"Grouch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... right—yes, sir," replied Merton Gill, though but half respectfully. The "Oh, all right" had been tainted with a trace of sullenness. He was tired of this continual nagging and fussing over small matters; some day he would tell the old grouch so. ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... impossible to preserve one's dignity when suffering a reprimand in public; but when you are handicapped by a shabby bath-robe, a three days' growth of beard, and a grouch that gives you the expression of a bandit, and the public happens to be the one being on earth whom you are most anxious to please, the ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... marked the distinction between a grouch caused by a cootie-lined bunk and a desire to place a bomb under the Capitol ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... seen completely shrouded in his blanket, standing or sitting a little apart from the camp, he either has a grouch or he is praying. In either case it is not good manners to ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... My wish avails me not, My work is coarse and Mame is onto me; So am I never Johnny-on-the-spot When any wooden Siwash ought to be. Thus I get busy working up a grouch Whenever heartless ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... isn't," said Uncle Larry. "The old grouch must have forgotten about them." He admired Jenny Lind as much as Mary ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... Loses what little sense he's got. Why, the last time him and m' girl friend got to scrapping was when he was going on to Pittsburg to play, about a month ago. He'd been out with her the day he left for there, and he had a grouch or something, and he started making low, sneaky cracks about her Uncle Sigsbee. Well, m' girl friend's got a nice disposition, but she c'n get mad, and she just left him flat and told him all was over. And he went off to Pittsburg, and, when he started in to pitch the opening ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... in the little village called Matilda "Matilda Grouch" and they called Katrinka "Katrinka Sunshine". All the children of the little village loved Katrinka, for she always had a cooky or a dainty in her apron pocket to give them, or she would pat them on their ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle
... overwork and shirk exercise, and let your temper run away with you, and smoke strong cigars on an empty stomach; and when you get indigestion as a natural result you look on yourself as a martyr, nourish a perpetual grouch, and make the lives of everybody you meet miserable. If you would put yourself into my hands for a month I would have you eating bricks and thriving on them. Up in the morning, Larsen Exercises, cold bath, a ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... especially a marked change in demeanour among some of the groups. In the early part of the summer every man answered every man good-naturedly, except he happened to have a next day's head or some other sort of a personal grouch. Now many compact little groups of men worked quite apart. When addressed they merely scowled or looked sullen, evidently quite unwilling to fraternize ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... have gone on a strike. I had left my crank at the camp and my only hope seemed to be to buy or borrow one somewhere. I asked the two or three fellows standing about the telegraph office where I might be likely to find one. No one seemed to know, but just then the old grouch—excuse me, person who keeps the ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... ain't nothin' wrong with him exceptin' his grouch. When he works that off so's it won't come back any more he'll be plumb man, an' ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... grouch tonight, haven't you? You seem all flittered up about something. What's the trouble? Sore about my not showing up at your apartment? I'll ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... froze the words that were all ready to slip off the end of my tongue, and made my grouch against MacRae crystallize into a feeling akin to anger. Why couldn't the beggar stand his ground and deliver the ugly tidings himself? That bunch of cottonwoods with the new-made grave close by the dead ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... chair to fully face the lad, the grouch caustically inquired: "What 'n seven kinds of blue blazes do you think I ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... Don't eat hurriedly; chew the food properly. 2. Don't overload the stomach. 3. Don't eat green or overripe fruit. 4. Don't eat anything while away from camp or barracks, whose materials or manner of preparation seem questionable. 5. Don't bring a "grouch" to the table with you. 6. Don't eat on the march; don't drink too ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... been sitting down there in the punt. The river's silver. Come down for a while," he implored. "All evening I've been as lonely as a leper. Ever since you motored off with Kenny, Don's been a grouch. Can't you climb down ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... whether it be the late holiday feast, or the usual family gathering, it sets the pace for the twenty-four hours. A cheerful start in the morning may give an optimistic momentum for all-day hill-climbing; or, one may slip dejectedly down hill if leaden-weighted with a "morning grouch" (one's own, or somebody else's). Even fellow "boarders" might reflect on this, with profit. Preoccupied with our own affairs, we forget to be mutually considerate. We habitually wake to rush and worry, taking social recreation chiefly at the close of day, when too weary to appreciate ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... looking at his clear eyes and steady hand and firm skin, "for a number of reasons. One of them is that you're not the sort of man who's a grouch at breakfast." ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... &c 901. moodiness &c adj.; perversity; obstinacy &c 606; torvity^, spinosity^; crabbedness &c adj.. ill temper, bad temper, ill humor, bad humor; sulks, dudgeon, mumps^, dumps, doldrums, fit of the sulks, bouderie [Fr.], black looks, scowl; grouch; huff &c (resentment) 900. V. be sullen &c adj.; sulk; frown, scowl, lower, glower, gloam^, pout, have a hangdog look, glout^. Adj. sullen, sulky; ill-tempered, ill-humored, ill-affected, ill- disposed; grouty [U.S.]; in an ill temper, in a bad temper, in a shocking ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... these results; and, anyway, it would be impossible to generalize to the extent of asserting that slow heart beat always gave a pleasant state of feeling, and rapid heart beat an unpleasant; for there is slow heart beat during a "morning grouch", and rapid during joyful expectation. Or, in regard to breathing, try this experiment: hasten your breathing and see whether a feeling of pleasantness results; slacken it and see whether unpleasantness results. The fact is that pleasantness can go with ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... wanst in me cousin Terence's fam'ly. They was livin' down near Healey's slough in wan iv thim ol' Doherty's houses,—not Doherty that ye know, th' j'iner, a good man whin he don't dhrink. No, 'twas an ol' grouch iv a man be th' name iv Malachi Doherty that used to keep five-day notices in his thrunk, an' ownded his own privit justice iv th' peace. Me cousin Terence was as dacint a man as iver shoed a hor-rse; an his wife was a good woman, too, though I niver took much to th' ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... wistfully of those brusque cavemen of whom she read in the novels which she took out of the village circulating library. The female novelist who was at that time her favourite always supplied with each chunk of wholesome and invigorating fiction one beetle-browed hero with a grouch and a scowl, who rode wild horses over the countryside till they foamed at the mouth, and treated women like dirt. That, Eunice had thought yearningly, as she talked to youths whose spines turned to gelatine at one glance from her bright eyes, was the sort of man she wanted to meet and never ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... me, there was only one who did not care for the game. He refused steadfastly to play, and, having learned the penalty of alighting below the line, very carefully avoided the unsafe territory. That fly was a sullen, disgruntled creature. As the convicts would say, it had a "grouch" against the world. He never played with the other flies either. He was strong and healthy, too; for I studied him long to find out. His indisposition for ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... Say, boys, there are ways and ways of earning it, and ways and ways of spending it! The fellow who knows all about that side of her is the barber Cupido. He imagines he's an artist, because he plays the guitar; and besides he has a Republican grouch, and was a great admirer of her father's. He's the only one in town who followed all she was up to, in the papers. They say she doesn't sing under her own name, but uses some prettier sounding one—foreign, I believe. Cupido is a regular busybody and ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... next town every man in the show had a grouch and a Katzenjammer, and their hair was so sore it was murder and suicide combined ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck |
