"Bicker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... color of his plumage is reddish, and between this family and the broad-tails there exists a bitter feud. When, in the migrating season, a large number of both species gather together in a locality where there is a cluster of wild-flowers, the picture they make as they dart to and fro and bicker and fight for some choice blossom, their metallic colors flashing in the sun, is so brilliant as never to be forgotten by the spectator who is fortunate ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... heart-stirring, soul-inspiring scandal. On that day there was no excise of the commodities of character. They might be bought or sold at a wanworth, or handed or banded about in any way that suited the tempers of the people. The bottle and the bicker had already, even in the forenoon, been, to a certain extent, employed as a kind of outscouts of the array that was to appear at night, and the gossipers were in that blessed state, between partial possession and full expectation, that ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... few of us delight in really serious fighting. We do love to bicker; and we box and knock each other around, to exhibit our strength; but few normal simians are keen about bloodshed and killing; we do it in war only because of patriotism, revenge, duty, glory. A feline civilization would ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... about the hill, An' todlin down on Willie's mill, Setting my staff wi' a' my skill, To keep me sicker; Tho' leeward whiles, against my will, I took a bicker. ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... temper, is a deep and fatal mistake. The world moves onwards patiently and inevitably, obeying a larger and a mightier law. What is rather the duty of all who love what is noble and beautiful is not to carp and bicker over faulty conditions, but to realise their aims and hopes, to labour abundantly and patiently, to speak and feel sincerely, to encourage rather than to condemn, Serviendum lietandum says the brave motto. To serve, one cannot avoid that; but to serve with blitheness, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... his office, immersed among papers and accounts. Before him was a large bicker of oatmeal porridge, and at the side thereof a horn spoon and a bottle of two-penny. Eagerly running his eye over a voluminous law-paper, he from time to time shovelled an immense spoonful of these nutritive viands into his capacious mouth. ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the smuggling, an exciseman was put among us, and the first was Robin Bicker, a very civil lad that had been a flunkey with Sir Hugh Montgomerie, when he was a residenter in Edinburgh, before the old Sir Hugh's death. He was a queer fellow, and had a coothy way of getting in ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... of thousands of acres to favorites of the Family Compact; on peculations of public funds in Quebec by irresponsible executives; on mistrials of disorders in the Fur Country, when North-Wester and Hudson's Bay traders cut each other's throats; on the constant bicker and bark between Protestant Ontario and Catholic Quebec, which kept the country rent by religious dissensions when men should have ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... battle-fields of backbiting and mockery. The feuds were as bitter, if not as deadly, as those that flourished around the fountains in medieval Italian towns. Two girls would perch on the drug-store stools back to back, and bicker in pretended ignorance of each other's presence. Tudie Litton would order "sahsahpahrillah," which she hated, just to mock Amelie's manner; and Amelie, assuming to be ignorant of Tudie's existence, would retort by ordering "a strorrburry ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... are so constantly the theme of ridicule and the text of warnings to the unwedded that we lose sight of the plain truth that husbands and wives bicker no more than parents and children, brothers and sisters. In every community there are more blood-relations who do not speak to one another than divorced couples. Wars and fightings come upon us, not through matrimony so much as through ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... living under one roof, one name, and one bond of family unity—there is likely to be a great similarity of feeling upon all questions of family pride, especially among people who discuss everything with vehemence, from European politics to the family cook. They may bicker and squabble among themselves,—and they frequently do,—but in their outward relations with the world they act as one individual, and the enemy of one is the enemy of all; for the pride of race and name is very great. There is a family in Rome who, since ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... Bicker, daughter of an influential burgomaster of Amsterdam, in 1655, by whom he had two ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... winking across the table at Julian. "Seems to me there was a powerful lot of fighting in the Old Testament, and the Lord was generally on one side or the other. But you and I ain't going to bicker, Mr. Fenn. The first decision this Council came to, when it embraced more than a dozen of us of very opposite ways of thinking, was to keep our mouths shut about our own ideas and stick to business. So give me a fill of baccy ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... kept, From poppies breath'd, and banks of pleasant green, Where never yet was creeping creature seen. Meantime unnumbered glittering streamlets play'd, And hurled every where their water's sheen, That, as they bicker'd through the sunny glade, Though restless still themselves, a ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... oor oxters in snaw, the morn, Wattie," chirrupped one damsel, in the bicker of rustic wit and empty ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... briskest kind of a bicker that ensued for a little while there on the bosky, broomy hill-side in the evening light. Ah, Dessauer was down at last and Cannstadt at his throat! I went about with a whirl, leaving my own man for the moment, and rushed upon the Count's false second. ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... has burst a-bloom like CERES' daughter; The painters bicker and the plumbers flee; The H. tap in the bathroom gives cold water Endlessly, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... shiver, twitter, twire^, writhe, toss, shuffle, tumble, stagger, bob, reel, sway, wag, waggle; wriggle, wriggle like an eel; dance, stumble, shamble, flounder, totter, flounce, flop, curvet, prance, cavort [U.S.]; squirm. throb, pulsate, beat, palpitate, go pitapat; flutter, flitter, flicker, bicker; bustle. ferment, effervesce, foam; boil, boil over; bubble up; simmer. toss about, jump about; jump like a parched pea; shake like an aspen leaf; shake to its center, shake to its foundations; be the sport of the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... has been taken, and all set thick with precious stones) he shall be hanged. Away he goes at once to a traktir, or tavern, and sets to work to drown his grief in drink. After awhile he begins to totter. "Now then," he says, "I'll take home a bicker of spirits with me, and go to bed. And to-morrow morning, as soon as they come to fetch me to be hanged, I'll toss off half the bickerful. They may hang me then without my knowing anything ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... undoubtedly hurt her. He had been clumsy enough to hurt her. She was nearing forty, and he also was close behind her on the road to forty; she was a perfectly decent sort, and he reckoned that he, too, was a perfectly decent sort, and yet they lacked the skill not to bicker. They no longer had the somewhat noisy altercations of old days concerning real or fancied interferences with the order and privacy of Edwin's sacred chamber, but their general demeanour to one another had dully soured. It was as if they tolerated one another, from motives of self-interest. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... brows of certain two speeding eastward through London, enhansomed, on the night of the feast of St. Box: alter, Geoffrey Dizzard, called "The Honourable," lieu-tenant in the Guards of Edward the Peace Getter; altera, the Lady Angelica Plantagenet, to him affianced. Devil take the cause of the bicker: enough that they were at sulks. Here's for a sight ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm |
