again, like he did ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... to express his—"love;" so he really called it, and so we suppose must we, in our extreme ignorance of the precise category of nomenclature to which the feelings that actuated him belonged. Honest man! bigoted and selfish as he was, he was neither cruel by nature nor cross-grained; and he was even moved by the pathetic and frank avowal which Barbara made to him on the state of her heart. But, though touched by her tears, he understood them not, treated them but as the natural mawkishness of girlish sentimentality; nor had her assurance that ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... a good deal on drawing something along in the early hundreds; and as the day wore along to his disappointment in that hope he thought that he might come tagging in at the end, in the mean way that his cross-grained luck had of humiliating him and of forcing the fact that he was more or less a ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... possessed of imagination should choose to make a novel on the foundation of this simple story, he may describe to his readers how the cross-grained and unattractive Coke contrived to induce the fair Lady Elizabeth Hatton to accept him for a husband. The present writer cannot say how this miracle was worked, for the simple reason that he does not know. One incident in connection with the marriage, however, is ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... fingers twisted together; and his chief difficulty appeared to be to reduce his own stride to the parrot march of the captain. His features were sharp and lean as was his body, and wore every appearance of a cross-grained temper. ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... Anasuya, I have done my best; but what living being could succeed in pacifying such a cross-grained, ill-tempered old fellow? However, I managed to ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... accustomed as he is to rule absolutely, though justly and with a sort of severe kindness. Army officers on the frontier—especially when put in charge of Indian reservations or of French or Spanish communities—have almost always been more or less at swords-points with the stubborn, cross-grained pioneers. The borderers are usually as suspicious as they are independent, and their self-sufficiency and self-reliance often degenerate into mere lawlessness and defiance ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... that cross-grained spinster, with real likes and dislikes, put a bony hand quietly before her eyes. At the last, she made three strides, as a soldier marches, and fell all of a piece, like a wooden mannequin, on the singer's neck. "Take my piano," she sobbed, "for you have ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... school was a big, ill-conditioned, lazy, selfish, cross-grained sort of fellow. He was nearly the tallest fellow in the fifth form, but by no means the strongest. He was narrow across the chest, and shaky about the knees, though we youngsters held him too much in awe to take this into account at the time. To the big boys ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... a stuck-up, cross-grained, meddlin', bumble-bee-backed old hag of a soup-slopper; to come stickin' yer big nose into other people's kitchens! If there was a rale misthress to the house instead of the little gal upstairs, you'd be rowled down the front steps afore you'd been let come ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... thing more to me about spoiling the sailing of the boat, Dory. I know more about sailing a boat than you do," replied Pearl. "You are a cross-grained youth, and you know more than the law allows for a boy of your years. You beat me out of this boat; but you stole the money to buy her, and it ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... was ever a cross-grained censor; we need not mind his maundering, Gods. We have it from the admirable Demosthenes: imputations, blame, criticism, these are easy things; they tax no one's capacity: what calls for a statesman is the suggesting of a better course; ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... see this creature at her best, you had to see her doing the dutiful to her old father. If ever there was a peevish, cross-grained, crabbed, unreasonable old sinner in this world, that sinner was Duncan McKay, senior. He was a widower. Perhaps that accounted to some extent for his condition. That he should have a younger son—also named Duncan—a cross ne'er-do-weel like himself—was ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... carelessly if there was anything new on board, but received a reply in the negative. When he came on board, followed by Snarleyyow, the eyes of the crew were directed towards the dog, to see how he looked; but he appeared just as lively and as cross-grained as ever, and they all shook ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... back, dearie—and I won't ask you any more questions. I'm a cross-grained, cantankerous old thing, but you'll stop along of me a ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... did not mean to hurt him, Sprott," said the Parson, more politely I fear than honestly—for he had seen enough of that cross-grained thing called the human heart, even in the little world of a country parish, to know that it requires management, and coaxing, and flattering, to interfere successfully between a man and his own donkey—"I am sure you did not mean to hurt him; but he ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... "claustration" to which I condemn myself may be a "state of joy," no. But what can I do? To get drunk with ink is more worth while than to get drunk with brandy. The muse, cross-grained as she is, gives less trouble than a woman. I cannot harmonize the one with the other. I must choose. My choice was made a long time ago. There remains the matter of the senses. They have always been my servants. Even at the time of my earliest ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... had not yet taken his decision. Indeed, indecision was one of his chief characteristics. Pelissier, who was cross-grained and gruff, used to say, "Judge men by their names, indeed! I am christened Amable, Randon Cesar, and ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... beautiful outland woman, and a scribe however learned," she answered bitterly, adding, "Oh! if the Prince is not mad, certainly he drives others to madness, and me, his spouse, among them. That throne is his, his; yet he suffers a cross-grained dolt to take his place, and ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... nervous motion. She was mobile, living, yet a painter might not have called her handsome or beautiful. But the much that she was surprised him. She was quite a long way removed from the rusticity that was his. How could one of his cross-grained, unfortunate, almost accursed stock, have contrived to reach this pitch of niceness? London had done it, ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy |
