"Sardonic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to do so, Crackenfudge," replied the baronet, with a grim, sardonic smile, or rather a sneer, "I assure you, that such a measure would become a very general and heavy impost upon the country. But goodby, now; I shall remember your wishes as touching the magistracy. You ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... your hat and come away, while you receive Lou's cheery "See you again," and the sardonic, sweet smile of Nancy that seems, somehow, to miss you and go fluttering like a white moth up over ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... captain had dropped back close to the carriage, the dandy seemed to fathom his design, and favored it by checking his horse. Merle, who had flung him a sardonic glance, encountered one of those impenetrable faces, trained by the vicissitudes of the Revolution to hide all, even the most insignificant, emotion. The moment the curved end of the old triangular hat and the captain's ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... not occurred to Lightfoot, nor to Ab. The little lad, of the world, yet not in it, saw vaguely the surprises, lights and shades and contrasts of existence, and sometimes they made him laugh. The laugh of the cave man was not a common event, and when it came was likely to be sober and sardonic, at least it was so when not simply an evidence of rude health and high animal spirits. Humor is one of the latest, as it is one of the most precious, grains shaken out of Time's hour-glass, but Little Mok somehow caught a tiny bit of the rainbow gift, ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... a sardonic smile, but when his wife, after waiting for her to be quite gone, came out to him, he ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... the way he proposed. Every time he would be near the garden, he would cough in such a noisy and sardonic way that the Heir, who was sitting with Derevenko on the bench would turn his long, pensive face, and his old sailor guardian would look with hatred ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... her dead ambitions, which grave she had dug with the fingers of her heart, Hattie could walk now with unsensitive feet. It had become dry clay with cracks in it like sardonic smiles. ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... man was on the train with his thin, sardonic friend, and with the old woman Lady Sellingworth had ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... many dogs milling about the yard. The log school had weathered against the red wall of the mesa for fifty years. There probably was not a person in the crowd who had not gone to school there, who did not, like Judith, love every log in its ugly sides. Judith caught Douglas' sardonic gaze, tossed her curly head and urged Swift up the steps, where she looked toward the road to the Pass, shading her fine ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... all its parts, and made his way unobserved to one of the doors in the lower part of the vessel. Thus, when the chance for escape came, he was ready for it. As the Skylark paused over the Isthmus, his lips parted in a sardonic smile. He opened the door and stepped out into the air, closing the door behind him as he fell. The neutral color of the parachute was lost in the gathering twilight a few seconds after he ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... which he was galloping, the rider would reach the main road a quarter of a mile ahead of them, about at the point where it entered the wood. Kenneth now made out an unfenced wagon-road through the field, evidently a short-cut from Rachel Carter's farm to the highway. He permitted himself a faint, sardonic smile. This, then, was to be her means of reaching the highway rather than to use the lane that ran past his house and no doubt crossed ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... priest. He was very feeble, as we could see, though his eyes, bright and piercing, contrasted strangely with the deadly pallor of his cheeks. A straggling grey moustache and beard partly concealed his mouth, which was set in a smile half mirthful and half sardonic. I put him down as the cure of a neighbouring hamlet, as he gave us the benediction, and invited us to join him, saying ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... Manhattan, Dorn felt peacefully out of place. His thought had become: "I want to get back to where I was." In the midst of the mechanical carnival of Broadway he caught a memory of himself walking to work with a stream of faces—of a sardonic Erik Dorn to whom the street was a pattern; to whom the mysteries tugging at heels that scratched the pavements were the amusing ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... true character, was by no means a devil's. His physiognomy had been much damaged, and one eye removed by the premature explosion of a blast in some old Ballarat mine. The blind eye was covered with a green patch, which gave a sardonic appearance ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... studying with strained acuteness the big lymphatic mask of the Director, with sundry sharp glances aside at the Chairman. The nervous changes on his alert, meagre old face showed how intently he followed every phase of their talk. A certain sardonic perception of evil in the air curled on his lip when he saw the Marquis accede with a bow and wave of the hand to Thorpe's proposition. Then he made his bow in turn, and put the best face possible ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... and her flowers could not soften or bring peace to his galled soul. The knowledge that the whole situation was the result of his own doings kept his bitterness always at white heat. The expression of his thin, haggard face was sardonic, and the groups of simple children, accustomed to ask any stranger for stamps for their collections—a queer habit of the place—turned away from him when once they had ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... thing go. It seemed in keeping with the destiny of the man. And it completed the sardonic picture. It was all fated, as the Gaelic people say.... I saw no reason ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... With a sardonic smile Willie shook his head and took another cigarette; and just then Christina had to go to attend to ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... It was up to Grant then to escape, if he could, and to report to Miro on Ganymede immediately with his findings. Miro was leaving by his private Service flier at once for Ganymede, to await him. Grant thought he saw a faint sardonic gleam in the Inspector's eyes at that, but paid no particular heed to ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner
... not," said Bob, with a something sardonic in his little laugh, "but I thought I might as well. It's the long way, six miles ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... mobility, and his most expressive results are produced by liftings of the high-arched brows and the play of passions about the flexible mouth. The natural line of his lip, not scornful in itself, is on that straight border-ground where a hair's breadth can raise it into sardonic curves, transforming all its good to sneering evil. In his rendering, Iago must become a shining, central incarnation of tempting deceit, with Othello's generous nature a mere puppet in his hands. As ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... dogs! cut them over the face and eyes like cats! bang them like asses! thank ye! thank ye, Cornwallis and Rawdon! most noble lords, I thank ye! you have at last brought the wry face upon my countrymen, the cold sweat, the sardonic grin. Thank God! the potion begins to work! huzza, my sons! heave! heave! aye, there comes the bile; the atrabiliary; the black vomiting which portends death to the enemy. Now Britons, look to your ships, for Carolina will soon be too hot to ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... burdens; or that his head thickly covered with fairish hair, was hatchet-shaped with the helve or face suggesting that while it could and would cleave any obstacle, it would wear a merry if somewhat sardonic smile the while. No one had ever seen Norman angry, though a few persevering offenders against what he regarded as his rights had felt the results of swift and powerful action of the same sort that ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... written in a very neat hand, was nearly completed. During the troublesome and painful cure he lost none of his vivacity, but he became less and less amiable. He could not write a note to ask for anything without scoffing rudely and bitterly, generally in sardonic verse. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... has glamor and beauty and it is told with an easy confidence. As for Blood himself, he is a superman, compounded of a sardonic humor, cold nerves, and hot temper. Both the story and the man are masterpieces. A great figure, a great epoch, ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... sardonic cachinnation). Ha! You expected something better than that. Well, you're right. Her face does not look well ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... bounded over the paving-stones and stopped at my hotel. The driver lifted his hat obsequiously. I, with sardonic smile, entered the hotel, where I was not unknown. No doubt was made as to the character ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... Lodge was open, and an elderly woman stood upon the steps. She watched us with a sardonic eye as we ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... too good for me," he wrote to his brother. "She's young and beautiful and sole heiress of an estate twice as big as our whole family can muster. She's uncultivated, the diamond in the rough, and all that sort of thing, you understand, but she'll polish easily." He put all this down in the sardonic wish to procure some sort of settlement from his brother. He got it by ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... that when Voltaire said, 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin,' he was quoting, with sardonic irony, Saint Teresa! You cannot be pleased at Mrs. Parflete's decision. The theatre in England is a sport—not an art. In France it is an art, but," he added drily, "it ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... the truths of experience, with an absence of self-consciousness truly amazing in the artistic temperament of either sex, she wrote exactly as she thought, saw and felt. Humour was not her strong point. She had an exultant joy in living, but laughter, whether genial or sardonic, is not in her work. Irony she seldom, if ever, employed; satire she never attempted. It was on the maternal, the sympathetic side that her femininity, and therefore her creative genius, was most strongly developed. She was masculine only in the deliberate libertinism of certain episodes ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: "Gad! she'd better!" At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... still hover darkly over the valley of death, and the muttering thunder that ever and anon reverberates faintly in the distance seems the sardonic chuckle of the demon of destruction as he pursues his way to ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... who was a perfect courtier, smiled in a manner, half kindly, half sardonic, and said that I was at that happy age when I had no need to think of anything, as my kind friends and relations did all ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... performance with a carriage of the head which, for superciliousness, I never have seen equaled in man, woman, or beast. His war-cry was a tinny bleat: the cry of a soul bursting with sardonic merriment. It was like the Falstaffian laughter of the duck, without ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... news philosophically enough, with some rather sardonic remark about my patient and me being well qualified to keep each other company. But to my mother it was a flash of joy, followed by a thunderclap of consternation. I had only three under-shirts, the best of my linen had gone to Belfast to be refronted and recuffed, the night-gowns were not marked ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... mind or a character, even of the most rudimentary sort. She knew nothing, except how to dance, and she knew that exactly as a kitten knows how to play with a ball of string; she dreamed of diamonds and wonderful restaurants and a sardonic hero nine feet tall with a straight nose and a long chin, who would clutch her passionately in his arms (there was no more real passion in her than there is in a soap-bubble) and murmur vows of ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... thirty years of age. His manners were those of good society; he wore jewels of value; the collar of his shirt came to the tops of his ears. His conceited and even impertinent air betrayed a consciousness of hidden superiority. His pallid face seemed bloodless, his thin flat nose had the sardonic expression which we see in a death's head, and his green eyes were inscrutable; their glance was discreet in meaning just as the thin closed mouth was discreet in words. The first man seemed on the whole a good fellow compared with this younger man, who was slashing the air with a cane, the ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... Lazarist, who by undertaking to teach me Latin made me detest it. His hair was coarse, black and greasy, his face like those formed in gingerbread, he had the voice of a buffalo, the countenance of an owl, and the bristles of a boar in lieu of a beard; his smile was sardonic, and his limbs played like those of a puppet moved by wires. I have forgotten his odious name, but the remembrance of his frightful precise countenance remains with me, though hardly can I recollect it without trembling; especially when I call to mind our meeting ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... the sardonic answer of the whites of Tullahoma County to those who deal fluently with questions of which they know but little, was fain to take Bill's sincere advice. Behind the shelter of the first clump of trees, he ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... lingered on Dartrey's face. He ate and drank in his usual sparing fashion, silently and apparently wrapped in thought. From the other side of the pink-shaded lamp which stood in the middle of the table, Nora watched him with a curious, almost a sardonic sadness in her clear eyes. An hour ago she had looked at herself in the mirror and had been startled at what she saw. The lines of her black gown, the most extravagant purchase of her life, had revealed the beauty of her soft and shapely figure. Her throat ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Massachusetts' answer would have been 'Yes.' I believe I said that. The men of Illinois believe I did not say it. The men of Illinois believe that when I sat down after making the few remarks I did, that I had a sardonic smile on my lips and they say that I have insulted them to the heart and I say to them: 'If there is anything that I can say, anything that I can do, as soldier to soldier to remove from your mind, or from the minds of any man who may have been in this theater, any belief ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... sat at the outer edge of the crowd of overdressed females and overfed men, and, with a sardonic smile, listened to Flagg telling his assembled friends and sycophants how glad he was they were there to see him give away a ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... story-teller, although the mechanical excellence of most of the stories is unquestionable,—they go through the motions quite as if they were the real thing. But the appeals of the editors for poetry and literary prose; their occasional sardonic comments upon the apathy of the college reading public,—especially during the waning later years of the Magazine, before it was absorbed into the monthly issue of the News,—would seem to indicate that the pure, literary imagination ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... generation of the work of Samuel Butler. College professors, he avers, have an antipathy for Samuel Butler; the chief interest of Butler, he further states, was in theology. Now I am a college professor without antipathy to Samuel Butler, with, on the contrary, the warmest admiration for his sardonic genius. And furthermore Butler's antipathy for college professors, which is supposed to have drawn their fire in return, is based upon a ruling passion far deeper than his accidental interest in theology, a passion that gives the tone and also the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... few months of our marriage. By and by I heard the sound of violent hysterical sobbing, accompanied by the noise of hurrying footsteps and the rapid whisking about of female garments. In a few moments the doctor entered with an expression of sardonic amusement on his face. "Yes!" he said in reply to my look of inquiry, "hysterics, lace handkerchiefs, eau-de-Cologne, and attempts at fainting. All very well done! I have assured the lady there is no fear of contagion, as under my orders everything ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... encourage her in a few half-suppressed words, took her trembling hand in his great paw, pressed it reassuringly, winked humorously, and then looked about him with a sardonic grin. ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... soundless laugh of his, but I felt too much touched by the feeling in Ernest's little face to join in the miser's sardonic amusement. When Ernest saw that we moved towards the door, he planted himself in front of it, crying out, 'Mamma, here are some gentlemen in black who ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... the resemblance between us was still so great that, for an instant, I thought it was my own reflection in the glass. He had a dark patch over his eye, but our features were absolutely the same. Then he smiled in a sardonic way which had been a trick of his from his boyhood, and I knew that he was the same brother who had driven me from my native land, and brought disgrace upon what had been an honourable name. I went to the door and I admitted him. That would be about ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... greatly attracted by him. He was not prepossessing. Fair, with a flaccid unwholesome complexion, foxy haired, his beard cut to a point, small moustaches curled upward showing thin pale lips, and giving his mouth a disagreeable curve also upwards, a sort of set smile that was really a sardonic sneer, conveying distrust and disbelief in all around. His eyes were so deep set as to be almost lost in their recesses behind his sandy eyelashes, and he kept them screwed up close, with the intent watchful gaze of an animal about to make a spring. His whole aspect, his shifty, restless manner, ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... wanted me still he could have me. And he did. And then I went out to live with my uncle, and this man lives in that town too, and I've seen him ever since, all the time. I know him now. And—" Out of the dimness the clergyman felt, rather than saw, a smile widen—child-like, sardonic—a curious, contagious smile, which bewildered him, almost made him smile back. "You'll think me a pitiful person," she went on, "and I am. But I—almost—hate him. I've promised to marry him and I can't bear to have his ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... how time dragged! What awful conceptions were formed in my fevered brain! What leering, sardonic faces pictured themselves against the black wall; what demon voices spoke and laughed in the void above! At times I stood in a cave thronged with jeering devils, some with the savage countenance of the heathen, some yet more satanic; yet ever in the midst of their ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... queer things and in very odd ways. There's "sardonic," for instance. As applied to a grin, it means one that a man makes if he is forced to laugh when he doesn't want to, or tries to smile when he really is ready ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... demanded the impeachment of the unworthy judge. With perfect candor and the naked vigor that in the years to come was to become known the world around he said precisely what he meant. Under the genial sardonic advice of the veteran Republican leader, who "wished to give young Mr. Roosevelt time to think about the wisdom of his course," the Assembly voted not to take up his "loose charges." It looked like ignominious defeat. But the next day the young firebrand was back to the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... said, with a sardonic smile, "you needn't call in help. We stand pat. How much is ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... earnestly at the brig from the distance, gripping hard the brass rail in front of him, till, the two ships closing, he lost all confidence in himself, and retreating to the chartroom, pulled the door to with a crash. There, his brows knitted, his mouth drawn on one side in sardonic meditation, he sat through many still hours—a sort of Prometheus in the bonds of unholy desire, having his very vitals torn by the beak ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... as he studied Carmen and planned her training, that whatever instruction he offered her must be without taint of evil, so far as he might prevent. And yet, the thought of any attempt to withhold from her a knowledge of evil brought a sardonic smile to his lips. She had as yet everything to learn of the world about her. Could such learning be imparted to her free from error or hypothesis, and apart from the fiat of the speculative human mind? It must be; for he ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... this suggestion with a quick glance at his departed client on the bed, as though he feared some sardonic reproof from ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... over the ills of life, such undoubted kingliness, that every one succumbed and rested gladly on so firm a precedent. Mr. St. George in this brief time had accepted much hospitality, had won a thousand friends, and by Christmas had made himself, through his genial strength to-day and his sardonic sarcasm to-morrow, as thoroughly the autocrat of all the region as ever Mr. Erne had been. For all that men want is a master; give them somebody that will lead, and glad enough are they to follow. But Mr. Erne's supremacy had merely been a matter of birth and of kindly feeling; Mr. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... going so smoothly," Deborah said, and a faint sardonic glimmer came into her father's hunted eyes. ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... from oppression. So, with the gang at their very doors, waiting to snatch away their husbands, their fathers and their sons, they carolled "Rule Britannia" and congratulated themselves on being a free people. The situation was unparalleled in its sardonic humour; and, as if this were not enough, the "Noodle of Newcastle," perceiving vacuously that something was still wanting, supplied the bathetic touch by giving out that the king, God bless him! could never prevail upon himself to break through the sacred liberties of his people save ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... "nothing could be further from my thoughts than to insult you, or to treat you in any way with disrespect. And I will not acknowledge that anything you can say can convey an insult to myself." Lira smiled in a sardonic fashion. "But," added Nino, "if it would give you any pleasure to fight, and if you have weapons, I shall be happy to oblige you. It is a quiet spot, as you say, and it shall never be said that an Italian artist refused to ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... months of his Pontificate, to the same line of action, and to bring to the notice of His Holiness the conduct of the Irish priesthood in supporting O'Connell. The fact that neither Gregory XVI. nor Pio Nono made any response to these appeals lends point to the sardonic comment of Disraeli on the Minto mission—that he had gone to teach diplomacy to the countrymen of Machiavelli. The views of Palmerston, on the other hand, are to be seen from a letter addressed to Minto, which is extant, in which, ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... to the factory, where an explanation is made to the men. Mr. Brent receives a check for a month's wages in advance, and a vacation. Mr. Wilmarth looks on with a sardonic suavity, saying little, and betraying surprise rather than ill-humor, but he hates Floyd Grandon to the last thread. The man has come between him and all his plans. No mere money can ever make up to him for being ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... in his horse and sat glancing serenely round about him, his lips curling in his bleak, sardonic smile, his prominent chin something more aggressive ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... were sitting—one in an apron, cobbling shoes on the bench by the one window; the other, evidently a caller, close by the open door, reading something from a newspaper and gesticulating rather wildly. A sardonic gleam flashed across Dan's handsome face as he passed them with a nod, and disappeared in the room beyond. This was his own, where he stinted himself in other ways that he might keep it unshared, thus insuring the strict privacy ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... seraph. Then again he is so sly and still, so imperturbably saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness towards all that men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter sardonic humour, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,—that you look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some huge foolish Whirligig, where kings and beggars, and angels and demons, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Antonio, well known to him in former days, approach, and draw the deadly lot, which ratifies their fate. No yielding of compassion, no recollection of former friendship, has power to alter the cold and sardonic sarcasm with which he sketches their characters, and marks their deportment in that awful moment. Finally, the zealous attachment of Alonzo for his king, which, in its original expression, partakes of absolute devotion, is changed, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... debt. But he has a great soul. And don't prevaricate, Susan. Where have you been?" Mr. Hadley bent his sardonic brows. ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... his own behoof and that of Lakeland: if he keep his word as to me, he may do as much for you, or more. Copies are at Cambridge; among the Oxonians too; I have with stingy discretion distributed all my copies but two. Old Rogers, a grim old Dilettante, full of sardonic sense, was heard saying, "It is German Poetry given out in American Prose." Friend Emerson ought to be content;—and has now above all things, as I said, to be in no haste. Slow fire does make sweet malt: how true, how true! Also his next work ought to be a concrete thing; ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... had been brought to him, so that his friends not unnaturally counted it as another of Harry's many happy, but usually impracticable, thoughts. But in this instance Mayhew made his personality felt, for the character of the paper, instead of partaking of that acidulated, sardonic satire which was distinctive of Philipon's journal, on which it was to have been modelled, took its tone from Mayhew's genial temperament, and from the first became, or aimed at becoming, a budget of wit, fun, and kindly ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... leaf in his mental pocket-book covered with the anecdotes, figures, and facts about that lady. "The old ogre means," thought he, "that I'm lucky because his leaf is blank about Antonia." But the old baronet had turned, with his smile, and his sardonic, well-bred air, to listen to a bit of scandal ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... shaped—seemed so out of proportion that he looked at a glance senile. But no one who had business dealings with him suspected him of senility or any degree of weakness. He spoke in a thin dry voice, shrouded in sardonic humor. ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... man laughed joyously. "You can search me," he answered, with a shrug. "The gods must have been in a sardonic mood about the time I arrived to gladden this sorrowful sphere. I've never used more of it than I could help, and everybody called me 'Jem' until I went to college, the initials making a shorter and more agreeable name. But before I'd been there a week, I was 'Jemima' or 'Aunt Jemima' ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... to town. And then, when he went out, he found the Piazza della Signoria packed with men: but all, all men. And all farmers, land-owners and land-workers. The curious, fine-nosed Tuscan farmers, with their half-sardonic, amber-coloured eyes. Their curious individuality, their clothes worn so easy and reckless, their hats with the personal twist. Their curious full oval cheeks, their tendency to be too fat, to have a belly and heavy limbs. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... announce that the car was ready, and they went out. Farbish watched them with a smile that had in it a trace of the sardonic. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... one God, and Mahomet is his Prophet," said the pacha. "Mustapha," continued he, turning round to him with a sardonic smile, "may your shadow never he less—but you have swallowed ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... some of my lectures, 'The Harmonious Blacksmith.' My dear one had a great favour for this honest Darwin always; many a road to shops, and the like, he drove her in his cab, in those early days when even the charge of omnibuses was a consideration, and his sparse utterances, sardonic often, were a great amusement to her. 'A perfect gentleman,' she at once discerned him to be, and of sound worth and kindliness, in the most unaffected form." He died in 1881, aged 77, leaving no memorial to the public of ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... Bismarck, pursuing the gruesome trade of politics, concealed the devastating wit of a Moliere; his surviving epigrams are truly stupendous. And Beethoven, after soaring to the heights of tragedy in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, turned to the sardonic ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... legitimate pet in the proper sense of the word? As to the bull-dog, I say little. He at least is a good water-dog, and, when he is taught, he will retrieve birds through the heaviest sea as long as his master cares to shoot. But his appearance is sardonic, to say the least of it; he puts me in mind of a prize-fighter coming up for the tenth round when he has got matters all his own way. Happily he is not often kept as a pet; he is usually taken out by fast young men in riverside ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... was Estelle the dancer, with whom Emile allowed her a slight acquaintance. He neither approved of women in general nor of their friendships. Estelle was the bonne amie of the sardonic Manager, who occasionally beat her, after which ceremony it was her custom to drink absinthe. Sometimes, for this reason, she was unable to appear on the stage. She would come into Arithelli's dressing room and weep, and smoke innumerable cigarettes, ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... plaster of one of the most sardonic of Notre Dame's gargoyles seemed to preside over everything—a terrible ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... gather the choicest knights-errant of the golden quest. Maxime Valois here develops a social talent as a leader of men, guided by the sardonic Mephisto ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... began covertly to pass jokes on him. Certain others, who were more acute, suspected that he was harbouring and devising in his mind some terrible enterprise.' The Prologue to Lorenzino's own comedy of 'Aridosiso' brings the sardonic, sneering, ironical man vividly before us. He calls himself 'un certo omiciatto, che non e nessun di voi che veggendolo non l'avesse a noia, pensando che egli abbia fatto una commedia;' and begs the audience to damn his play to save him the tedium of writing another. Criticised by the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... they were too much surprised by Don Pedro's recognition of Captain Hervey as the Swedish sailor Vasa to move or speak. But the Professor did not seem to be greatly astonished, and the sole sound which broke the stillness was his sardonic chuckle. Perhaps the little man had progressed beyond the point of being surprised at anything, or, like, Moliere's hero, was only surprised at finding ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... Sympathetic tears. sympatheticus. 2. Sternutatio a lumine. Sneezing from light. 3. Dolor dentium a Stridore. Tooth-edge from grating sounds. 4. Risus sardonicus. Sardonic smile. 5. Salivae fluxus cibo viso. Flux of saliva at sight of food. 6. Tensio mamularum viso puerulo. Tension of the nipples of lactescent women at sight of the child. 7. Tensio penis in hydrophobia. Tension of the penis in hydrophobia. 8. Tenesmus calculosus. Tenesmus from stone. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Touch. (with sardonic frankness). No, truly; for the truest politics show the most feigning; and Tories are given to politics; and what they swear, in politics, may be said, as Tories, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... his sleeve ruffs were halfway up to his elbows and his doublet had an unfortunate tendency to creep. The St. Elizabeths men, all four of them, looked just a little like moth-eaten versions of old silent pictures. Malone looked them over with a somewhat sardonic eye. Not only did he have the answer to the whole problem that had been plaguing them, but his costume was ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... NAPOLEON vents a sardonic laugh, and throws himself on a sofa, where he by and by falls asleep. The door is softly opened. ROUSTAN and ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... p 222. He swears with the most fervent and enthusiastic devotion; and trembles, lest he should betray too much of these holy mysteries, which the profane might deride with an impious Sardonic laugh.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... the village. Fortunately for us, the owner of the house we had formerly occupied was still absent, and the theft committed by the pirates was not discovered. Soon after we arrived Captain Roderick made his appearance, a sardonic smile on his countenance. ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... stranger was hardly fifteen feet removed from him, and Larry was a dead shot. But this time he made a scandalous miss, for the shot knocked a little white dust from the stone wall a full yard at one side; and the fellow never shifted his negligent posture or qualified his sardonic ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... consent,' he whispered, putting his arm round her waist; 'we must run away quietly, and when we are married can ask his pardon and,' with a sardonic sneer, 'his blessing.' ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... the pension, is a journalist. He has no race or polish, and the rest rather despise him for having none of their landed traditions. He is lean and brown, with a razor-like jaw and a twisted, sardonic expression to his lips. His face is cruel. At Warsaw, where he was working, he was thrown into prison time after time on account of the radical, revolutionary character of his articles. He is well known for the strong, intellectual ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... these oriole nests, would—through ignorance of their peculiarity—bring about such a rocking uproar of carpentry, joining to it such an uproar of exclamations, that it seemed as if some luckless ship, with all its crew, was being dashed to pieces among the rocks. They were beds devised by some sardonic foe of poor travelers, to deprive them of that tranquility which should precede, as well as accompany, slumber.—Procrustean beds, on whose hard grain humble worth and honesty writhed, still invoking repose, while but torment responded. Ah, did any one make such ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... of her own in a backward glance of mischievous significance to indicate the following Reeds. When they approached, Courtland joined them, and finding himself beside Miss Octavia entered into conversation. Apparently the suppressed passion and sardonic melancholy of that dark-eyed young lady spurred him to a lighter, gayer humor even in proportion as Miss Sally's good-natured levity and sunny practicality always made him serious. They presently fell to the rear with other couples, ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... plume was lost in shadow, was scarcely different from Dick's sombrero. But the likeness of the face to Dick was marvelous—convincing! As he gazed at it, the wicked black eyes seemed to flash and kindle at his own,—its lip curled with Dick's own sardonic humor! ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... the role of the wicked partner of the combination—"in full appreciation of our mediatory activity," (so says the German "White Paper" with sardonic humor,) replied to this proposition that, coming as it did after the opening of hostilities, "it ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... are up in the lonely mountains," he concluded at length, smiling his queer sardonic smile, "and keep yourself in hand. Put on the brakes when possible. Your experience will ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... mentioned. He was quite sure that she would not even consider the cost. He credited her with an honest scorn for sentimentality; she would make no effort to glorify him for an act that was so obviously a part of their unsentimental compact. There would be no gushing over this sardonic tribute to her avarice. She would have herself too well ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... it now. He knew that the ex-prizefighter would denounce him. A daredevil spirit of recklessness flooded up in his heart. A smile both gay and sardonic danced in his eyes. Thus does untimely mirth in the hour of danger drive away a sober, prayerful gravity from the mien of such light-hearted sons ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... the best of my way to the abode of an ambitious cockney wine-merchant, to whose daughter I had not been disagreeable in other days, and within a fortnight married her. You have seen the lady, Sir," he said, eyeing me searchingly as he spoke, with a sardonic smile,—the only ugly expression I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... fully comprehended the significance of the matter, as he was certainly far from perceiving its ironic aspect; nevertheless, his dull brain received more stimulus from the prospect than from any other thing that had befallen him, thereby furnishing sardonic humorists with the criticism, that if the Honorable Richard Pennroyal would keep on burying his wives, and choosing Archibald as best man for the new-comer, the youth might in ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... direct you to a farmhouse and he will say, "Keep the main travelled road till you come to the second crossing and turn to the left." It seemed to me not only a picturesque title, significant of my native country, but one which permitted the use of a grimly sardonic foreword. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... him, but Willet did not reveal his meaning. It was impossible to tell what course he meant to take, and the two lads were willing to let the event disclose itself. The same sardonic humor that had taken possession of Robert seemed to lay hold of the older ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... from his seat. He looked around quietly; there was a sardonic smile on his lips. His eyes almost closed; he spoke in a muffled voice, slowly and very distinctly. He was evidently master of his subject, and ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... Mr. Dagonet's right, in the high dark dining-room with mahogany doors and dim portraits of "Signers" and their females, she felt a conscious joy in her ascendancy. Old Mr. Dagonet—small, frail and softly sardonic—appeared to fall at once under her spell. If she felt, beneath his amenity, a kind of delicate dangerousness, like that of some fine surgical instrument, she ignored it as unimportant; for she had as yet no clear perception of forces that did ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... cloud of smoke upwards. "You're not the only person with brains, Nick," he observed, with sardonic humour. "But look here! Your friend Mrs. Musgrave is not to be meddled with in this matter. You leave her alone and Hunt-Goring too! He's killing himself by inches with opium, so he won't interfere with anyone ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... that no young man was her equal in birth or behaviour, had insisted upon her declining into a spinsterhood which increased in refinement as it did in service. Sentimental persons held that she came by that manner from association with Art in her brother's studio. Others, of a more sardonic turn, said that her manner was that of one who continually smelled a bad smell, and that if she got it by looking at her brother's pictures they ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... addressed giggled confusedly, and looked for assistance to a sardonic Boer whom she was going to marry, who shook his head sadly, indicating thereby that these were mysteries into which it was not well to pry. Thrown on her own resources, she plunged into the recesses of an intricate calculation, in ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... was not allowed to enjoy this illusion long. One day when I innocently asked him if he found my hands improving, he turned upon me his off sardonic eye. 'You'll never improve, old sack-of-beans' (for he had come to address me with a freedom I burned to resent); 'hands! why, you're sawing my mouth off all the time. And your feet "home," and tickling me under ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... me to purchase for him or sell him some California stock. I have reluctantly consented to do so," continued Frank, with a sardonic smile, "entirely through the request of my senior, and he has taken a hundred shares at ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... was ironically courteous, his harsh voice was pitched in one sardonic monotony of tone. Mercy took an instantaneous dislike to this hobbling, ugly old man, staring at her rudely through his great ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... social conditions in Ireland, it must, say Sinn Feiners, find out the cause. So they have pondered on this question: What is the cause of the unemployment in Ireland today? The answer to that question was the one point that the sharp-mustached, sardonic little Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Fein, wanted the American delegates from the Philadelphia Race Convention ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... thirty with a cadaverous face, whose sharp, lustreless black eyes, thin projecting nose, and mouth like a sardonic mere line, combined with a jesuitical downwardness of look, made one feel uneasy—such was the Abbe Jude as he appeared to Germain's brief ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... despair at the loss of their precious solace, when the sailors would be seated inconsolable as the Babylonish captives, Jackson would sit cross-legged in his bunk, which was an upper one, and enveloped in a cloud of tobacco smoke, would look down upon the mourners below, with a sardonic grin at ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... memory, devoted herself to the duty of administering the remedies at the prescribed intervals of time. When she left the room, having performed her duties as usual, I saw Rothsay's eyes follow her to the door with an expression of sardonic curiosity. He put a strange question to me as soon as we ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... mettle for that!"—and Lysia smiled darkly, while the great eye on her breast flashed forth a sardonic lustre— "Strong as ye all are, and young, ye lack the bravery of the weak old man who, mad as he may be, has at least the courage of his opinions! Who is there here that believes in the Sun as a god, or in Nagaya as a mediator? ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... horseman, sharp as spurs, were pricking the ribs of the pale horse. His parchment-like skin betrayed the lines and hollows of his skeleton. The front of his skull-like face was twisted with the sardonic laugh of destruction. His cane-like arms were whirling aloft a gigantic sickle. From his angular shoulders was hanging a ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... doing,—that is, if I survived the battle with him. I could not help feeling, even then, my ludicrous position, and I thought, if ever I got ashore again, I should have to laugh at myself standing hour after hour waving my shirt at those lofty cliffs, which seemed to assume a kind of sardonic grin, so that I could almost imagine they were laughing at me. At times I could not help thinking of the good breakfast that my colleagues were enjoying at the back of those same cliffs, and of the snug fire and the comfortable room which we call ...
— Adrift on an Ice-Pan • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... stramonium, that grips the lungs like an asthma; and quinia, that shakes its victims like the cold hand of the miasma of the Pontine marshes. The essence of poppies, ten times sublimated, a few grains of which bring on the stupor of apoplexy; and the sardonic plant, that kills its victim with the frightful laughter ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the matter; the fact was obvious; the girl was hopelessly and utterly compromised; and he, aided certainly by untoward circumstances—for the sardonic interference of which, in such circumstances, a man of sense usually allows—he had done it. They had had their "holiday," without taking thought for the morrow, in the way approved by boys and dogs ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... bitter, sardonic laugh which he had acquired of late years. "Oh, well, she will get used to it," he replied. "Don't you worry, Maria. She will get used to it. The smell of the poor is the smell of the world. Heaven itself must be ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... certain sardonic propriety in preserving our orthography, since ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... of the situation," he answered, in a tone of sardonic submission. "If you insist on my admitting it, I do admit it in those words. My niece's will and mine used to be one, Mr. Vendale. You have come between us, and her will is now yours. In my country, we know when we are beaten, ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... left alone with the young bandit who had before guarded me: he had the same gloomy air and haggard eye, with now and then a bitter sardonic smile. I was determined to probe this ulcerated heart, and reminded him of a kind of promise he had given me to tell me the cause of ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... of Thomas de Quincey to this vacant throne? Shall it be Coleridge, 'the noticeable man with large, gray eyes,' or the stately Macaulay, or Carlyle, with his Moorish dialect and sardonic glance, or hale old Walter Scott, or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Christopher North? The time was when Coleridge's literary fame was second to that of no other man. But he has suffered a disastrous eclipse; it has been articulately demonstrated that the vast body of his most valuable ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... it. Indeed, I have a distinct recollection of being told that the child's father had painted in the extraordinary features and had himself decorated the original flaxen locks with singular stripes of red and white and blue, a sardonic tribute to the home land of ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... His smile of sardonic amusement Gray found to be almost insupportable, and although Sir Lucien refrained from looking at Mrs. Irvin whilst he spoke, it was evident enough that his words held some ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... in pursuit of his usual business of curing imaginary ailments by means of medicine and suggestion, and leaving real ailments to nature aided by coloured water. His attitude towards the medical profession was somewhat sardonic, partly because he was convinced that only the gluttony of South Kensington provided him with a livelihood, but more because his wife and two fully-developed daughters spent too much on their frocks. For years, losing sight of the fact that he was an immortal soul, they had been ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... sometimes was called, was past his sixtieth year. For twenty years he had been in command of the army. One had but to look at his strong, sardonic face to know that he was a fearless leader, a savage fighter. His eyes were black, piercing and never quiet; his hair and close-cropped beard were almost snow-white; his voice was heavy and without a ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... passionate rhapsody. He knew a thing or two, he allowed, about these wonderful Roses of Sharon and this Song of Songs. Lies, all lies, every word of it! Yet, in spite of himself, from time to time, he liked to reread it. He fancied this was because of the sardonic pleasure its superlative phrases gave him, but the truth was it held him. He despised sentiment, tenderness, and, by the strangeness of the human mind, he went, by way of paradox, to the tenderest, most sublime spot in a book supreme in ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... of this, gave pause to his elaborate history while he administered a sardonic comment. "Be keerful, honey, you 'll ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... half-an-hour. Luke still meditated. Then the office boy came in to fetch the clerk. It was necessary to do something, to decide at once. His promise to Mabel had been quite definite. He would bring back the spring-cleaning requisites on his bicycle that evening. There had been a sardonic cruelty in sending him to purchase the materials for his own torture. ...
— If Winter Don't - A B C D E F Notsomuchinson • Barry Pain
... deceived, they see with bright and horrible eyes. In men, too, the same merciless perspicacity sometimes shows itself—men recognized to be more aloof and uninflammable than the general—men of special talent for the logical—sardonic men, cynics. Men, too, sometimes have brains. But that is a rare, rare man, I venture, who is as steadily intelligent, as constantly sound in judgment, as little put off by appearances, as the ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken |
