"Moroseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... passed through these strange, these miserable days—when he and Laura were once more under the same roof, living the same household life. Like Laura, he clung to every hour; like Laura, he found it almost more than he could bear. He suffered now with a fierceness, a moroseness, unknown to him of old. Every permitted mortification that could torment the body or humble the mind he brought into play during these weeks, and still could not prevent himself from feeling every sound of Laura's voice and every rustle ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... comfort to his wounded heart, and his health gradually returned; but, looking upon mankind as false deceivers, he no longer permitted the caresses of any but his keepers, manifesting to all strangers the savageness and moroseness ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... taciturnity, bordering on moroseness, of a talker usually so brilliant led his host to surmise that Lightmark had ruined a picture, his hostess to conclude that he had quarrelled with his wife. He came home early, and occupied the small hours of the morning ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... emulous contention of the Forum; partly, on account of the weakness of his constitution; and partly, because he could not submit to the follies and impertinencies of the common people (which we Orators are forced to swallow) either, as it was generally supposed, from a peculiar moroseness of temper, or from a liberal and ingenuous pride of heart. After acquiring, therefore, in his youth, a tolerable degree of reputation, his character began to sink: but in the trial of the Vestals, he again recovered it with some additional lustre, and being thus recalled to the theatre of Eloquence, ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... exhaust human charity, or require contemptuous crusade against equally honest, living toilers? Are antiquity and foreign birthplace imperatively essential factors in the award of praise for even faithful and noble work? We lament the caustic moroseness of embittered Schopenhauer, brooding savagely over his failure to secure contemporaneous recognition; yet after all, did he malign his race, or his age, when, in answer to the inquiry where he desired to be buried, he scornfully exclaimed: ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... was one, at least, of the party, who was watching Lucia with most deep and painful interest. Lord Scoutbush was too busy with his own comforts, especially with his fishing, to think much of this moroseness of Elsley's. "If he suited Lucia, very well. His taste and hers differed: but it was her concern, not his"—was a very easy way of freeing himself from all anxiety on the matter: but not so with Major Campbell. He saw all this; and knew ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... fun and joke: or who on the occasion of a festival, can so entirely forget themselves and everything else but the enjoyments of the moment; but the very sight of a stranger is odious to the priests, and the moroseness which thou observest is intended as retaliation on me for my alliance with the strangers. Those very boys, of whom thou spakest, are the greatest torment of my life. They perform for me the service of slaves, and obey ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... curiosity in her earnest gaze. Tavernake was, in his way, good enough to look upon. He was well-built, his shoulders and physique all spoke of strength. His features were firmly cut, although his general expression was gloomy. But for a certain moroseness, an uncouthness which he seemed to cultivate, he might even ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in search of game, muttering and gesturing to himself. He is thought to be identified with Thomas Crager, whose wife had been hanged in Salem as a witch, and whose only child had been stolen by Indians. After a long, vain search for the little one he gave way to a bitter moroseness, and avoided the habitations of civilized man and savages alike. It is a satisfaction to know that before he died he found his daughter, though she was the squaw of an Indian hunter and was living with his tribe on the ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... blessing "him that gives, and him that takes'?" Do you know that good manners, as well as good sense, demand that we should look at objects on their bright side'? Do you know that it is contemptible selfishness in you to shed gloom and sorrow over a whole family by your moroseness and ill-humor'? ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... correct. The packer was a taciturn inhabitant of the wilds who seldom indulged in an unnecessary remark. There was, however, no moroseness about him; the man was good-humored in his quiet way, and his usual ruminative calm was no deterrent from apparently tireless action. For the most part, he lived alone in the impressive stillness of the bush, ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... for your tail-coat, if that's what you mean," answered Mr Philp with sudden moroseness, pulling out his ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the three people most concerned seemed perfectly satisfied. David Graham was positively transformed; his moroseness was gone from him, he lost his queer ways and wild manners, and became gentle and affectionate in the midst of this great and unexpected happiness. Miss Edith Crawford ordered her trousseau, and talked of the diamonds to her friends, and Lady Donaldson was only waiting for the consummation ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... kept him in my service, and still keep him, as a phenomenon of moroseness not to be matched ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... that one of as much meekness, as some are of moroseness, even upright Moses himself, in his service of the essential and increated truth (of higher consequence than the historical truth controverted betwixt us) had notwithstanding 'a respect to ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... Johnny reminded her. He had lost all his moroseness in the interest of the conversation. He had forgotten what a tonic his word-battles with Mary V could furnish. "You better stick to it, because it will sure pan out that way. You'll hate to admit, five years from now, that you once took me for a donkey. Besides, you can't have my ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... never been attained in a degree so eminent. This first interchange of thought upon a topic of literature did not tend to slacken my previous disposition to retreat into solitude; a solitude, however, which at no time was tainted with either the moroseness or the pride of ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... aunt found her, later in the evening. She was touched by the figure, the shabby black frock, the white tired face. She had been honestly disappointed in her niece, disappointed in her plainness, in her apparent want of heart, in her silence and moroseness. Mathew had told her of the girl's outburst to him against her father, and this had seemed to her shocking upon the very day after that father's death. Now when she saw the photograph clenched in Maggie's hand tears came into her eyes. She said, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... fierce for being restrained. He thought Darius a gross fleshly organism, as he indeed was, and he privately objected to many paternal mannerisms, of eating, drinking, breathing, eructation, speech, deportment, and garb. Further, he had noted, and felt, the increasing moroseness of his father's demeanour. He could remember a period when Darius had moods of grim gaiety, displaying rough humour; these moods had long ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... me," he explained; "and, Aaron, if you will only believe me, it tells me also that a little of the man you were still clings to you. Come out of the moroseness in which you have enveloped yourself so long. Think what a joy it ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... inability to set it straight. But the basest disowning of flattery is to be disagreeable without any purpose in view, and it shows an altogether inelegant and clumsy unfitness for social intercourse to shun by unpleasing moroseness the suspicion of being mean and servile in friendship; like the freedman in the comedy who thought railing only enjoying freedom of speech. Seeing then, that it is equally disgraceful to become a flatterer through trying ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... of their poise and their silence in the presence of strangers is not due to moroseness or the absence of active thought. They have learned in the woods, if they are to be successful in their hunts, to be personally as unobtrusive as possible, often to remain motionless, and all the while to watch and listen alertly. Whenever ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... being already then of a very injudicious nature, I confess that, having nursed it myself for eleven years with some success, I dreaded to think what it would become under his auspices. And so I agreed to remain. But the position increased in difficulty. Adrian's moroseness seemed to grow upon him; he showed an exaggerated horror of company; either flying from visitors as from the pest, and shutting himself up in his own apartments, or (on the few disastrous occasions when my persuasions induced ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... she had never before known John Pendleton. The old taciturn moroseness seemed entirely gone since they came to camp. He rowed and swam and fished and tramped with fully as much enthusiasm as did Jimmy himself, and with almost as much vigor. Around the camp fire at night he quite rivaled Jamie with his story-telling of adventures, both laughable and thrilling, ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... suddenly a bluish flame of lightning flashed once more through the cracks of the shutters and the words died on her lips, while the maid, almost as frightened as the youngest child, howled and screamed out, "The good God is angry!" When it was dark again in the room she added with pedagogical moroseness, "You're all of you good for nothing, anyhow!" These words, no matter how odious the mouth from which they fell, made a deep impression on me; they forced me to look upward, above myself and above everything which surrounded me, and kindled in me ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... have not enough knowledge. Neither of us, I take it, has ever seen a case, and the extant descriptions are inadequate. From what I know of the disease, its symptoms agree with those in your case in respect of the alleged moroseness and in the gradually increasing periods of lethargy alternating with periods of apparent recovery. On the other hand, the disease is said to be confined to negroes; but that probably means only that negroes alone have hitherto been exposed to ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... even proceed to moroseness, though sore against my heart, unto poor babes, in tearing from them the half-eaten apple, which they privily munched at church. But verily it pitied me, for I remembered the days of ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... essential information, he urged the policy of chastising the sullenness out of a couple of incommunicative boys. His attitude, and mine, hitherto, towards the blacks had been of cheery good-nature tempered with considerate authority. Present moroseness was novel, and he was eager to sweep it away with a sturdy stick, and thus to demonstrate that when a friendly white man visited a camp blacks should be deferential and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... great wish of his heart—the promotion of learning, which, it cannot be denied, was at that time in danger of being overthrown by bigotry and fanaticism: for this reason it was that he opportunely interposed to shelter Oxford from the moroseness of Owen and Godwin. Well might his eye look dreamy. How could that of the author of a "Discovery of a New World" look otherwise? He openly maintained that, not only was the moon habitable, but that it was possible ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... life, Tiberius seems to have conducted himself with a uniform repugnance to nature. Affable on a few occasions, but in general averse to society, he indulged, from his earliest years, a moroseness of disposition, which counterfeited the appearance of austere virtue; and in the decline of life, when it is common to reform from juvenile indiscretions, he launched forth into excesses, of a kind the most unnatural and most detestable. Considering ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... at her in a quick nervous way, and then looked back again at the fire. The sight of her delicate blanched face had in some respects a more and more poignant power with him as the years went on. His anger sank into moroseness. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Tongue had a fault it was a certain moroseness and fierceness of temper, a readiness and even an apparent pleasure in taking offense, that made him somewhat of a solitary in our midst and threw him more than ever on the companionship of his own Kanakas; so that at night, when one had occasion to seek him out, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... there are sweeping denunciations of amusements which we now justly deem innocent, and without which or something equivalent to them, the wrinkles on the brow of care could not be smoothed, nor life preserved from dulness and moroseness. There is fanaticism in this no doubt: but in justice to the Methodist as well as to the Puritan, let it be remembered that the stage, card parties, and even dancing once had in them something from which even the ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... one child here who has almost floored me; but I WILL NOT acknowledge myself beaten by a child of five. He alternates between sullen moroseness, when he won't speak a word, and the most violent outbursts of temper, when he smashes everything within reach. He has been here only three months, and in that time he has destroyed nearly every piece of bric-a-brac in the ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... Sometimes he would hesitate; then I would hear him stop beside the window, where I knew the ice bowl and the decanter were placed upon a table which had stood beside the head of his bed so burdened since my early childhood. I had always dreaded his moroseness and instinctively felt the cause of it. I had never really loved him until just the last few days, and now I felt my love rise in a tide that threatened ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... things supportable which at first would seem beyond our powers of endurance. Mr. and Mrs. B., and, indeed, all the other B.'s, male and female, had got so used to the tyranny of this ill-tempered animal, that they put up with his moroseness almost without a growl; but there is a limit to sufferance, beyond which neither men nor bears can travel, and that boundary was at last attained with the B.'s. As what I am now about to relate is, however, rather an important fact in my biography, I must ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... production of insanity and crime. Over fatigue means a weakening of the power of attention, and hence of will, a paralyzing of the highest brain centers, a lowered resistance to the more primitive instincts and passions. Chronic irritability, moroseness, pathological impulses of all sorts, generally betokens eyestrain, dyspepsia, constipation, or some other bodily derangement. With the regaining of normal health the unruly impulses usually become quieter, sympathy flows more freely, the man becomes ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... asks what test there is that this kind of sudden conversion is not from God, as instability and frequent change are the test, on the other hand, in disproof of the divinity of the conversions just now mentioned, I answer,—its moroseness, inhumanity, and unfitness for this world. Men who change through strong passion and anguish become as hard and as rigid as stone or iron; they are not fit for life; they are only fit for the solitudes in which they sometimes bury themselves; they can ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... Miss Nadine should know his heart before long, and have also a chance to know her own mind. "The fact is, the old boy has lived the life of a recluse, that's all, but I'll find a way to pierce the shell of his moroseness. There's one comfort," he smiled, "No other fellow ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... signs of increased vigour, his mind, I think, improved in tone, at any rate for a time. From the evening on which he had shown me the terrible discovery in the Via del Giardino he seemed to have laid aside something of his care and depression. He now exhibited little trace of the moroseness and selfishness which had of late so marred his character; and though he naturally felt severely at times the fatigue of travel, yet we had no longer to dread any relapse into that state of lethargy ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... another attempt, happily with better success than previously; and brought the dray from its miry adherence to a position on the bank. It was then reladen with the goods; while the men, barely recovered from the chagrin caused by the misadventure, performed their work with a sullen moroseness, enlivening their gloom by animadversions on the river, the country, and ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... idioms. They are unable to discover any unity in the patched, irregular structure. The speculative element both in government and education is superseded by a narrow economical or religious vein. The grace and cheerfulness of Athenian life have disappeared; and a spirit of moroseness and religious intolerance has taken their place. The charm of youth is no longer there; the mannerism of age makes itself unpleasantly felt. The connection is often imperfect; and there is a want of arrangement, exhibited especially ...
— Laws • Plato
... suddenly and out of the fullness of his manly strength. The change is so great, the difference so significant and painful, that the consequence must be a series of unpleasant properties,—egoism, excitability, moroseness, cruelty, etc. It is significant that the very old man assumes all those unpleasant characteristics we note in eunuchs—they result from the consciousness of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... from. I had only heard that he had written some sort of article in a progressive Petersburg magazine. Virginsky had introduced me casually to him in the street. I had never in my life seen in a man's face so much despondency, gloom, and moroseness. He looked as though he were expecting the destruction of the world, and not at some indefinite time in accordance with prophecies, which might never be fulfilled, but quite definitely, as though ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... and kindly, seemed more so than ever to-night, evidently trying to make up for his roommate's moroseness by his own geniality. He showed Shag his treasures, his collection of curiosities, his two lynx-skin rugs—animals shot by his father years before—his pet books, and finally came ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... Mistress Fanshawe; she had found the evening a grand failure: completely upset as to temper, she gave way to the most uncontrolled moroseness as soon as we were seated, and the carriage- door closed. Her invectives against Dr. Bretton had something venomous in them. Having found herself impotent either to charm or sting him, hatred was her only resource; and this hatred she expressed in terms so unmeasured and proportion so monstrous, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... invitation, for he needed it greatly, and began to warm himself. And as he was warming himself, one of the young men whose face was such a picture of moroseness as to make you die of fright, said to him, "What think you, countryman, of ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... that reiterated, "I told you so," in which, Ranny reflected, he might have taken it out of him. He also seemed to regard his son Randall as one smitten by God and afflicted, to whose high and sacred suffering silence was the appropriate tribute. His very moroseness provided the ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... lying dead drunk on the road-side within a hundred yards of the local railway station. He was brought home and put to bed, and next day was seized with a severe fit of epilepsy. For weeks his life was in danger, and when at last he recovered strength of body, his mind remained in a state of moroseness that at times bordered on insanity. He became a fierce hater of women, and the chief victim of his frenzy was his stepdaughter, ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... I attributed the unusual moroseness to London in vile weather. At the best of times Jaffery grew impatient of the narrow conditions of town; yet there he was week after week, staying in a poky set of furnished chambers in Victoria Street, and doing ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... to every thing which usually bears the appellation of pleasure. His features were scarcely ever relaxed into a smile, nor did that air which spoke the unhappiness of his mind at any time forsake them: yet his manners were by no means such as denoted moroseness and misanthropy. He was compassionate and considerate for others, though the stateliness of his carriage and the reserve of his temper were at no time interrupted. His appearance and general behaviour might have strongly interested all persons in his favour; ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... peasant, in a striped hempen shirt and patched drawers, stands facing the investigating magistrate. His face overgrown with hair and pitted with smallpox, and his eyes scarcely visible under thick, overhanging eyebrows have an expression of sullen moroseness. On his head there is a perfect mop of tangled, unkempt hair, which gives him an even more spider-like air of moroseness. He ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... light from heaven which rains happiness on this dull, dark earth! A spell falling upon the spirit, which reminds us of a higher existence! A memory of bliss! A present delight! An earnest of future felicity! It makes hideousness beautiful and stupidity clever, old age young and wickedness good, moroseness amiable, and low-mindedness magnanimous, perversity pretty and vulgarity piquant. Truly it is sovereign alchemy and excellent flux for blending contradictions is our ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... startled eyes caught sight of him, a welcoming light came into her relaxed face. With her first spoken word some earlier touch of moroseness seemed to slip away from her. If it required an effort to shake herself together, she gave no outward sign of it. She had promised that there should be no complaining and no hesitations from her; and Durkin knew she would adhere to that promise, ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... upon her clenched hands. How empty, empty her hopes had been! Even his boyhood had disappointed her, in spite of his cleverness at his books. The irritability of his childhood had become moroseness, and he had alienated more often than he had attached his friends. A certain passionate sincerity, however, had never been lacking in his worst moods; and toward her he had been a loyal, if often heedless, son. In this loyalty, ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... had been right; he was unnaturally calm. Even his habitual moroseness had given place to an expression of weary indifference, which did not change when he caught sight of his brother-in-law. Only in the glance which he threw on the German adjutant, who was escorting him, there was a momentary ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... illusions accompany us: we have little inclination, little time, for jocularity and laughter. Light things are easily detached from us, and we shake off heavier as we can. Instead of levity, we are liable to moroseness: for always near the grave there are more briers than flowers, unless we plant them ourselves, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... wondered at, therefore, that the sorely pestered Mr. Rosen should be at this time a prey to care so carking as to border on forthright melancholia. Never a particularly cheerful person, at Red Hoss' soft knock upon his outer door he raised a countenance completely clothed in moroseness where not clothed in whiskers and grunted briefly—a sound which might or might not be taken as an invitation to enter. Nor was his greeting, following upon the caller's soft-footed entrance, calculated to promote ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... I gathered in faint intervals between anguish while Marc'antonio bound me with rude splints of his own manufacture. Yet he said little and did his surgery, though not ungently, with a taciturn frown which I set down to moroseness, having learnt somehow that the bandits had broken up their camp on the mountain and marched ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... absurdity of the belief that the body is the man. Two bodies may be alike, as in the case of twins, but the souls, the real men, may be absolutely unlike. The real man is superphysical. His intelligence or his stupidity, his genial disposition or his moroseness, his generosity or his selfishness, are but the manifestations of himself through the body by which they are expressed. The body itself is a mere aggregation of physical atoms, as a planet is, so organized that they ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... benefits spoil them by their silence or slowness of speech, which gives them an air of moroseness, as they say "yes" with a face which seems to say "no." How much better is it to join kind words to kind actions, and to enhance the value of our gifts by a civil and gracious commendation of them! To cure your friend of being slow to ask a favour of you, you may join to your gift the ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca |
