"Derisory" Quotes from Famous Books
... year ago I had been a clerk in the Office of the Local Government Board—a detested calling with a derisory stipend. It was all that a University education (a second in Moderations and a third in Literae Humaniores) had enabled me to win, and I stuck to it because I possessed no patrimony and had no 'prospects' save one, which stood precariously on the favour ... — Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... monument, Lincoln's Inn its fresco; but year after year subject-pictures continued to be painted on an ambitious scale, which after a few months' exhibition on the walls of Burlington House passed to their tomb in provincial museums, or reappeared as ghosts in the sale-room only to fetch a derisory price and to illustrate the fickle vagaries in the ... — Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... praised or admired. If one looks at a child for a while in admiration, he should then spit on it three times.[1832] Possibly the custom of throwing an old shoe after a bride is to be traced to the same superstition. It is a contemptible and derisory gift for luck, like vituperative outcries. The fear of the evil eye and the jettatura is now ... — Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... His researches soon came to the ears of the police, still tracing the mysterious Jose Puegas. A certain good-humoured brigadier whose Catalan French Aristide found difficult to understand, but with whom he had formed a derisory kind of friendship, urged him to desist ... — The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke |