"Gruffness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with their olive-trees. Inside the church is a seething mass of country-folk and townspeople, mostly women, and these almost all old, but picturesque beyond description; kerchiefs of every colour, wrinkles of every shape and depth, skins of every tone of brown and yellow, voices of every gruffness, shrillness, strength, and weakness. Wherever an empty corner can be found, it is soon filled by tottering babies and mischievous children. The country-women come with their large dangling earrings ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... he grumbled, with that shade of gruffness which is but the transition to absolute surrender. "I am not talking ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... upstairs and put that coat and hat away," ordered Jennie, with sudden gruffness. "You're no more fit to roam this wild desert of boarding-school life alone than a baby in long clothes! Run, now!" and Jennie darted ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... and with affected gruffness.. "If you were sure of nothing else in this world, you might be sure of that!".. He paused squared his shoulders, and put up his eyeglass, through which he scanned his friend with such a persistently scrutinizing air, that Alwyn ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Robin returned gruffly—the gruffness being merely the cloak to conceal his own riotous felicity which every Englishman in similar circumstances thinks it necessary to assume. But Ann saw through it, and was not to ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... not too easy either, at this time, though few folks troubled themselves to speculate upon the reason for her added gruffness. So she concealed her anxieties under an extra harshness of tongue and did her best to make life a burden to everyone she came across. For, naturally, now that the Inn was no longer a pleasant place in mine host's absence, ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... and medicine; but he would not listen to the Bible. Flora knew that he liked her visits, however; so, with prayers in her heart and the Bible in her hand, she persevered hopefully, yet with such delicacy that the gruff old man became gruffer daily, as his conscience began to reprove him for his gruffness. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... being so opportunely at hand when hard blows were likely to be going! Two of the other ships were cutters, similar to Erling's Swan, and carrying sixty men each, and one was a little larger, holding about eighty men. It belonged to Glumm the Gruff; whose gruffness, however, had abated considerably, now that there was a prospect of what we moderns would call "letting the steam off" ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... time he snapped, "That's enough. Don't give him any more ether." He was concentrated on tying an artery. His gruffness seemed heroic to her. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... did not let Mr. Crow's gruffness trouble him. He had so many other cronies that he frequently remarked that he had never spent a ...
— The Tale of Major Monkey • Arthur Scott Bailey |
