"Cussedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had thrown off his mask and announced his presence in his true light by butting a sleepy steer out of its bed, which bed he straightway proceeded to appropriate for himself. This was folly, for the ground was not cold and he had no excuse for stealing a body-warmed place to lie down; it was pure cussedness, and retribution followed hard upon the act. In about half a minute he had discovered the great difference between bullying poor, miserable, defenceless dogies and trying to bully a healthy, fully developed, and pugnacious ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... me that things couldn't well be going better at Chicago than they are. There's no other machine that can set type eight hours with only seventeen minutes' stoppage through cussedness. The others do rather more stopping than working. By and by our machines will be perfect; then ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... embarrassing to their companions. The Saxons, to use their own expressive parlance, were always "a trifle wary" in dealing with Maud, for what that young lady thought she promptly said, and said without reserve, choosing, as it seemed, out of pure "cussedness" the very moment of all others when they would have ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... soon. I began to live with a new motive—a sense that I was needed, a purpose to be ready to help her children—the one service I could give to her. There's a long, cruel story back of her marriage to Tank—a story of deception, coercion, love of money, and all the elements of common cussedness—too common to make a good story. And, as generally happens, when Tank married the girl who didn't want him he treated her as ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... will read them far enough to note that one member of the family at least holds him in pleasant recollection for the fun he has afforded him in the past. The two first boys of creation were not bad fellows at all, although as was natural, their bringing up resulted in a general condition of pure cussedness that at times became appalling to their parents. The fact that there had never been any other boys in the world before placed Adam and Eve at a considerable disadvantage in rearing these two youngsters. There were no precedents to go by, and as a consequence the lads were permitted to ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... away off any trail here," he said, "and it's all woods, with only a little patch of open here and there. It's pure accident I happen to be here at all; accident which comes of unadulterated cussedness on the part of one of my horses. I left the Meadows at noon, and Nigger—that's this confounded cayuse of mine—he had to get scared and take to the brush. He got plumb away from me, and I had to track him. I didn't come up with him till dusk, and then the first good ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... along one day and tackled Jim fer a swap; and about that time Jim he'd got hold of a critter that had more cussedness in him to the squar inch than any critter we'd ever sot eyes on, 'cept a cirkus mule that Ezra ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart
... gave them a talk for what he called their long-eared cussedness, and laid down a little law and wound up with a number of reasonable explanations for the same. Every man who went out hunting trouble was a camp liability, and would be fired. He did not propose to give the town authorities a chance to jail workmen ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... satisfied to work off their high spirits some other way. With them that's not white, things is different. When the Apache streak gets on top it sends 'em along quick into clear deviltry—the kind that makes you cussed just for the sake of cussedness and not caring a damn; and it's them that has give some parts of the Western Country—like it did New Mexico in the time I'm talking about, when they was bunched thick there—its ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier
... him show his teeth! That is Mr. Sinful Peck. I've had him in irons with a broken head five times, and the log is full of him. I towed him over the stern running down the trades to take the cussedness out of him, and if he had not been born for higher things, he'd have drowned. He was absolutely unconquerable until I found him telling his beads one time in irons and took them away from him. Now to get an occasional chance at them ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... more of everything good, and less of everything bad; more manhood, less meanness; more gain, less groans; more bread, less brawls; more clothing, less cussedness; less heartaches and more happiness. Turn saloons into bake shops and butcher stalls, distilleries into food factories, breweries into stock pens, and the country will be a thousandfold better off than feeding its ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... the housekeeper's room, papa." Sylvia's voice to-day was very sweet and high; a sign to those who knew her of some perturbation or cussedness, as ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... gets when them spells come over him. It's just plain cussedness. I've seen gunfighters lookin' for trouble—for someone to kill. But Gulden was worse than that. You all take my hunch—he's got a screw loose ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... I never knew Mark Twain to make me tired before. Positive fact." Ross slammed "Roughing It" on the floor. "When you're snowbound this-away you want tragedy, I guess. Humor just seems to bring out all your cussedness. You read a man's poor, pitiful attempts to be funny and it makes you so nervous you want to tear the book up, get out your bandana, and have ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... sometime; and if I were a minister, nothing would give me more satisfaction than to be present at your execution and preach your funeral sermon." He replied: "Now, Colonel, you don't mean that. You don't think I'll ever be hanged!"—"Indeed I do, if you don't stop your profanity and general cussedness."—"I'll be hanged, if I will," was his last word ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague |
