"Querulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... business about—about Kathleen," said Force, a querulous note creeping into his voice. Mr. Bingle did not think it worth while to tell him that it was the same miserable business that kept him awake. "Now, I want the truth, Bingle. I want to be sure before I go ahead. It means a great deal ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... bitterness and injustice, of her bringing up, asked what she should read, spread out her puzzles with the poor, or with her household—half angrily, as though she were accusing someone. For the first time, as it were, she was seeking a teacher in the art of living. And though the tone was still querulous, she knew, and Marcella presently dared to guess, that the ugly house on the hill had in truth ceased to be in the least dull or burdensome to her. George went in and out of it. And for the woman that has come to ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the production of those posters and lithographs of Mr. Shepard which for so long disfigured the town. Mr. Mitchell, printer, complained bitterly over this invasion of his rights by Mr. Bim. The latter snapped pudgy fingers at the querulous Mr. Mitchell by virtue of his powerful partner. Who was Mr. Bim's partner? One year before when Mr. Mitchell's bill was seven thousand dollars, Mr. Croker, being in a frugal mood, felt excessively pained. Why then should it mount last autumn to three hundred thousand dollars and ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... up?" he asked in a querulous voice. Then his eyes fell on Teddy the elf. He scowled until his little pin-pricks of eyes almost disappeared. "Ugh! there's one of those nasty gamblesome elves," he said. "Now mischief's ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle
... Lytton Bulwer—and let us add, not all the benefit which both countries would derive from the alliance—can make it, in our times at least, permanent and cordial. They hate us. The Carlist organs revile us with a querulous fury that never sleeps; the moderate party, if they admit the utility of our alliance, are continually pointing out our treachery, our insolence, and our monstrous infractions of it; and for the Republicans, as sure as the morning comes, the columns of their journals thunder out volleys of fierce ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... heard of any other. Nothing but an anxious concern which I feel to be furnished with authentic evidences of events, which may be improved to the benefit of our country, has led me to speak of this, which I deem important in the manner I have done, and I presume Congress will not attribute it to a querulous disposition. ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... about Sir George's age, or a little younger. One, after glancing round, passed hurriedly to the window and looked out; the other sank into the nearest chair, and, fanning himself with his hat, muttered a querulous oath. ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... Arnold's from the sea-board, and Cornwallis's from the southward,—when we were driven from Richmond and Charlottesville, and every member of my council fled to their homes, it was not the total destitution of means, but the mismanagement of them, which, in the querulous voice of the public, caused all our misfortunes. It ended, indeed, in the capture of the whole hostile force, but not till means were brought us by General Washington's army, and the French fleet and army. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... exhibition of feeling would probably not have affected the casual spectator to quite the same degree. He would have seen merely a very faulty and amateurish portrait of a singularly repellent little boy of about eleven, who stared out from the canvas with an expression half stolid, half querulous; a bulgy, overfed little boy; a little boy who looked exactly what he was, the spoiled child of parents who had far more money than ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... attempt at subjugation. Strong in her power and salient with fascination, she leaned gently over the fence, and with the fan raised to her delicate ear, made him repeat his question under the soft fire of her fringed eyes. He did so, but incompletely, and with querulous laziness. ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... waiting for her fate, to the typical disconsolate and forlorn "superfluous woman," to the two standards of morality for the sexes, to the mercenary marriage with all its attendant miseries, to the selfish, exacting, querulous wife, to the disappointed or tyrannical husband; and of late, with the wider possibilities of individual pleasure and satisfaction, to the growing aversion of young people to matrimony, and the rush of women to the divorce courts for freedom from the galling ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... all lifeless things; the winds Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh, Never a senseless gust now man is born. The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts A secret they assemble to discuss When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare Like grates of hell: the peerless cup afloat Of the lake-lily is an urn, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... have seen very little to object to so long as Nellie showed no preference for any one of her admirers at Warrener, and unless peevish or perturbed in spirit would have made little allusion to it. As matters stood, however, she was in a most querulous and excitable mood: she could not rail at the real cause of her misery, and so, woman-like, she was thankful for a pretext for uncorking the vials of her wrath on somebody or something else. If the young matrons in garrison who, with the two or three visiting maidens, ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... of English History, who died in 735; BONIFACE, the English Apostle to the Germans, whose martyrdom took place in 754; LANFRANC, to whose influence over the Conqueror the English owed what liberty William still allowed them to enjoy; PETER OF BLOIS, the gossiping but querulous archdeacon of Bath; THOMAS A BECKET, the greatest churchman of any time, and the fearless upholder of the rights of the Church against the usurpations of the Crown and his contemporaries; honest plain-spoken JOHN OF SALISBURY; and the specious ERNULPH, Bishop of Lisieux, whose ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 42, Saturday, August 17, 1850 • Various
... His querulous question was more of a challenge than a request, and Dick hastened to assure him that he could unroll his blankets in a bunk in the rambling old structure that loomed dim, silent, and ghostly, on the hill beyond where they were seated. His pity and ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... slouch hat was pulled a little farther down over his eyes as he mounted the steps and entered the hallway. He listened a moment. A sort of subdued, querulous hubbub seemed to hum through the place, as voices, men's, women's, and children's, echoing out from their various rooms above, mingled together, and floated down the stairways in a discordant medley. Jimmie Dale stepped lightly down ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... through the whole round of changes of the seasons. She lay upon her bed through fifteen months. In all that time, her old cheerfulness never quitted her. In all that time, not an impatient or a querulous ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... silent too. The sweet voices of pleading affections, the loud cry of desires and instincts that roar for their food like beasts of prey, the querulous complaints of disappointed hopes, the groans and sobs of black-robed sorrows, the loud hubbub and Babel, like the noise of a great city, that every man carries within, must be stifled and coerced into silence. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the garret, with a handful of berries or a fragment of cake which the matron had given her during the day. Sometimes her voice, low and sweet, as if in tearful entreaties, floated along the garret, and then might have been heard another voice, sometimes rude, sometimes querulous, but very feeble, answering her with sharp reprimands. After this the child would come down in tears and steal away, as we have described, ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... milk-white jets. Log after log was chopped free by the axemen along the shore, but the mass remained unshaken. Meanwhile the logs were gathering swiftly behind, ramming down and solidifying the whole structure, and damming back the flood till its heavy thunder diminished to the querulous rattling of a mill-race. In a short time the river was packed solid from shore to shore for several hundred yards above the brow of the jam; and above that again the waters were rising at a rate which threatened in a few hours to flood ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... thought she heard a slight noise in the bedroom. She bent her head and listened attentively. "It is nothing; my ears often deceive me now," she mumbled as she laboriously seated herself on a maimed rocking-chair, which creaked dismally as she rocked herself to and fro. Its querulous protestations prevented her hearing the sound of a falling window which came from the direction of ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... a pout that was pleasant enough to see. Suddenly the rattle of hoofs and wheels struck her with the sense of something forgotten, and she put down her work quickly and stood up listening. The sound of rough voices and her father's querulous accents was broken upon by a cultivated and more familiar utterance: "All right; I'll speak to her at once. Wait there," and the door opened to the well-known physician of Burnt Ridge, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... her hands on the back of the wheeled chair and was about to move on, when again a querulous ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... in terrifying colours a picture of solitude, and at length his despair closed with idiotism. The amiable Gresset could not sport with the brilliant wings of his butterfly muse, without dropping some querulous expression on the solitude of genius. In his "Epistle to his Muse," he exquisitely paints the situation of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... took the letter to her father. He was in one of his most querulous moods, ill-disposed to believe in any good thing coming to him. He read the letter under such influence, and yet he could not but be sensible ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... a quagmire. The querulous voice of the man who lost his camera claims our attention. "I thought I would be able to get out and run behind and pick flowers." Turning and introducing ourselves, we find the troubled one to be an English doctor going north off his own bat with the idea of founding a hospital for sick ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... human nature. What is to become of us, thus placed between the devil of mob ignorance and corruption, and the deep sea of genteel listlessness and superficiality? After all, Sir Henry Maine is only repeating in more sober tones the querulous remonstrances with which we are so familiar on the lips of Ultramontanes and Legitimists. A less timid observer of contemporary events, certainly in the land that all of us know best and love best, would judge that, when it comes to a pinch, Liberals are still ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... at ease, that, 1727, he returned to England; where he collected three volumes of Miscellanies, in conjunction with Pope, who prefixed a querulous and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... hospitality of a millionaire, awaiting them. The skill of the cook seemed to have been quite unaffected by the losses of his master. M. Formery, an ardent lover of good things, enjoyed himself immensely. He was in the highest spirits. Germaine, a little upset by the night-journey, was rather querulous. Her father was plunged in a gloom which lifted for but a brief space at the appearance of a fresh delicacy. Guerchard ate and drank seriously, answering the questions of the Duke in a somewhat absent-minded fashion. The Duke himself seemed to have lost his usual flow of good spirits, and at times ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... him at home among men of leisure and cultivated tastes, but he seemed out of place in a log-built ranch in the snow-wrapped wilderness swept by the bitter wind. Perhaps he realized it, for his voice was querulous as he said, "I wonder if you have forgotten, Nellie, that we were sitting warm and safe in England ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... battles? Dust [206] and ashes indeed; a fable, a mythus, or not so much as that. Yes! keep those before thine eyes who took this or that, the like of which happeneth to thee, so hardly; were so querulous, so agitated. And where again are they? Wouldst thou have it ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... you now behold me, such as I have seemed, even from your infancy—a suffering, querulous, cheerless, hopeless, broken-hearted man—one who has buried all the energies of his nature, and only preserves a few of its charities tremblingly alive. It was not with me always thus—I once possessed a mind and a body vigorously ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... Mrs. Bell in a querulous voice, "and you know I hate being puzzled. Lydia Purcell, too, often puzzles me lately, but you, Mercy, never used to. Sit down, child, and stitch at your sampler, and I'll get accustomed to the sight of you, and not believe that you've been away with my blessed ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... Uncle Joe Davey, in his querulous voice. (He was the patriarch of them all.) "I can't find ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... Tennyson in my pocket, which somehow settled that question, and ended the querulous dispute between me and Conscience, under the shape of the neglected and irritated Greek muse, which had been going on ever since I had commenced my walk about Athens. The old spinster saw me wince at the idea of the author of Dora and Ulysses, and tried to ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... corpse." In his admirable chapter on Contentment, he very forcibly lays down that topic of consolation which is derived from the sense that "the universe is not made for our individual satisfaction." "Must my leg be lame?" he supposes some querulous objector to inquire. "Slave!" he replies, "do you then because of one miserable little leg find fault with the universe? Will you not concede that accident to the existence of general laws? Will you not dismiss the thought of it? Will you not cheerfully assent to it for the sake of him ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... likely to remain so. Hester, who had been lunching with her, had gone shopping into Markborough with the schoolroom maid, and was afterward to meet Sarah and Lulu at a garden party in the Cathedral Close. Lady Fox-Wilton had just left her sister's house after a long, querulous, excited visit, the latest of many during the past week. How could it be her—Alice's—fault, that Judith Sabin had come home in this sudden, mysterious way? Yet the event had reopened all the old wounds in Edith's mind, revived all the old grievances and terrors. Strange that ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... well than when Dave had last seen him. He seemed older and more shriveled, and there was a querulous, pinched expression in place of the firmness and almost nobility Dave had come to expect. His old eyes bored into the younger man, and he nodded. His voice had a faint quaver now. "All right. You're not much to look at, but you're the best we could find in the Ways we can reach. ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... certain blisters. To a war correspondent and traveler over the Dawson Trail, such blisters are nothing. To a golf player they are of profound importance. The next day, in our foursome, they affected the war correspondent's game. He became softly querulous. ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... trifle annoyed. "Be a man," he was on the point of saying, "and don't, for heaven's sake, talk in that confoundedly querulous voice." But before he had uttered the words, there rang through the studio a loud, peremptory ring at the ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... interested in the operation. It had come a dozen feet nearer, and was perking its head and seesawing on its long legs as it watched with inquisitive inspection the unusual manifestation of life behind the rock. Its twittering note had changed to an occasional sharp and querulous cry. Carrigan wanted to wring its neck. That cry told the other fellow that he was ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... rings about her eyes; the mouth was hard and pinched, but the eyelids swollen; while the crossed wrinkles on her brow told the same tale of grief grown petulant, and of pain grown soured, as the thin lip, quivering and querulous, and the nervous hand, never still and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... nothing unusual for him to receive a sudden call. Jack might have preferred staying in Chester, where things were commencing to grow pretty warm along the line of athletics, his favorite diversion. His parents, however, believed it would be unwise to offend the querulous old dame who was so crotchetty that she might take it into her head to change her will, and leave everything to some society for the amelioration of the condition of stray cats. It would be a great pity to have all that fine property go out of the Winters' family, they figured; and perhaps ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... the resounding chords of the war march. The man at the youth's elbow was babbling. In it there was something soft and tender like the monologue of a babe. The tall soldier was swearing in a loud voice. From his lips came a black procession of curious oaths. Of a sudden another broke out in a querulous way like a man who has mislaid his hat. "Well, why don't they support us? Why don't they ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... beyond the surf beckoning to me with flapping arms, and had cast on me a spell whereby, as my brain shrivelled to madness, my body was shrivelling and changing into that of Black Bartlemy. Always I knew that Humphrey waited me beyond the reef, watchful for my coming and growing ever more querulous and eager as the spell wrought on me so that he began to call to me in strange, sobbing voice, hailing me by my ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... also at the pleasures of sense, without submitting to their law. That is a grief we all feel, a knot we cannot untie. Tasso's is no infrequent case in modern biography. A man of genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of physical laws, self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortunate, querulous, a "discomfortable cousin," a thorn to himself ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... done little but disease their mind and heart. They resorted more and more to those arts which are the weapons of crafty, ambitious, and unprincipled women. They were too apt to be cunning, false, intriguing. They were personally cowardly, as their own chronicles declare; querulous, passionate, prone to unmanly tears; prone, as their writings abundantly testify, to scold, to use the most virulent language against all who differed from them; they were, at times, fearfully cruel, as evil women will be; cruel with that ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... her washing-tub to accompany me upstairs, stood drying her arms on her apron, and talking in a high-pitched querulous voice. 'No one can say I have not been unfortunate this year,' she grumbled. 'There's Bell, he gets worse and worse. I fetched him myself out of the Man and Plough last Saturday night, where he was drinking ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... man gazed upon her like one who felt displeasure at having a contingency so painful forced upon his consideration. Without making any reply, however, he looked thoughtfully into the fire for some time, after which he rose up, and, with a querulous and ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... such number that she can not only give them adequate care but keep herself mentally and spiritually alive, as well as physically fit, can discharge her duties to her children much better than the overworked, broken and querulous mother of a large, ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... seldom hurts people, and she was brought back to everyday affairs by the querulous voice ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... satisfied with something less? But Columbus was as inexorable as the Sibyl with her books, and would hear of no abatement in his price. For this "great constancy and loftiness of soul,"[506] Las Casas warmly commends his friend Columbus. A querulous critic might call it unreasonable obstinacy. But in truth the good man seems to have entertained another grand scheme of his own, to which he wished to make his maritime venture contribute. It was natural that his feelings toward ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... Querulous, complaining sounds come from the lodge room. The tenor horns are crooning, and the bass horn blatting gently, while the clarionet players are chasing each other up and down the scale, like squirrels running round and round in a cage. The warming-up exercises are on. They ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... retreat, but Ford advised him against it as "the land from which few travellers return," and told him that he had much better go to Seville. Still later Constantinople was considered and then the coast of Barbary. Into his letters there crept a note of querulous complaint. John Hasfeldt besought him to remember how much he had travelled and he would find that he had wandered enough, and then he would ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... pleasure of welcoming her old friend Mr. Baxter, of Dundee, although his daughter Isabel, married to Mr. Booth, still held aloof. Peacock, Horace Smith, and Hogg were also among the guests. We find constant references to Godwin having been irritated and querulous with Mary or Shelley. A forced, unnatural, equanimity during one period of his life seems to have resulted in a querulous irritability later—a not unusual case—and he had to vent it on those who loved and revered him most, or in fact, on those who would alone ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... I see," he said weakly. "I'm damned glad." Then he felt foolish, and querulous, and as if he should make some apology, and instead said, "But five dimensions does seem extreme. Three is enough for ordinary use, and four is luxurious. Five seems to be ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... I am afraid I trouble you with my querulous epistles, but this is probably the last. To-morrow or the next day decides my fate with respect to the divorce, when I expect to be a free man. In vain! Was it not for her and to lay my freedom at her feet, that ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... to crawl along the packed gear with which the wagon was laden my mother said in a tired and querulous voice, "Can't you ever be ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... at the best, in advising his retirement. It is the only occasion in all the correspondence in which the least cloud seems to have rested on the perfect friendship of the two men. Atticus does not appear to have shewn any annoyance at the querulous remarks of his friend. He steadily continued to write, giving information and advice, and made no difficulty in supplying his friend with money. During Cicero's absence Atticus became still more wealthy than before by inheriting the estates of his ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... small; then he jumped up with both feet at once, heaved deep sighs, groaned, nipped his eyes so close together that the tears began to trickle down his cheeks, opened them wide again, fixed his gaze immovably upon the charming Magdalene, sighed again, lisped in a thin, querulous, mutilated voice, "Ah! carissima—benedettissima! Ah! Marianna—Mariannina—bellissima," &c. ("Oh! dearest—most adored! Ah! Marianna—sweet Marianna! my most beautiful!") Salvator, who had a mad fancy for ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... permanent discomfort, but which necessitate the surrender of cherished expectations, the change of favorite plans, it may be, the life-long abandonment of aims and hopes that had held the foremost place in the anticipated future. Here submission of some sort is a necessity. But the submission may be querulous and repining; it may be bitter and resentful; it may be stern and rigid. In the last of these types only can there be any semblance of virtue; and this last can be virtuous, only where inevitable events are attributed to Fate, and not to Providence. ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... perfectly fresh and blithe goddess of the fields, whose children, if she has them, must be as the perfectly discreet and peaceful, unravished Kore; on the other hand, we have Persephone, as the wholly terrible goddess of death, who brings to Ulysses the querulous shadows of the dead, and has the head of the gorgon Medusa in her keeping. And it is only when these two contrasted images have been [95] brought into intimate relationship, only when Kore and Persephone have been identified, that the deeper mythology ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... sounded querulous. "There's no such thing. Don't talk to a Wall Street man about the law ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... from remoter boughs, or alighted on the shoulders of Abdul, at whose side I was standing. A few of them examined me in every position their inquisitive eyes could take; displaying all the advantages of their versatile necks, and pretending querulous fear in ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... man, with quick, questioning eyes, and hair like a clothesbrush. His short alert hair, his raised and querulous eyebrows, his taut moustaches, and a bit of beard that hangs like a dagger from his under lip, give him the appearance of constant surprise and fretfulness. When he is talking to me he is embarrassingly playful—but I shall ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... not querulous, nor malevolent; She loved not the fierce wrangling of women; She was not a backbiting serpent, or a liar; She sold not the Son of God for ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... woman, for Roman girls were generally young women at fourteen years of age. She was never ruddy or robust, always pale, delicate-looking and fragile-seeming, never actually ill, but usually ailing, peevish, limp and querulous. Life in the Atrium largely consisted in the effort to keep Meffia well, to make sure that she was not overtired, to foresee and forestall opportunities for her to blunder, to repair the consequences of her mistakes, generally to ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... Progress," a work on folk-lore, and several Bibles. The saut-backet, or salt-bucket, stood at the end of the fender, which was half of an old cart-wheel. Here Cree worked, whistling "Ower the watter for Chairlie" to make Mysy think that he was as gay as a mavis. Mysy grew querulous in her old age, and up to the end she thought of poor, done Cree as a handsome gallant. Only by weaving far on into the night could Cree earn as much as six shillings a week. He began at six o'clock in the morning, ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... last morsel of his story and had warmed some of it over for another taste, there came an ominous silence, broken at last by the querulous voice of Bill, arguing ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... is that time goes by while I give it to every querulous man who claims it, and thine altar is empty of all offerings to ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore
... was attended by his favorite son William, then nineteen years old. Proud as was this father of his son, he did not guess that in four short years this boy would, through his brilliancy, cast his own splendid efforts into the shadow; and that Burke, the querulous, would give the son a measure of approbation he never vouchsafed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... was brief enough, but there was plenty of husk to the grain. The old expatriate was querulous, long-winded, not niggard with his ink when he cursed the English and damned the Prussians; and he obtained much gratification in jabbing his quill-bodkin into what he termed the sniveling nobility ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... period had married a woman from Heanor, a daughter of the "Black Horse". She was a slim, pretty, dark woman, quaint in her speech, whimsical, so that the sharp things she said did not hurt. She was oddly a thing to herself, rather querulous in her manner, but intrinsically separate and indifferent, so that her long lamentable complaints, when she raised her voice against her husband in particular and against everybody else after him, only ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Slip, where I stop every day and buy apples; she's sixty years old, and through thick and thin, under a dripping wreck of an umbrella when it rains, under the sky when it shines—warming herself by a foot-stove in winter, by the sun in summer—there the old creature sits. She has an old, sick, querulous husband at home, who tries to beat her. Her daughters are all out at service—let us hope, in kind families—her sons are dull, ignorant men; her home is solitary and forlorn; she can not read much, nor does ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... up the Professor. His response to the call was a little languid, and his reception of the news of Quest's successful enterprise was almost querulous. ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... permissible. But Bill had his own ideas of the humorous, and maybe his own no less definite ideas of dignity. In this latter virtue I counted the fact that although once or twice, when he was very low, he gave way to a little fretting to me, he never, I am convinced, let fall one querulous word in the presence of his wife. She sat by her husband's side, and when things were at their worst the two said naught. The wife numbly watched her Bill's face, turning now and then to glance at the activities of little Bill with his ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... have wandered up the hill road,—the discontented, "traipsing," exasperating things? She started in that direction, when she heard a crash in the Croft kitchen, and then the sound of a boy's voice coming from an inner room,—a weak and querulous voice, as ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... were discoverable, the most material of which was an emotion of tenderness at times, and a querulous sensibility not proper to the character of lady Macbeth's cool, deliberate, and inflexible resolution by which the poet has distinguished her. Great allowance is due for the perturbation of the actress ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... our own theatres, obtain from the audience the greatest share of applause. The dialogue in all their dramas, whether serious or comic, is conducted in a kind of monotonous recitative, sometimes however rising or sinking a few tones, which are meant to be expressive of passionate or querulous cadences. The speaker is interrupted at intervals by shrill harsh music, generally of wind instruments, and the pauses are invariably filled up with a loud crash, aided by the sonorous and deafening gong, and sometimes by the kettle drum. An air or song generally ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... much negative, too little positive, in child-training; too much querulous reiteration of "don't," too little intelligent teaching how to do. Little children like to be "shown how;" they are fascinated with the games and gifts of the kindergarten, which aims to teach something, not to repress everything. Children are delighted ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... Selwyn's voice was querulous. "Don't I tell you everything? Mrs. Swink has friends here, strivers like herself—the only kind of people you won't have anything to do with. But I'm going to ask you to call. ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... of this fact made Barter's case seem hopeless to himself. If he had brow-beaten, or blustered, if he had shown anger or impatience, or had been querulous, there might have seemed to exist some slenderest chance for him. But Steinberg was so unmoved that he ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... the circle with a stick, there came a poor blind man, of diminutive stature, squeezing beneath his left arm a suffocating accordion, which, every now and then, as he stumbled against the uneven planks of the wharf, gave a querulous squeak, doleful in its cadence as the feeble quavers evoked by Mr. William Davidge, comedian, from the asthmatic clarionet of Jem Bags, in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... whether his Passions (especially those of the gentler Kind) play easie, since it is not his Wit, but the Delicacy and Tenderness of his Sentiments, that will affect his Readers. His Versification likewise should be soft, and all his Numbers flowing and querulous. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the lapping of the evening tide sounded quite loud, and the querulous call of a gull that swept by ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... the Pedius—genuine—such as the singers of Antioch take of mornings to restore the waste of their voices," the dealer answers, in a querulous nasal tone. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the old order of things on the range. And it had begun to look as though he was going to best Time at his own game, and refuse also to grow old; as though he would go on being the same pudgy, grizzled, humorously querulous Old Man beloved of his men, the Happy Family of the ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... come; and so was her mother—a little querulous chip of an old lady with a peevish face, who, in right of having preserved a waist like a bedpost, was supposed to be a most transcendent figure; and who, in consequence of having once been better off, or of labouring under an impression that she might have been, ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... gusto, and not at all in the querulous spirit of the delightful member of Parliament who complained at Westminster with unconscious humour that the agent and the police in that case had "dishonourably" stolen a march on the defenders ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... boisterous, please," responded a querulous voice from a great easy-chair by the glowing grate, and a middle-aged lady turned a white, faded ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... picture was one of BURNE-JONES'S best; "SALLIE" was snub-nosed and showily drest; I sought her visage in querulous quest, When oh, what a surprise! Plump in the midst of a "puddingy" face, Coarse-cut in feature, devoid of grace, Nature capricious had chosen to place Two lovely ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... Charlemagne is the reason for the language being thus querulous; for, unlike Upper Saxony, the Saxony of the Lower Weser, the Saxony of the Angrivarii, Westfalii, and Ostfalii, was truly the native land of an old and heroic German population, of a population which under Arminius had resisted Rome, of a population descended from the Chamavi, the ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... moment!" cried a querulous voice, and we looked up to find a queer little old man, jerking and twitching in the doorway. He was dressed in rusty black, with a very broad-brimmed top-hat and a loose white necktie—the whole effect being that of a very rustic parson or of an undertaker's mute. Yet, in ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the most nerve-racking situation with the even-tempered calmness of one who had foreseen it and to whom it was but a trivial incident, inevitable to his far-reaching plans. When others—their tempers tried to the breaking point—cursed with dry, high-pitched, querulous curses the heat, the land, the sun, the dust, the Company and their fellow-sufferers, Jefferson Worth's cool, even tones and unruffled spirit helped them to a needed self-control and gave them a new ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... boy whispered. "They're always crowdin' me." His voice was querulous, uncomprehending, like that of a child complaining of something beyond his experience. "I can't remember when they haven't been crowdin' me. Movin' me on, you understand? Always movin' me on. Moved me out of India, then Cairo, then they closed Paris, and now they've ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... threshold her mother met her, querulous and in the midst of adjusting summer covers ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... not admit. In weary and querulous tones she began expatiating on the merits of her daughter: her fair hair, her graceful neck—until the African, bored and impatient, turned on ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... feathers and strong quills burst forth suddenly, her nose became a hard crooked beak, her toes changed to curved talons, and Pamphile was no longer Pamphile, but it was an owl I saw before me. And now, uttering a harsh, querulous scream, leaping from the ground by little and little, in order to try her powers, and presently poising herself aloft on her pinions, she stretched forth her wings on either Side to their full extent, ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... said Captain Stewart, with an elderly man's half-querulous certainty. "Yes, the name is Powers. I remember it well. And I remember—Yes, it was odd, was it not, your meeting him like that, just as you were talking of Arthur? You—oh, you didn't speak to him, you say? No, no, to be sure! You didn't recognize him at ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... bit querulous that evening. The Heads of Training Schools get that way now and then, although they generally reveal it only to the First Assistant. They have to do so many irreconcilable things, such as keeping down expenses while keeping up requisitions, and remembering the different ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... seems to stand in need of an extension Prophecies Prophesy as much as you like, but always hedge Teach the ignorance of what people do not want to know Timid compromisers We are all egotists in sickness and debility Weakness had made him querulous ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... a good deal more in the original, totally uninteresting to the reader, in the same querulous strain of invective against Oviedo, but which is here abridged as ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... popped, and the briers grew pink and white. Through the lengthening days we toiled in the truck patch, but always as I bent to my work Polly Ann's face saddened me—it had once been so bright, and it should have been so at this season. Old Mr. Ripley grew querulous and savage and hard to please. In the evening, when my work was done, I often lay on the banks of the stream staring at the high ridge (its ragged edges the setting sun burned a molten gold), and the thought grew on me that I might make my way over ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... done in good taste, too," Mr. Lovel went on, in rather a querulous tone. "I did not expect to see that. But of course a man of that kind has only to put himself into the hands of a first-class architect, and if he is lucky enough to select an architect with an artistic mind, the thing is done. All the rest is merely a question ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... painful and terrible," said Mr. Scott Eccles in a querulous voice, "but it is really uncommonly hard on me. I had nothing to do with my host going off upon a nocturnal excursion and meeting so sad an end. How do I come to be mixed up with ...
— The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge • Arthur Conan Doyle
... by party interests to co-operate with the Teutons, while the Senate, which favoured neutrality on independent grounds, had made it a rule to second every resolution of the Chamber. In a word, although Italy might wax querulous and importunate, her complaints and her demands would, it was assumed, play a part only in the scheme of diplomatic tactics, but would never harden into ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... worn for festival. I recognized Grandma Holly, with her soft white hair, and I thought I could tell which were Mis' Ailing and Mis' Burney and Mis' Norris. And the faces of them all, the gentle, the grief-marked, even the querulous, were grown kindly with the knowledge that somebody ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... and of a moral character more manly and on a higher level, had chosen the navy, and went off to the preparatory college at Portsmouth. But he evidently underwent persecution for righteousness' sake at the college, which was then (say about 1820) in a bad condition. Of this, though he was never querulous, his letters bore the traces, and I cannot but think they must have exercised upon me some kind of influence for good. As to miscellaneous notices, I had a great affinity with the trades of joiners and of bricklayers. Physically I must have been rather tough, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... regarded her with a reflective interest. She must have been very beautiful then, he thought. She was almost beautiful still. Certainly she was a very distinguished person, with her costly clothing, her rich furs, her white hair, and that faded rose-leaf skin. The petulant, querulous droop of her mouth escaped MacRae. He was not a physiognomist. But the distance of her manner did not escape him. She acknowledged the introduction and thereafter politely overlooked MacRae. He meant nothing at all to Mrs. ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the room with no difficulty. A faint cough from within, and a querulous protest, answered his knock. Mr. Hamlin entered without further ceremony. A sickening smell of drugs, a palpable flavor of stale dissipation, and the wasted figure of Jack Folinsbee, half-dressed, extended upon the bed, greeted him. Mr. Hamlin was for an instant startled. There were ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... her own command laid upon them. She sought wildly to delay, delay to the last fragment of the last second before yielding to the inevitable; she wanted to loiter over her hair, and her fingers raced. She could hear voices downstairs. Gratton's voice, low and urgent; a thin, querulous voice; she shuddered. That would be the justice. Another voice, a man's and strange to her. He said nothing, but twice she heard him laugh, a laugh that jarred upon her nerves. She guessed who he would be; the man Gratton had sent ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... Montague Shirley?" was the querulous greeting from the old gentleman, when he was admitted to the drawing-room. "You kept me in anguish the entire night, with your silly words. The telephone bell rang at intervals of half an hour until dawn: I may have missed some important business deal by not replying ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... day, and had but two days' rations left. Other children, who were helping the nuns, moved noiselessly about among the prostrate forms. The hushed silence of sanctuary was broken only by low moaning, or the querulous sobbing of little children weary with pain. The Sister brought me to see one little mite, whom she called the "first fruit" of ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... quite querulous. Have noticed sometimes, when a man hopelessly in the wrong, he is inclined to turn on his best friend and rend him. This Clongorey business, truly, a bad one. When, just now, SEXTON moved adjournment of House, in order to call attention to ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... remained on my memory, but some I have not thought of from my infancy, as I grow old, return upon my mind with a charm altogether inexpressible. Would any one believe that an old dotard like me, worn out with care and infirmity, should sometime surprise himself weeping like a child, and in a voice querulous, and broken by age, muttering out one of those airs which were the favorites of my infancy? There is one song in particular, whose tune I perfectly recollect, but the words that compose the latter half of it constantly refuse ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... to a great extent, what we ourselves make it. The cheerful man makes a cheerful world, the gloomy man a gloomy one. We usually find but our own temperament reflected in the dispositions of those about us. If we are ourselves querulous, we will find them so; if we are unforgiving and uncharitable to them, they will be the same to us. A person returning from an evening party not long ago, complained to a policeman on his beat that an ill-looking fellow ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... querulous tone, she departed. She had much to do besides her duties in the belfry. Her father was an invalid who required constant care; there was only one servant, an old peasant woman who cooked. The Government required her father to keep open the White ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... about the number of chapels he had to attend, about the gown he wore, about the master's treatment of him, about the want of plums in the pudding, as old men and schoolboys grumble. It was wonderful what a liking John James took to this odious, querulous, graceless, stupid, and snuffy old man, and how he would find pretexts for visiting him at his lodging in the old hospital. He actually took that journey that he might have a chance of seeing Clive. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... clearly ascertained, it is not necessary to seek the mind's construction in the writings: and we must regret being compelled to believe that some of Mr. Pope's actions, at the same time that they prove him to be querulous and petulant, lead us to suspect that he was also envious, malignant, and cruel. How far this will tend to confirm the assertion, that when a boy, he was an amateur of this royal sport, I do, says Mr. Ireland, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... forgiving the temper of her Horace—for he is her Horace still—and who can wonder at that? She will bear with all—will live, will die with him. I look, Eusebius, upon this ode as a real consolation to your lovers of an ambiguous and querulous age. Seeing what we are daily becoming, it is a comfort to think that, should such untoward persons make themselves disagreeable to all else of human kind, there will be, nevertheless, to each, one confiding ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... if you please?" a thin, querulous voice called out. A little old man, crouching in the darkness behind a railing, suddenly rose and exhibited his features, carved ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... fit of coughing, and in the querulous, plaintive, fretful, sometimes angry tones which invalids have, he grumbled at Angela and then cried over her, saying what a burden he was to her, while she, moving about the room in her bare feet, coaxed and caressed him, and persuaded him to take ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... Ecclesiastes contains some fine things but is strongly tinged with pessimism, cynicism and affectation. Some of the Proverbs are good, but not many of them are in common use. Job contains some fine passages, and so do some of the Psalms; but the Psalms generally are poor and, for the most part, querulous, spiteful and introspective into the bargain. Mudie would not take thirteen copies of the lot if they were to appear now for the first time—unless indeed their royal authorship were to arouse an adventitious interest in them, or unless ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... ship when the shot were flying; and now he saw in him another Doughty sent by the friends of Spain to hang on his arm. "In persisting," he told Lord Burleigh, "he committed a double offence, not only against me, but it toucheth further." To his embittered sense the querulous protest was a treasonable attack on his own authority, and in his fury he brutally dismissed the old admiral from his command and placed him under arrest on his flag-ship. In vain the astonished veteran protested his innocence, apologized, and made submission. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... Maurice accompanied his grandmother, Bertha, and Count Tristan to the residence of the Marchioness de Fleury. Count Tristan's malaise evinced itself by his unusually fretful and preoccupied manner, his querulous tone, and a partial forgetfulness of those polite observances of which he was rarely oblivious. He allowed his mother to stand, looking at him in blind amazement, before he remembered to open the door; was very near ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... never mutable Scott of the earlier years, still constant in fun and kindness, in quaint erudition and hearty friendship, though he is all this in a slightly deadened and sicklied degree. But there are strange breaks-down and unfamiliar touches, now of almost querulous self-concern (the thing most foreign to his earlier nature), as where he complains that his companions, his son and daughter, 'are neither desirous to follow his amusements nor anxious that he should adopt theirs'; now of still more ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... pigs:—the first small piggy doesn't feel well; and the second one threatens the doctor to tell; the third little pig has to linger at home; and the fourth small porker of meat has none; then the fifth little pig, with a querulous note, cries "weak, weak, weak" ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... see the tried leader, her soldier husband, sitting in saddle at the bank. Bravely she answered the flutter of his handkerchief in farewell. Then all was swallowed up in the shadows of the distant prairie, and from the nursery adjoining her room there rose a querulous wail that told that her baby daughter was waking, indifferent to the need that sent the soldier father to the aid of distant comrades, threatened by a merciless foe, and conscious only of her infantile demands and expectations. Not yet ten years wed, that brave, devoted wife and mother ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... Maxence. I was abroad a little after six the next morning. The air was biting, and smelt of frost. In an open place a score of women wrangled together over the day's market; and the noise of their negotiation sounded thin and querulous like that of sparrows on a winter's morning. The rare passengers blew into their hands, and shuffled in their wooden shoes to set the blood agog. The streets were full of icy shadow, although the chimneys were smoking overhead ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... indeed a very great book, such as could only be produced by a great mind, and it comprises more wisdom and wit than a score of old English folios could together yield to the most devoted reader. Some querulous persons there are who affect to consider the present as a shallow age, because, forsooth, huge volumes of learning—each the labour of a lifetime—are not now produced. But the flood-gates of knowledge ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... never comes in that I do not feel a north-wind vigor and healthfulness in his cordial, sincere, hearty manner, and in his wholesome way of looking at things. The Parson, you would say, was the east wind, and only his intimates know that his peevishness is only a querulous humor. In the fair west wind I know the Mistress herself, full of hope, and always the first one to discover a bit of blue in a cloudy sky. It would not be just to apply what I have said of the south wind to any of our visitors, but it did blow ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... but that's no reason—!" Mr. Touchett let his phrase die away in a helpless but not quite querulous sigh and ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James |
