"Truculency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tenebrosity, fumidity, and injucundity, or translucency. In short, its diaphaneity, even in the crepuscle, makes it a pharos, and without laud, for its agglutination and amenity, it is a most delectable commorance; and whoever lives in it will find that the neighbours have none of the truculence and immanity, the torvity, the spinosity, the putidness, the pugnacity, nor the fugacity observable in other parts of the town. Their propinquity and consanguinity occasions jucundity and pudicity, from which and the ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... more delicate meal, the younger of the two gentlemen cast upon me a look of latent truculence, such as I have often remarked among my compatriots of the South. He seemed to detect an unexpressed sarcasm in the contrast between my gentle refection ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... immediately afterwards was of a very different type. His mode of entry was of another description. Whereas the man of blood swaggered in with an air of nervous truculence, as if he were afraid that some one was desirous of disputing his equality, the next comer crept in softly, and closed the door with accuracy. He was the incarnation of benevolence—in the best sense of the word, a sweet old man—looking out upon the world through large tinted spectacles with ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... the tradition of Catholic Spain, the tradition of military grandeur, the tradition of fighting the Moors, of suspecting the foreigner, of hospitality, of truculence, of sobriety, of chivalry, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... double-breasted coat which he put on occasionally on Sundays and holidays—he always looked a well-fed, respectable, prosperous member of society; whilst his imperturbable composure, and the entire absence of obsequiousness or truculence in his manner, indicated plainly that he possessed no small amount of calm, deep-rooted self-respect. A stranger, on seeing him, might readily have leaped to the conclusion that he must be the Village Elder, but in reality he was a simple member ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... by Maturin in The Wild Irish "Boy," and it is fair to say that the book preceded Scott's, though not Miss Edgeworth's, experiments in the line of the "national" novel. The earlier Reviewers were discreditably savage on women-writers, and Lady Morgan had her share of their truculence. She did not wholly deserve it: but it must be said that nothing she wrote can really be ranked as literature, save on the most indiscriminate and uncritical estimate. It is, however, difficult to see ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... must admit, at least, that these ideals are not yet 'accepted of song': they have not inspired poetry in any way adequate to the nobility claimed for them. Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley saluted the Boer War in verse of much truculence, but no quality; and when Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley lacked quality one began to inquire into causes. Mr. Kipling's Absent-minded Beggars, Muddied Oafs, Goths and Huns, invited one to consider why he should so often be first-rate when neglecting or giving the ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... believed, was the strongest influence against war. When he was conscious of a "veiled truculence" in the Japanese diplomatic communications, the American battle fleet was ordered to make a cruise around the world, ostensibly for training, but really to show the world, and particularly the Asiatics, that the United States had ample means to enforce ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... Apart from their truculence, the early numbers of the Edinburgh and Quarterly are memorable for two reasons in the history of English literature. They mark the downfall of the absolute standard assumed by Johnson and others to hold good in criticism. And they led the way, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... compromised by the lack of an acceptable Army response.[14-88] In a word, the argument over civil rights in the armed forces had become a political liability for Louis Johnson, and he wanted it out of the way. Glossing over the Army's truculence, Johnson blamed the committee and its recommendations for his problem, and when his frontal assault on the committee failed—Kenworthy reported that the secretary tried to have the committee disbanded—he had ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... national crime, conceived by Southern statesmen for the benefit of slavery, [Footnote: This purpose was avowed by John C. Calhoun in the Senate, May 23, 1836; see also his speech of February 24, 1847.] carried on during a term of years with unexampled energy, truculence and treachery; in both houses of Congress, in the cabinets of two Presidents, in diplomatic dealings with foreign powers, every step of its progress marked by false professions, by broken pledges, by a steady ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... red-headed beggar; or Long Jim or Buckrow or Thirkle. I never found in their pages a cabin-boy like Rajah the Malay, strutting about with a long kris stuck in the folds of his scarlet sarong, or a mate whose truculence equalled the chronic ill-humour of Harris, who learned his seamanship as a fisherman on the Newfoundland Banks. And in all his log-books I never found ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... So—what does he care? His zeal against the Calvary in Amiens may hurt him with the poor people upon whose faith and whose affections he tramples; but, like his brutal expulsion of the Sisters from their schools and hospitals, and his truculence towards the religious processions in which the Picards delight, it recommends him to the clique who have got our poor France into their clutches at Paris, and who pose before all the gaping world at the Universal Exposition as ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... It has had the effect of a sharp trial which the weak cannot stand, but from which the strong emerge stronger or more confident in themselves. It is not correct to say that Zionism is but a "gesture of truculence" or an act of desperation against Anti-Semitism. It is true that more than one educated Jew has been moved only by Anti-Semitism to throw in his lot again with Jewdom, and he would again fall away if his Christian fellow-countrymen would receive him anew in ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... place in our presence?" asked Mrs. Quigg, who had returned to something like her original truculence of doubt. "Why should you ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... and where the cur is both popular and powerful. There is, moreover, a very marked difference in the character of the inhabitants of neighbouring places. In one the prevailing characteristic may be mildness and affability of manners, whereas in another it may be truculence and incivility. Neither the influence of politics nor of religion sufficiently accounts for these differences in character. They seem to rest rather upon obscure and remote causes, such as racial and congenital tendencies. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... into a wailing, inarticulate chant, swaying their bodies to the accent. The men join them somewhat reluctantly, all save Red Cloud, who betrays vexation, and War Chief, who betrays truculence.) ...
— The Acorn-Planter - A California Forest Play (1916) • Jack London
... let her pass—" But under the green dwarf's stern gaze the truculence of the guardian faded. "Why should I ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... rapture, nor yet in agony. He is dressed neither in a rainbow, nor bedraggled with blood. You are neither to be alarmed nor entertained by anything that is likely to happen to him. You are not to be improved by the piety of his expression, nor disgusted by its truculence. But there is more true mastery of light and shade, if your eye is subtle enough to see it, in the hollows and angles of the architecture and folds of the dress, than in all the etchings of Rembrandt put together. The unexciting color will not at first delight you; but its ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... a faint note of truculence in her tone. "You know I'm not short of money, and I guessed it was where ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... long years of visiting must carry her still. She had demanded and hence received homage and respect from her kinsmen for two generations and she must continue to do it. It would be fatal at this point to show weakness or truculence. She had been and intended to be always the honored guest at the various homes that she visited. The unfortunate occurrence at Cousin Betty Throckmorton's was to be ignored—forgotten. Billy was right; she must dress with care. The matter ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... the truculence of his language, and through all his strenuous thrust and parry, Dr. Beecher's sincerity, integrity, and piety shine forth unclouded. Looking at this memorial in one aspect, he seems to have assumed a charge which Mr. Lincoln has professed himself unable to undertake, namely, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... year to do with as you like. No hospitals, churches, heathen; but the needy and deserving near by. You can send boys to college and girls to schools; and Kitty'll be glad to be your lieutenant. I never had a college education. Not that I ever needed it,"—with sudden truculence in his tone. "But it might be a good thing for some of the rising generations in my tenements. I'll leave the choice to you. And when it comes to voting, why, tell me which way to vote, and I'll do it. I'll be a bull ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... such unforgiving harshness, after the experience of such merciful forgiveness, rouses his righteous indignation. The unmercifulness of Christian people is a worse sin than many a deed that goes by very ugly names amongst men. And so the judgment that falls upon this evil-doer, who, by his truculence to his fellow-servant, had betrayed the baseness of his nature and the ingratitude of his heart, is, 'Put him back where he was! Tie the two and a quarter millions round his neck again! Let us see what he will do by way ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... that that isn't what I've felt too—from the beginning?" he demanded of her, almost with truculence. "You say I sit on my money-bags and smile—you abuse me with doing no good with my money—how do you know I haven't been studying the subject all this while, and making my plans, and getting ready to act? You never ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... home or abroad. At home we want science, research, labour, tone, manners, and time; abroad we get the accumulated prejudices that have arisen from a factitious state of things; or, what is perhaps worse, their reaction, the servility of castes, or the truculence of revolution. ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... permission to send in my resignation." He was clearly deficient in that subservience and ready obedience to authority which was the best passport to promotion in the Civil Service; there was in his disposition already a certain truculence and impatience. From this time he nourished a bitter hatred ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... the cock-loft came a passionate voice of such rabid truculence as sounds in the throat of a dog straining ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... me; I had always supposed that he had accepted me on sufferance for Grim's sake, and that in his heart he scorned me as a tenderfoot. You can no more dig beneath the subtlety of Sikh politeness than you can overbear his truculence, and it is only by results that you may know your friend and recognize ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... writes Grumkow, "and said it was the happiest day of his life." Judge Grumkow's feelings soon after, on this furious recalcitration breaking out! Grumkow's Answer, which also we still have [Ib. xvi. pp. 44-46.] is truculence itself in a polite form:—horror-struck as a Christian at the suicide notion, at the—in fact at the whole matter; and begs, as a humble individual, not wishful of violent death and destruction upon self and family, to wash his poor hands of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... something else—I will not call it terror, for the brave feel no terror but it was near akin to it. I had had to do with rough men all my life, but there was a grimness and truculence in the aspect of these three that shook me. When I thought of the dark paths and narrow lanes and cliff sides we must traverse, whichever road we took, ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... hope of assistance from Huntington, he was thinking of other measures, and was scarcely as attentive as he might have been to the increasing truculence of his host. ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... liberal intentions, and the only British war waged between the Peace of Versailles in 1783 and the rupture with Revolutionary France in 1793 resulted in the dismemberment of Tippoo Sultan's kingdom of Mysore (1792). The crusading truculence of the French republicans, and Napoleon's ambition, made the security of the British Isles Pitt's first consideration; but when that was confirmed by naval victories over the French on the 1st of June, 1794, and at the battle of the Nile in 1798, over the Dutch at Camperdown ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... eyes when they rested upon the horseman; and his brows were drawn together with unmistakable truculence when Haydon dismounted near the ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... There was a certain change in the man's appearance. His hair and beard were freshly trimmed, and he had a cleanlier look than we have hitherto noticed; moreover, his expression had lost a little of its habitual sullen truculence. ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... the great teak door below—a thundering that echoed through the dome like the reverberations of an earthquake. It was punctuated by the screams of women. The prisoners changed their attitude, and eyed Brown and the Rajput with an air of truculence again. ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... the tindal of the crew—a kind of boatswain's or serang's mate. The other, sitting beside him on the booms, was a man nearly black, not much bigger than a large ape, and wearing on his wrinkled face that look of comical truculence which is often characteristic of men from the southwestern coast ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... This was reason good why Smollett should try to make a little money and notoriety by penning satires. They are fierce, foul-mouthed, and pointless. But Smollett was poor, and he was angry; he had the examples of Pope and Swift before him; which, as far as truculence went, he could imitate. Above all, it was then the fixed belief of men of letters that some peer or other ought to aid and support them; and, as no peer did support Smollett, obviously they were "varnished ruffians." He erred as he would not err now, for times, and ways of going ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... harshness, pitilessness, severity, brutality, hard-heartedness, inhumanity, rigor, sternness, cruelty, hardness, mercilessness, ruthlessness, truculence. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... He drew the line there. To these provincial autocrats, before whom the peaceable population of all classes had been accustomed to tremble, the reserve of that English-looking engineer caused an uneasiness which swung to and fro between cringing and truculence. Gradually all of them discovered that, no matter what party was in power, that man remained in most effective touch with the higher authorities in ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... ain't got no cause neether," came the voice from the darkness, defiant almost to truculence. "I only ad but the two talents—lovin and fightin; and they can't say I've id eether o them up in a napkin. They can't chuck that in ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... many hunters rank the buffalo first among the dangerous beasts. This is not my own opinion, but he is certainly dangerous enough. He possesses the size, power, and truculence of the rhinoceros, together with all that animal's keenness of scent and hearing but with a sharpness of vision the rhinoceros has not. While not as clever as either the lion or the elephant, he is tricky enough when angered to circle back for the purpose of attacking ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... important influence in forming his public ideals. Of everything that Cleveland represented—civil service reform; the cleansing of politics, state and national; the reduction in the tariff; a foreign policy which, without degenerating into truculence, manfully upheld the rights of American citizens; a determination to curb the growing pension evil; the doctrine that the Government was something to be served and not something to be plundered—Page became an active and brilliant ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... that the fellow's truculence and utter lack of proper deference must be corrected. "I am Lord Julian Wade," he announced, with ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... is proper that we assure our friends once again that, in the discharge of this responsibility, we Americans know and we observe the difference between world leadership and imperialism; between firmness and truculence; between a thoughtfully calculated goal and spasmodic reaction ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... occupied with Hilda's ear and her nostril. He could watch her now at leisure, for the changeful interest of the scene made conversation unnecessary and even inept. What a lobe! What a nostril! Every curve of her features seemed to express a fine arrogant acrimony and harsh truculence. At any rate she was not half alive; she was alive in every particle of herself. She gave off antipathies as a liquid gives off vapour. Moods passed across her intent face like a wind over a field. Apparently she was so rapt as to be unaware that her sunshade was not screening ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... left him downcast and bewildered. Had it no heart? Better the woodpile, the scolding of vinegar-faced housewives at back doors, the kindly spleen of bartenders behind provincial free-lunch counters, the amiable truculence of rural constables, the kicks, arrests and happy-go-lucky chances of the other vulgar, loud, crude cities than ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... and exquisite excellence of various lines and passages in Marlowe's first play must be admitted to relieve, if it cannot be allowed to redeem, the stormy monotony of Titanic truculence which blusters like a simoom through the noisy course of its ten fierce acts. With many and heavy faults, there is something of genuine greatness in "Tamburlaine the Great"; and for two grave reasons it must always be remembered ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne |
