"Pugnacious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to resent interruptions or to be vexed by them. If they happen to get on the hands or fingers, they submit to be restored to the gate; but go to the formicary on the mango-tree half a dozen yards away and offer a friendly finger, and you will find dozens of pugnacious individuals ready to defend their home. Do they recognise that they are but pilgrims of the fence, enjoying certain rights on sufferance, that it is a path of peace on which belligerents must not intrude, a neutral tract under the custody of the law of nations, which ants, as well as ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... poker, and casting a glance first at his hopeful son, and then at his hoping wife, replied that Jake was an ignorant, pugnacious, good-for-nothing scamp, and never would come to anything, ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... and so-called success. At present he is forty and occupies about the same position that he did at twenty. As a boy he was fond of play but never excelled in any sport and never occupied a place of leadership. He had the usual pugnacious code of boys, but because he was friendly and good-natured rarely got into a fight. He liked to read and was rather above the average in intelligence, but he never tackled the difficult reading, confining himself to the "interesting" novel and easy information. He left high school ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Lenten Hymn, and poor Father Roach's penance, rubbed his hands, and slapped his thigh, and crowed and shouted with ecstasy. O'Flaherty, who called for punch, and was unfortunately prone to grow melancholy and pugnacious over his liquor, was now in a saturnine vein of sentiment, discoursing of the charms of his peerless mistress, the Lady Magnolia Macnamara—for he was not one of those maudlin shepherds, who pipe their loves in lonely glens and other sequestered places, but rather loved to exhibit his bare ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... of this fellow, notwithstanding his pugnacious manner. He had an honest face, and bright blue eyes, in whose depths lurked a merry twinkle. He took it for granted that this was Jake Jukes who ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... answer to the spurs of the gamecock or the antlers of the deer; they are masculine weapons in the struggle for mates. Indeed, you may take it for granted that brilliant colors and decorative adjuncts in animals almost invariably go with irascible tempers, pugnacious habits, and the practice of fighting for the possession of the harem. The consequence is, with the sticklebacks, that many males get killed during the struggle for supremacy, so that the survivors wed half a dozen wives each, like little Turks that they are in their watery ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... of being very young is one's absolute certainty that there is only one type of beautiful girl in the world. That type we make a religion. We are its pugnacious champions, and the idea of our falling in love with any other is too preposterous even for discussion. If our tastes happen to be for blondness, brunettes simply do not exist for us; and if we affect the slim and willowy in figure, our contempt for the ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... there was not a man in England who could have driven her against her will. She had a fortune of her own. Enoch Lovatt treated her with the respect due to an equal who had more than once proved herself capable of insisting on independence and equal rights in the most pugnacious manner. ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... themselves do not repute so much as faults. I have, in my youth, seen a man of good rank with one hand present to the people verses that excelled both in wit and debauchery, and with the other, at the same time, the most ripe and pugnacious theological reformation that the world has been treated withal these many years. And so men proceed; we let the laws and precepts follow their way; ourselves keep another course, not only from debauchery of manners, but ofttimes by judgment and contrary opinion. Do but hear a philosophical ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... disquisition for the encouragement of dull boys, in which we are told that "the great philosopher, Newton, was one of the dullest scholars in school when he was twelve years old. Doctor Isaac Barrow was such a dull, pugnacious, stupid fellow, etc., etc. The father of Doctor Adam Clarke, the commentator, called his boy, etc. Cortina," (vernacular for Cortona, probably,) "a renowned painter, was nicknamed, etc., etc. When the mother of Sheridan once, etc., etc. One teacher sent Chatterton home, etc. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... things the London prentices were pugnacious, but as every one joined in the laugh against George, and he was, besides, stuck fast on a quaking tussock of grass, afraid to proceed or advance, he could not have his revenge. And when the slough was passed, and the slight rise leading to the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was a patriotic, pugnacious, but God-fearing Cornishman, born at an old homestead known as Trethinnick, in the parish of St. Cleer, in which his forbears had been settled well back in the seventeenth century, probably earlier. To quote Dr. Knapp: "They feared God, honoured the king, and believed ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... own reputation; for the report that he kept a mysterious and pugnacious statue on the premises would not increase his custom. He must silence it, if possible. "I'm afraid it is, sir—in a ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... his own enjoyment. What followed is thus told by Samuel nearly twenty years after: 'I returned, saw the exploit, and flew at Frank. He pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow, flung himself upon the ground, and there lay with outstretched limbs.' This is good comedy: the pugnacious Frank affecting to be an Abel, killed by a blow from Cain such as doubtless would not have 'made a dint in a pound of butter.' But wait a little. Samuel was a true penitent as ever was turned off for fratricide at Newgate. 'I,' says the unhappy murderer, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... general referee in all those abortive quarrels, which, at a place of this kind, are so apt to occur at night, and to be quietly settled in the morning; and occasionally adopted a quarrel himself, by way of taking down any guest who was unusually pugnacious. This occupation procured Captain MacTurk a good deal of respect at the Well; for he was precisely that sort of person who is ready to fight with any one,—whom no one can find an apology for declining to fight with,—in fighting with ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... write his own life, and his pugnacious vivacity, and hardy frankness, would have seasoned a piece of autobiography; an amateur has, however, written it in the style which amateurs like, with all the truth he could discover, enlivened by some secret history, writing the life of Lenglet with the very spirit of Lenglet: it is a mask ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... laughing at the predicament in which Chester found himself, "what's the matter that you've turned so pugnacious all of a sudden? Getting to be ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... marched westward. At Temple Bar the zealous new "Peelers" slammed the old muddy gates, to stop the threatening mob; but the City Marshal, red in the face at this breach of City privilege, re-opened them, and the mob roared approval from a thousand distorted mouths. The more pugnacious reformers now broke the scaffolding at the Law Institute into dangerous cudgels, and some 300 of the unwashed patriots dashed through the Bar towards Somerset House, full of vague notions of riot, and perhaps (delicious thought!) plunder. But at St. Mary's, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... frequently invited me to spend Saturday at Pinkie. She was a very ladylike person, in delicate health, and with cold manners. Sir Archibald was stout, loud, passionate, and devoted to hunting. I amused myself in the grounds, a good deal afraid of a turkey-cock, who was pugnacious ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... has had singular effects on some persons. A boar's head was a favorite dish at the table of great people in Marshal d'Albret's time; yet he used to faint at the sight of one. It is not uncommon to meet with persons who faint at the sight of blood. One of the most inveterately pugnacious of Dr. Butts's college-mates confessed that he had this infirmity. Stranger and far more awkward than this is the case mentioned in an ancient collection, where the subject of the antipathy fainted at ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... There we both tried our powers upon him, the result being very unsatisfactory. The youth, feeling himself freed from one operator and not subjected by the other, refused allegiance to either, and, being of a pugnacious temperament, he squared up and commenced striking out at both of us. It was not without considerable difficulty that I re-mesmerised him completely, and then, having previously prepared his mind to account naturally for his presence in my rooms, I succeeded ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... the Golden Crowned Thrush (soon to delight the eyes of the readers of BIRDS), though it is altogether a more conspicuous bird, both on account of its brilliant plumage and greater activity, the males being, during the season of nesting, very pugnacious, continually chasing one another about the woods. It lives near the ground, making its artfully concealed nest among the low herbage and feeding in the undergrowth, the male singing from some old log ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... combining a flowing movement with condensation, and free from the tricks and charlatanries of diction. He is not so popular as he would be if he made more noise about his words and thoughts, and called the attention of the public to every felicity of his style or reflection by a pugnacious manner, and a strained expression. Though possessing a singularly rich and suggestive fancy, and a wide variety of information, his use of ornament and allusion is characterized by a taste, an appropriateness, a reserve, which men of smaller stores ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... pugnacious by nature. He disliked very much being on bad terms with anyone, and could not understand why he should regard another boy as his natural enemy simply because he happened to go to a different school. More than ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... wall. The bold and athletic took it. If two roisterers met they cocked their hats in each other's faces, and pushed each other about till the weaker was shoved towards the kennel. If he was a mere bully he sneaked off, mattering that he should find a time. If he was pugnacious, the encounter probably ended in a duel behind Montague ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I have myself experienced, he was not absolutely perfect, as he would not remain without any movement when a tiger charged directly face to face; upon such occasions he would stand manfully to meet the enemy, but he would swing his huge head in a pugnacious spirit preparatory to receiving ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... tear. With a smooth, clean-shaven face, plentiful white hair like spun silk, and neat feet and hands, he did not look his age. The dreamy look in his small blue eyes was rather belied by the hardness of his thin-lipped mouth, and by the pugnacious push of his jaw. The eyes and the dome-like forehead hinted that brain without much originality; but the lower part of this contradictory countenance might have belonged to a prize-fighter. Nevertheless, Braddock's plumpness did away to a considerable extent with ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... order to provoke a battle with the whites, and boasting that formerly they had driven them back from the Darling, was a blow that they could not get over, and the result was that the whites were not again molested. It turned out that this pugnacious tribe was the same that threatened Sturt at the Darling junction, when the energetic interference of one man was so effectual. This remarkable savage, it seems, was dead and his ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... to pack up their luggage and be off, to make way for the advancing nerve-battalion; but in their exodus they are met by a fierce destroyer, in the shape of an east wind—a Caffre that suddenly throws the ranks of General Carbon into disorder, and drives them back upon the brilliant and pugnacious array of General Nerve: a battle-royal is the result. General Nerve immediately places lance in rest, and advances to the charge with the unsparing war-cry of: "Mr Ferguson, you don't lodge here!" and if Caffre East-wind is not despised and trifled with, he is generally beaten for a time; but great ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... crossed over to Holland to keep their hands in there till fortune favoured them once more at home. The old castle, with its rambling towers, and walls, and buttresses was a sort of rallying-point for all the pugnacious spirits of the time, and its bluff walls showed many a scar and many a dint where hostile guns had played upon them, not, you ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... be a man with thin, iron-grey hair and a stubby, pugnacious moustache. He sat at a desk at the end of a long, narrow room, down both sides of which were rows of cases filled with impressive-looking books. He did not raise his eyes when Grant entered, but continued poring over a file ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... shambling but self-important gait to the table next mine, carefully placed his manuscript upon a chair, and sat down upon it. He was soon lost in a prolonged contemplation of the limited bill of fare posted on the wall, a study which resulted in his ordering, through a hustling, pugnacious-looking ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... but no longer alone and unsupported. Close alongside of her there lay such a craft as the eyes of a seaman does not delight to look upon; no masts, no smokestack, no guns—at least nothing of the sort could be seen about her. And yet the thing had a grim, pugnacious look, as if there was tremendous power of some sort inherent in her, and ready to be manifested whenever the occasion required it. The Monitor (for it was that famous vessel) promptly steamed out to meet the Virginia, as the latter vessel bore down on ...
— Life of Rear Admiral John Randolph Tucker • James Henry Rochelle
... know only the great flat, ruddy crabs with ponderous pincers and pugnacious mien, which frequent fish shop windows, can form but a very unflattering opinion of the fancy varieties which people every mile of ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... exemplary parish-priest. 'He was one of the most contented, quiet, sweet-tempered, generous, cheerful men I ever knew,' so says the chronicler of the Leigh family, 'and his wife was his counterpart. The spirit of the pugnacious Theophilus dwelt not in him; nor that eternal love of company which distinguished the other brothers, yet he was by no means unsocial.' Towards the end of his life he removed to Bath, being severely afflicted with the gout, and here he died in 1763. ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... idle, drinking, negligent, pugnacious Regan, by his own sheer neglect, put his property into the hands of the most relentless harpy that ever robbed and fleeced a tenantry. This mode of proceeding was, in fact, one of the many methods resorted to by rapacious agents, for filling their own pockets at the expense ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... entrance to the R.N.W.M.P. barracks the unsuspecting Jan was violently attacked by a fox-terrier, the pet of one of the senior officers of the corps. This pugnacious little chap wasted no time over preliminaries, and apparently had no desire whatever to examine the new-comer. He just flew straight at Jan's throat, snarling furiously. Captain Arnutt was distressed, for he made sure the terrier would be killed, and that Jan would thereby make an ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... The pugnacious instinct—the desire to fight—is the natural reaction of every human being of sane mind to attack. The inner necessity of avenging is so strong in the child or man of untrained mind or soul that he acts before he thinks. He strikes back, or shoots, or plots against his enemies. Only rare development ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... and fine, falling in natural ringlets about a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed. Every feature was delicately cut; the chin was bold; and about the mouth something of a pugnacious expression. His eyes were mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled.[391] Haydon says that his eyes had an inward Delphian look that ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... pugnacious on his juniors' account, I assure you! I can't imagine his agreeing to the use I'm making of you. I've no time to listen to his protests. Write, ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... war in Barsetshire. If there was on Dr Thorne's cranium one bump more developed than another, it was that of combativeness. Not that the doctor was a bully, or even pugnacious, in the usual sense of the word; he had no disposition to provoke a fight, no propense love of quarrelling; but there was that in him which would allow him to yield to no attack. Neither in argument nor in contest would he ever allow himself to be wrong; never at least to any one but ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... not many hundred yards away. Elaine and Comus were indulging themselves in two pennyworths of Park chair, drawn aside just a little from the serried rows of sitters who were set out like bedded plants over an acre or so of turf. Comus was, for the moment, in a mood of pugnacious gaiety, disbursing a fund of pointed criticism and unsparing anecdote concerning those of the promenaders or loungers whom he knew personally or by sight. Elaine was rather quieter than usual, and the grave serenity of the Leonardo da Vinci portrait seemed intensified in her face this morning. ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... lugubrious; we shall have to change the subject. Love affects people in as many different ways as wine. Some are exalted,—their feet spurn the earth, their heads are in the clouds; some pugnacious, walking about with a chip on the shoulder; others are stupidly happy,—their faces wearing a sickly smile that becomes painful to look at; others again, like you, melancholy as a wailing tenor in the last act of 'Lucia.' ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... some small spot of cleared ground for the combat, he would throw down his gallant bird, and conceal himself in the brushwood; the game-cock would immediately crow, and his challenge was immediately answered by the pugnacious male pheasant, who flew down to meet him: the combat was short, for the pheasant was soon pierced by the sharp steel of his adversary; and as one antagonist fell dead, again would the game-cock crow, and his challenge be accepted ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... Sound. Their orange-and-tawny backs gleam in the sunshine from morning until night. There are numbers of them. Their manners are very marked. They have quite the air of conquerors. All the other birds yield them precedence, and they positively domineer over the pugnacious little English sparrow, who is content to keep in the background and watch his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... changed, however, soon after that marriage, for as I was now nearly eight years old it was deemed appropriate that I should be sent to a boarding-school, both by way of improving my mind and of having some nonsense knocked out of me, which, indeed, was promptly accomplished by the pugnacious kindness of my schoolfellows. Among the latter was one, my senior by a few years, who became a very distinguished journalist. I refer to the late Horace Voules, so long associated with Labouchere's journal, Truth. My brother Edward was also at the same school, and my brother ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... wood-rats had examined him suspiciously through the undergrowth and decamped. As he slept, howling night-dogs came up, sniffed at him from a safe distance, and scattered from his vicinity. He would have yielded in a battle with a pugnacious kitten, but these creatures recognized a prehistoric foe, and would not abide ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... Zachariah was not pugnacious, and could not very well be so in the presence of his huge antagonist; but he was no coward, and not seeing for the moment that his hat had hopelessly gone, he turned round savagely, and laying hold of the ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... and on along Unter den Linden, with its broad pavements gleaming in a characteristic misty winter night, through the Brandenburg Gate of his Brandenburg dynasty, or to the statue of the blood-and-iron Bismarck, with his strong jaw and pugnacious nose—the statesman militant in uniform with a helmet over his bushy brow—who had made the German Empire, that young empire which had not yet known defeat because of the system which makes ready and chooses the hour ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Goddesses, you'll find that here await you Four companies of most pugnacious women Armed cap-a-pie from the topmost louring curl To ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... the years passed by without war and retaliation, or that treaties made piracy impossible. In the early and more pugnacious days of the Saracen domination conflicts were frequent. The F[a]tim[i] Khalifs conquered and held all the larger islands of the Western Mediterranean, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic Isles. In 1002 the Saracens pillaged Pisa, and the Pisans retaliated by burning ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... bed of the Arno, while his temple and town were appropriated to other purposes. The river was dragged. The statue was found and set upon a column near the edge of the river, on a spot which is now the head of the Ponte Vecchio. True to its pugnacious character, it brought nothing but turbulence and bloodshed upon the town. The long and memorable feuds between the Guelphs and Ghibellines began by the slaying of Buondelmonte in his wedding dress, at the base ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... bad as he used to be, Clinton," Easton laughed; "just the same aggressive, pugnacious beggar that he ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... and, try as he would, he could not dispel them. He would fix his mind and eyes on Miss Wilson's face, who was now sitting at her desk, and even as he looked at her the face of Brick Simpson, impudent and pugnacious, would arise before him. It was of no use. He felt sick and sore and tired and worthless. There was nothing to be done but flunk. And when, after an age of waiting, the papers were collected, his ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... became as pugnacious as U. S. Grant, as conceited as a Successful Business Man and as self-assured as ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... consists in asking a leading question which can only be answered in a sense contrary to the intention of the question: 'Your father and mother of course allow you to drive the chariot?' 'No they do not.' When Menexenus returns, the serious dialectic begins. He is described as 'very pugnacious,' and we are thus prepared for the part which a mere youth takes in a difficult argument. But Plato has not forgotten dramatic propriety, and Socrates proposes at last to refer the ...
— Lysis • Plato
... and indulged at home, he does not appear to have been in sympathy with his surroundings. Already dowered with the "hate of hate, the scorn of scorn," he appears to have made foes both among those who envied him and those whom, in the pride of intellectuality, he treated with pugnacious contempt. Beneath the haughty exterior, however, was a warm and passionate heart, which only needed circumstance to call forth an almost fanatical intensity of affection. A well-authenticated instance of this is thus ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... the robin's beak, then, is a very prettily representative one of general bird power. As a weapon, it is very formidable indeed; he can kill an adversary of his own kind with one blow of it in the throat; and is so pugnacious, "valde pugnax," says Linnaeus, "ut non una arbor duos capiat erithacos,"—"no single tree can hold two cock-robins;" and for precision of seizure, the little flat hook at the end of the upper mandible is one of the most delicately formed points of forceps ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... until they arrive at the age of manhood, they then begin to develop more ambitious ideas and cannot be managed, while with the Chinese a "boy" (a servant throughout the East is called "boy") is always a boy, and is constantly on the watch to serve his master. Again, the Japs are pugnacious, a race of little game-cocks, always in for a fight, especially with a Chinaman. The captain told us the other day a great big Chinaman had complained to him that one of the Japs had abused him. Upon calling up ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... watching his movements, as though he had promised them some lively proceedings. Jack noticed that his nose had assumed its normal proportions, from which he concluded that more time than was actually the case had elapsed since he himself was prostrated by illness. The pugnacious youth advanced in his wary fashion, gradually slackening his gait until nearly opposite the pale face, who felt that the exigencies of the situation demanded he should brace up so as to impress the youth with the peril ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... Capt. Liddell had his H.Q. in J.4 at this time. The first night he went with me to this trench with a party of bombers, and we stayed from 2 A.M. till dawn was breaking. Capt. Liddell was a great tower of strength to us in these trenches, one of the most fearless and pugnacious of men, with a taste for wandering about No Man's Land o' nights. It did you good merely ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... peaked cap drove the gray machine. He looked across at Sophie, scowling. He was young and red-faced, a pugnacious-looking individual. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... any one to advocate a new view that will startle people, he ought of all men to be conciliatory and persuasive; but Carmichael was, at least in this time of fermentation, very exasperating and pugnacious, and so he drove the Rabbi to the only hard action of his life, wherein the old man suffered most, and which may be said to have led ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... to 1814, by the state banks, with a result which no one had as yet forgotten; before and since that brief interval through the Bank of the United States. Enough for Taney, that it was the will of his imperious master, 'the pugnacious animal,' as Gallatin ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... and a woman's linsey dress dangled from a hook against the wall. I crept forward, my heart pounding madly, until I could gain sight of his face. He was a big fellow, not more than thirty, with sandy hair and beard, and a pugnacious jaw, his coarse hickory shirt slashed into ribbons, a bullet wound in the center of his forehead, and one arm broken by a vicious blow. His calloused hands yet gripped the haft of an axe, just as he ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... which they yielded up their breath. By this time Fotis, the maid, had been aroused by the din of battle, and still panting and perspiring freely I slipped in through the opening door, and, as weary as though I had fought with the three-formed Geryon instead of those pugnacious thieves, I yielded myself at one and the same moment ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... in the poet's affections comes out in the pugnacious lyric, "Popularity," one of the old-time bits of ammunition shot from the guns of those who found Browning "obscure." The poem is an "apology" for any unappreciated poet with the true stuff in him, but the allusion ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Ryan an optimist. The blood of Ireland had made him pugnacious. And Mack Nolan had a way with him. Wherefore, Casey Ryan once more came larruping down the grade to Camp Cajon and turned in there with a dogged purpose in his eyes and with his jaw set stubbornly. History has it that whenever ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... use, if not often swept and cleaned, but what will soon become an intolerable nuisance within, and not much better without, and the ground immediately around the premises a dirty place. The common pigeon is a pugnacious cavalier, warring apparently upon mere punctilio, as we have often seen, in the distant strut-and-coo of a stranger bird to his mate, even if she be the very incarnation of "rejected addresses." On all these accounts, we would locate—unless a small and select family of fancy birds, ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... Wallace, moving up to him, 'is physically impossible. Don't be so pugnacious. We leave you the front of the box, and when we appear in your territory our mouths are closed. But in our own domain we claim the rights of ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... if he sleeps with another student in the Hall but not in his own bed, he pays a penny; if he brings a stranger to a meal or a lecture or any other "actum communem" in the Hall, he is fined twopence; if he is pugnacious and offensive and makes odious comparisons, he is to pay sixpence; if he attacks a fellow-member or a servant, the University has (p. 100) appointed penalties varying with the severity of the assault, and for a second offence he must be expelled. He has to obey his Principal much ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... the striking views he at one time inculcated as a backtothelander, which was one reason he strongly resented the innuendo put upon him in so barefaced a fashion by our friend at the gathering of the clans in Barney Kiernan's so that he, though often considerably misunderstood and the least pugnacious of mortals, be it repeated, departed from his customary habit to give him (metaphorically) one in the gizzard though, so far as politics themselves were concerned, he was only too conscious of the casualties invariably ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... as luck would have it, it hit the wrong mark, and fell just in front of him, smashing to atoms the porcelain inkslab and water bottle, and smudging his whole book with ink, Chia Chuen was, of course, much incensed, and hastily gave way to abuse. "You consummate pugnacious criminal rowdies! why, doesn't this amount to all of you taking a share in the fight!" And as he uttered this abuse, he too forthwith seized an inkslab, which he was bent ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Two stamps brought it right. The river soon disappeared in a swamp, where the alligators' heads protruding above the water gave Tiffles an opportunity to describe several terrific combats which he had enjoyed with those pugnacious creatures. This entertained the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... all snugly curled up in bed, with his rosy cheek resting on one of his scratched and grimy little hands, forming altogether a perfect picture of peace and innocence, it seems hard to realize what a busy, restive, pugnacious, badly ingenious little wretch he is! There is something so comical in those funny little shoes and stockings sprawling on the floor,—they look as if they could jump up and run off, if they wanted to,—there is something so laughable about those little trousers, which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... jelly, limes, green tea, and a slight suspicion of preserved ginger,—nothing else, upon honor,—and the most simple mixture for the cure, the radical cure, of blue devils and debt I know of; eh, Doctor? You advise it yourself, to be taken before bed-time; nothing inflammatory in it, nothing pugnacious; a mere circulation of the better juices and more genial spirits of the marly clay, without arousing any of the baser passions; whiskey is the devil ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... answer save that her lips slowly reddened again after the pallor; then came a quiver in them, as though pity were conquering pride within her breast, and then that contemptuous curl that had often in the past cowed the heart of the fearless and pugnacious boy whom no peril of ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... who, by a combination of fortuitous circumstances, later attained the position of President of the United States. This was Theodore Roosevelt, the scion of a moderately rich New York family, and a remarkable character whose pugnacious disposition, indifference to political conventionalities, capacity for exhortation, and bold political shrewdness were mistaken for greatness of personality. The phenomenal success to which he subsequently ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... grieve. And ought he not to disregard The poet's madness? for 'tis hard At eighteen not to play the fool! Sincerely loving him, Eugene Assuredly should not have been Conventionality's dull tool— Not a mere hot, pugnacious boy, But man ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... especially in verbal encounters. Fighting is in his blood. That is what makes the Irish soldier the best in the world, and that was why he used to revel in the faction fights. As a paternal Government now prevents the breaking of heads, at all events on a wholesale scale, the pugnacious instincts of the nation have to be gratified by litigation, and certainly there never was such a litigious race in history ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... even a second leap, the blenny moves slowly towards it like a cat to its prey, or like a jumping spider; and, as soon as it gets within two or three inches of the insect, by a sudden spring contrives to pop its underset mouth directly over the unlucky victim. He is, moreover, a pugnacious little fellow; and rather prolonged fights may be observed between him and his brethren. One, in fleeing from an apparent danger, jumped into a pool a foot square, which the other evidently regarded as his by right of prior discovery; in a twinkling the ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... a curious and not very healthy-looking person of about fifty years of age, ill-dressed in seedy black clothes and a flaming red tie, with a fat, pale face, a pugnacious mouth, and a bald head, on the top of which isolated hairs stood up stiffly. I knew him by sight, for once he had argued with me at a lecture I gave on sanitary matters, when I was told that he was a draper by trade, and, although his shop was by no means among the most important, that he ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... gave it back to the priest, whereupon the priest became noisy. Afterward he reported the affair to his consul at Bangkok, with the embellishing statement that not only himself, but his religion, had been grossly insulted. The consul, one Monsieur Aubaret, a peppery and pugnacious Frenchman, immediately made a demand upon his Majesty for the removal of ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... beggar!" said Mr. Bouncer, in reference to the last paragraph. "Well, Giglamps! Filthy Lucre doesn't tell fibs when he says that Tug came of a good breed: but he was so doosed pugnacious, that he was always having set-to's with Huz and Buz, in the coal-shop just outside the door here; and so, as I'd nowhere else to stow them, I was obliged to give Tug away. Dr. What's-his-name says, 'Let dogs delight to bark and bite, for 'tis their nature ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... and old servants were fixtures, but the old faithful and devout ones looked forlorn and unhappy and there had been a great importation of the ruffianly men-at-arms, whom the more pugnacious ecclesiastics, as well as nobles, of Scotland, were apt to maintain. Guards there had been in old times, but kept under strict discipline; whereas, in the rude conduct of these men, there was no sign that they knew themselves to be in a religious ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... desk, scanning several pages of type-written paper. He was a young judge with a keen, though somewhat weary, face and eyes, full of compassionate knowledge. But Nance did not see the judge; her gaze was riveted upon her two arch enemies: Mason, with his flat nose and pugnacious jaw, and "Old Cock-eye," the policeman who looked strangely ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... silence; who cannot sleep if steam-pipes crackle; and who must straighten out all the tangles of his life, past, present, and future, before he can close his eyes in slumber or take a vacation. The boy Carlyle, proud, shy, sensitive, and pugnacious, was father to the man who made war upon the neighbor's poultry, and had a room, proof against sound, specially constructed ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... "advanced" thinkers. The contest between skepticism and revelation has long since shifted to other grounds. Both the philosophy and the temper of the Age of Reason belong to the eighteenth century. But Paine's downright pugnacious method of attack was effective with shrewd, half-educated doubters; and in America well-thumbed copies of his book passed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern or store, where the village atheist wrestled in debate with the deacon or the schoolmaster. Paine rested his argument against Christianity ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... horns. He was pugnacious, bitter, but ineffectual. He quoted Hebrew, he spoke partly in Yiddish and partly in English; he repeatedly used the words "subjective" and "objective"; he dwelt on Job's "obvious tragedy" and Solomon's "inner sadness," ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... visiting; shouldn't think that his scripture reader—a really good, hard-working man—can perform miracles, and do nearly everything; can talk genuine common sense if he likes, and make himself either very agreeable or pugnacious; is an Orangeman, with a holy horror of Popery; can give deliciously passionate lectures about the Reformation; considers money a very important article, and is inclined to believe that all people, particularly parsons, should stick ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... "Eye of Yemen" with an idea of extreme danger. The Anglo-Saxon spirit suffers, it has been observed, from confinement within any but wooden walls, and the European degenerates rapidly, as do his bull-dogs, his game-cocks, and other pugnacious animals, in the hot, enervating, and unhealthy climates of the East. The writer and his comrades were represented to be men deliberately going to their death, and the Somal at Aden were not slow in imitating the example of their rulers. The savages had heard of the costly ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... her at that moment. She would give vent to her hatred. She would turn the disagreeable, pugnacious, upstart New Woman ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... gorge." The Robin, like the Hedgesparrow, is a common resident in all the Islands, and I cannot find that its numbers are increased at any time of year by migration. But on the other hand I should think a good many of the young must be driven off to seek quarters elsewhere by their most pugnacious parents, for of all birds the Robin is by far the most pugnacious with which I am acquainted, and deserves the name of "pugnax" much more than the Ruff, and in a limited space like Jethou and Herm battles between the old and the young would be constant unless some ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... she saw of this dogmatic dreamer, this erratic man of action, the more she liked him, the more she found really admirable in him. But mixed with her admiration was an alert and pugnacious fear, so big was he, so powerful, so violently hostile to all the principles involved in her belief that the whole wide world of action should in justice lie as much open to woman to choose ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... when cooked, look like chickens, are supposed by the natives to fall down from thunder-clouds, because after a heavy thunder-shower the pools, which are filled and retain water a few days, become instantly alive with this loud-croaking, pugnacious game. This phenomenon takes place in the driest parts of the desert, and in places where, to an ordinary observer, there is not a sign of life. Having been once benighted in a district of the Kalahari ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Juliet in Coolagarranoe," for she had drawn the guidebook toward her and made good use of it. "Let us do the literary pilgrimage, certainly, before we leave Ireland, but suppose we begin with something less intellectual. This is the most pugnacious map I ever gazed upon. All the names seem to begin or end with kill, bally, whack, shock, or knock; no wonder the Irish make good soldiers! Suppose we start with a sanguinary trip to the Kill places, so that I can tell any timid Americans I meet in travelling that I have been to ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... guarantees", Foote regarded Webster's speech as "unanswerable", and in April came to an understanding with him as to Foote's committee and their common desire for prompt consideration of California. The importance of Foote's influence in turning the tide in Mississippi, through his pugnacious election campaign, and the significance of his judgment of the influence of Webster and his speech have been somewhat overlooked, partly perhaps because of Foote's swashbuckling ...
— Webster's Seventh of March Speech, and the Secession Movement • Herbert Darling Foster
... a new chord sounding in his speech: it was rather imperious than appealing—had more of conscious power than of the yearning need which had acted as a beseeching grasp on him before. And usually, though he was the reverse of pugnacious, such a change of attitude toward him would have weakened his inclination to admit a claim. But here there was something that balanced his resistance and kept it aloof. This strong man whose gaze was sustainedly ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... (1630-1677).—Divine, scholar, and mathematician, s. of a linen-draper in London, was ed. at Charterhouse, Felsted, Peterhouse, and Trinity Coll., Cambridge, where his uncle and namesake, afterwards Bishop of St. Asaph, was a Fellow. As a boy he was turbulent and pugnacious, but soon took to hard study, distinguishing himself in classics and mathematics. Intending originally to enter the Church, he was led to think of the medical profession, and engaged in scientific studies, but soon reverted to his first views. In 1655 he became candidate for the ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Manchester! Your policy of absorption is good enough when you're dealing with fragments. It's a devilish unlucky thing to attempt with a concrete mass. You might as well ask your head to absorb a wall by running at it like a pugnacious nigger. I don't want you to go into Parliament ever. You're a fitter man out of it; but if ever you're bitten—and it's the curse of our country to have politics as well as the other diseases—don't ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... training in my youth it is not at all strange that I now consider myself rather an adept in the prevailing social usages. At a musicale I applaud fit to blister my hands, even though I feel positively pugnacious. But I know the singer has an encore prepared, and I feel that it would be ungracious to disappoint her. Besides, I argue with myself that I can stand it for five minutes more if the others can. Professor James, ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... are told that they will also attack any bird of prey that ventures near their breeding ground; they are quarrelsome, too, and the cock birds will fight with each other should they come into too close quarters. A cock bird one day attacked a wounded male bird which came near his nest; the pugnacious little fellow ran up to the intruder, and taking advantage of his weakness, jumped on him, and pecking at his head, dragged him along the ground as fiercely as a game cock. This was witnessed by Mr. St. John.[A] "I have often heard peewits uttering their peculiar noise," said Willy, ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... on that score, Trebon," Malchus said, "I can tell you, but let it go no further, that ere long there will be fighting enough to satisfy even the most pugnacious." ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... falcon-eyed Indians whispered "cuche" long before we saw any thing.[129] Williams went ashore and came upon a herd of peccaries, killing two. The peccari is a pugnacious, fearless animal. It is not frightened by the noise of fire-arms, and when wounded is a dangerous foe; but captured when young, it is easily tamed. It has a higher back than the domestic hog, and cleanlier habits; an odoriferous gland on the loins, and three-toed hind feet. We preserved ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... not reply to her bantering smile, but, in the pause that followed, stepped to the bookcase where she had been standing, gingerly picked up a soft bit of linen and lace from the floor and dropped it into her lap. Then he faced her in an attitude of pugnacious irritation. For a brief moment his silence ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... really reformed? Had his pastoral life with his nymph-like mistress completely cured him of his pugnacious propensity, or had he simply found it was inconsistent with his dancing, and seriously interfered with his "fancy steps"? Had he found tracts and hymn-books were as edible as theatre posters? These were questions that Rocky canyon discussed lightly, ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... morbid and unbalanced by feeling too much about morality, not by feeling too little. You may say if you like that Robespierre was (in a negative sort of way) mad. But if he was mad he was mad on ethics. He and a company of keen and pugnacious men, intellectually impatient of unreason and wrong, resolved that Europe should not be choked up in every channel by oligarchies and state secrets that already stank. The work was the greatest that was ever given to men ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... spread on Roger's cheekbones. In spite of his apparent demureness he had a pugnacious ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... his knees. He was a powerfully-built man, as I have said, with a fine forehead and rather heavy features; but his eyes had that odd drooping of the skin above the lids which often comes with advancing years, and the fall of his heavy mouth at the corners gave him an expression of pugnacious resolution. He talked to Montgomery in a tone too low ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... he drinks his coffee and smokes his cigar. If the ladies of the household are inclined that way they look at it too. But there really is not much to look at as a rule. These paragraphs about the wicked British that seem so pugnacious when they are printed on solid English paper in plain English words, are often in a corner with other political paragraphs about other wicked nations. At times of crisis, when the leading papers are attacking us at great ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... hours and months; they are, like our North American Indians, constitutionally lazy, are intensely selfish, and seem to care nothing for their dead; they have a quick sense of insult, but cannot as a rule be called pugnacious; they excite themselves to fight by indulging in strange war-dances and by singing songs full of braggadocio; and, after having been thus wrought up to a state of frenzy, they are perfectly reckless as to personal hazard. The Maori is not, however, a treacherous ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... glanced past him to the big maroon automobile at the gate. Therein she saw the squat, pugnacious looking Mr. Grimes, and she jumped ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson |
