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More "Irritable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reached their destination, had gone so far as to suggest that they should turn back to hunt up some show she had heard of in a theatre at the Batignolles. But at that he had somewhat irritably protested: he remembered that, for the first time, they were both rather irritable, and vaguely disposed to resist one another's suggestions. His feet were wet, and he was tired of walking, and sick of the smell of stuffy unaired theatres, and he had said he must really get back to write some letters—and so they had kept ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... it, and makes it impossible, as an undisciplined temper. For of all the things that are to be met with here on earth, there is nothing which can give such continual, such cutting, such useless pain. The touchy and sensitive temper, which takes offence at a word; the irritable temper, which finds offence in everything whether intended or not; the violent temper, which breaks through all bounds of reason when once roused; the jealous or sullen temper, which wears a cloud on the face all day, and never utters a word of complaint; the discontented temper, brooding ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... present clear success, and averse from further risk. He had reached his limitations. It is known now that Douglas agreed with Hood, but he was too loyal to his chief to say so publicly, then or afterwards; and especially, doubtless, to so irritable a talker. ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... merits all the evil epithets that are applied to it. The truth is that, after the torrid days of the hot weather and the humid heat of the rainy season, the European is thoroughly weary of his tropical surroundings, his vitality is at a low ebb, he is languid and irritable, thus he complains bitterly of the climate of September, notwithstanding the fact that it is a distinct improvement on that of the ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... hardly say that I do. I saw her once, nearly eighteen years ago, about the time you were born—but I was not capable of appreciating her then; indeed, was so unhappy and irritable as to be hardly in a condition to either make or receive favorable impressions. I now believe her to be a truly good and noble little woman, though decidedly an oddity in some respects. Then I called her ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... turned upside down, and he was resolved, if his enemy appeared, to give him a run for it. While employed one afternoon in the congenial task of foreclosing a mortgage his creditor begged for another day to raise the money. Tom was irritable on account of the hot weather and talked to him as a good man of the ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... open, we'll keep in the open," cried the gentleman, with the impetuosity of a man rendered irritable by the heat. "You'll have had enough of the cuddy, Miss Le Grand, long before you ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... passed. "Surely she must be ready now," said the General, who grew more excited and irritable every moment. A messenger was thereupon dispatched for her, but she found the door bolted, and amidst the outcry and confusion in the room could only distinguish that Miss Pomeroy was not ready. This message she delivered without entering ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... regarded it less as a friendly office towards Julien than as a duty, an order given by an officer. He was a sergeant, and four years of war had changed him from an irritable and independent friend to a dogged and careful subordinate. He did not like Fanny any the more for the trouble she was giving him; but he did not hold her responsible for his discomforts. She must be got to the river and to the ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... feet from our dining-room door, began to practise upon the French-horn; and being in the very first rudiments of execution, produced such discordant sounds, as might have discomposed the organs of an ass. You may guess what effect they had upon the irritable nerves of uncle; who, with the most admirable expression of splenetic surprize in his countenance, sent his man to silence these dreadful blasts, and desire the musicians to practise in some other place, as they had no ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... also and Walter were seated as far apart from their father and from each other as was possible, and for a few moments not a word was spoken. Then, suddenly remembering himself, the squire dismissed the paper from his hand with an irritable jerk, and, with the words, "I suppose that means dinner," gave his arm to his sister, and conducted her ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... afraid you'll find Gerry very trying. He's awfully irritable and ... and very spiteful. So you must be careful ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... water between them was most beautiful. And Ruth enjoyed herself immensely. That is, she found the occasion enjoyable until they got back to the bungalow and had bidden the Copleys and their party good night. Then the girl of the Red Mill found her roommate rather irritable. Helen pouted and was frankly cross ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... met in the same way. As with nervous pain it seems at first impossible to "relax to it;" but the Rubicon once crossed, we cannot long be irritable,—it is so much simpler not to be, and so much ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... sat down. What then? He might be a gentleman of irascible, nasty temper, and in walking about my room, I might step on his feet. These irritable folk have such large feet, at least they are always in the way, and always being stepped on no matter how careful one tries ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... an irritable race, and justly, if the epithet be understood in its physiological rather than its moral sense. This irritability, which responds to the slightest stimulus, leads to much of the misdirection of talent we have been considering. The greatness of an author consists ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... in Farewell instead of traipsing off over the range like a tomfool. Might not be back for a week, Swing mightn't. Idiotic caper (with other adjectives) of Swing's, anyway. Why hadn't he used his head? Oh, Racey Dawson was an exceedingly irritable young man as he rode out of Farewell. The aches and pains were still throbbingly alive in his own particular head. The immediate future was not alluring. It was ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... grievous." "What is that other?" he inquired. "Death! simply death!" she answered. "Death," said her persecutor, "is not so simple and opportune a thing as you imagine. You are strong and warm with life. Sensitive and irritable as your spirit is, these many months of trouble, this latter thraldom in which I hold you, have scarcely made your cheek paler than I saw it in your girlhood. Miriam,—for I forbear to speak another name, at which ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... remained till the end of his life, which was placid, uneventful, and happy. He made a happy marriage in 1804; and his calm temperament enabled him to bear an amount of abuse which might have broken the health of a more irritable man. Cobbett's epithet, 'parson Malthus,' strikes the keynote. He was pictured as a Christian priest denouncing charity, and proclaiming the necessity of vice and misery. He had the ill luck to be the centre ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... look very promising, and Dorothy asked, in an irritable tone, before she parted with ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... he appeared to be more irritable than ever; and he had got into the way of never speaking to his wife without shouting as if he were in a rage, while she, on the contrary, would lower her voice, be gentle and conciliating, to avoid all argument; but she often wept at night after ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... and their assistants, everlastingly irritable as if the victims of pernicious conspiracies, badgered for information that seemed inevitably non-existent. They desired to know in what mysterious manner one could get ten columns of type into a page that held only seven ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... movement of hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control. Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid. All New York was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed into corporations, were demanding a new type of man — a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... not dared to speak for an hour, for fear of slipping a cog in the intricate machinery of creation. The constant struggle to supply "The Opp Eagle" with sufficient material to enable it to fly every Thursday was telling upon the staff; he was becoming irritable. ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... be remembered that the priest left Feemy after his stormy interview in a somewhat irritable mood; she was still chewing the cud of the bitter thoughts to which the events of the last few hours had given rise, and was trying to make herself believe that her brother and Father John and Pat Brady, and all the rest ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... Mateo, Redwood City and Palo Alto were next telephoned to, and when this long and expensive task was done, Ex-Private Bill Peck emerged from the telephone booth wringing wet with perspiration and as irritable as a clucking hen. Once outside the hotel he raised his haggard face to heaven and dumbly queried of the Almighty what He meant by saving him from quick death on the field of honor only to condemn him to be talked to death by B. Cohens ...
— The Go-Getter • Peter B. Kyne
... we saw Donald and Dorothy perched on the sofa, Mr. Reed had been remarkably changeful, and they had been puzzled and grieved by his manner toward Dorothy. He had been kind and irritable by turns, and finally, for some unaccountable reason, had sharply requested her to leave him, to "go away for mercy's sake," and then she had been recalled on some slight pretext, and treated with extra kindness, only to be wounded the next moment by a look from her uncle ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... opposed. His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known; no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the word, a wise, a good, and a great man. His temper was naturally irritable and high toned; but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... been watching with an expression not so irritable as it was wearied. "You are pathetic!" she ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... obligation to keep in idleness men hateful to them, and connected by no ties of blood. (174) Especially would this seem grievous when provisions were dear. What wonder, then, if in times of peace, when striking miracles had ceased, and no men of paramount authority were forthcoming, the irritable and greedy temper of the people began to wax cold, and at length to fall away from a worship, which, though Divine, was also humiliating, and even hostile, and to seek after something fresh; or can we be surprised that the captains, who always adopt the popular ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... up to shut it himself, and wondered why it was that Esther never did any one mortal thing efficiently or well. Good God! how irritable he felt. It was impossible to write. He must find an outlet for his impatience, rend or mend something. He began to straighten the room, but a wave of disgust came over him before the task was fairly commenced. ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... nurse. Take care of your sister," he added almost appealingly, divided between his knowledge of how poor a nurse Miss Madigan was and how impossible it was to tell this to her niece. "She'll be cross and irritable and—even worse than usual," he said, with a grim smile that recognized the battle-ground upon which the Madigans spent their lives; and this recognition made him seem more human to them than any other adult. "But you just treat her like a teething baby. She's got a hard row ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... his parents ought to make him tender toward them when age or disease has made them irritable or complaining. A love that only accepts, and never gives, is not worthy ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... fourth day Durant's irritable mood had changed to resignation. If he could not altogether adopt Mrs. Fazakerly's attitude and smile pleasantly into the jaws of dulness, he consented to be bored to death with a certain ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... live by plunder, the monks by alms. The haughtiest Abyssinian is not above begging, excusing himself with the remark, "God has given us speech for the purpose of begging.'' The Abyssinians are vain and selfish, irritable but easily appeased; and are an intelligent bright people, fond of gaiety. On every festive occasion, as a saint's day, birth, marriage, &c., it is customary for a rich man to collect his friends and neighbours, and kill a cow and one or two sheep. The principal parts of the cow are eaten raw ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a thoughtless, expensive, headlong and irascible master, but never one more so than the present owner; added to which, he had the misfortune of being unpopular. Other men, thoughtless, and headlong, and irritable as he, have lived and had friends; but there was something about O'Grady that was felt, perhaps, more than it could be defined, which made him unpleasing—perhaps the homely phrase "cross-grained" may best express it, and O'Grady was essentially ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... to be irritable, revengeful, and implacable; but gay and volatile, passionately addicted to dancing and the jeu de paume, which he never abandons till compelled by positive infirmity. He is very adventurous, and fond of excitement; it is not, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... not quite himself," she admitted slowly. "He is more nervous, inclined to be short and irritable, than he used to be. You may be right; or it may be simply that his continued failure to stop these crimes is wearing him down. I'll be glad to watch him, to talk with him if he will listen ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... species on Earth that is, or was, very common: the Mimosa Pudica. Perhaps you know it as the sensitive plant. It does not trap insects, but it has a very distinct power of movement, and is extremely irritable. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... weak were friendship could she shake with dread Of thy detraction 'gainst her worthies dead! No! such detraction makes her zeal more just To every claim of their yet speaking dust. Save me, good heaven! and all whom I regard, (Or hasty muse, or irritable bard,) Save us, good heaven! in mild and temperate age, From wounded vanity's vindictive rage! To genuine friendship pure delight is given, Next to the favor of approving heaven; And that delight is most sublimely felt. When nature in vain tears, has ceased to melt: When sorrow, quell'd ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... avarice, the most suspicious of passions, has in no instance I ever heard of, desired to compose her hoards by an accumulation of the precious metals. The confidence in the credit of our ordinary medium has not been doubted even in the dreams of the most irritable and jealous of ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... toilet every morning, while he loved, and he knew he could dress in four minutes and a quarter, for he had done it often. Love was a great beautifier. In this case I must admit that the lover suffered more than we outsiders, except that he became irritable in his cleanliness. Love should not be scorned, even if it is real and sometimes uncomfortably practical. It is very beautiful, and lovers make a pretty sight. What I protest is, that all creatures should be lovers—or none. It is the half-and-half state ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... to Captain Thorn, I must confess that though a stern commander and an irritable man, he paid the strictest attention to the health of his crew. His complaints of the squalid appearance of the Canadians and mechanics who were on board, can be abated of their force by giving a description of the accommodation of these people. ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... said the nurse could take care of Eunice. As if I'd leave my baby with any nurse that ever lived, for any old dance! The idea! But Jerry went. At first he stayed with me; but the baby cried, and Jerry didn't like that. It made him irritable and nervous, until I was glad to have him go. (Who wouldn't be, with his eternal repetition of "Mollie, can't you stop that baby's crying?" As if that wasn't exactly what I was trying to do, as hard as ever I could!) But Jerry didn't see it that way. Jerry ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... of the wrong of slavery extension "abolitionism." This went on for a month. Then Lincoln resolved to force Douglas to meet his arguments, and challenged him to a series of joint debates. Douglas was not pleased. His reply to the challenge was irritable, even slightly insolent. To those of his friends who talked with him privately of the contest, he said: "I do not feel, between you and me, that I want to go into this debate. The whole country knows me, and has me measured. Lincoln, ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... honour) much more recent. You must know that, among many places I dislike, Paris carries the palm. I am bored to death there; it's the home of every humbug. The life is full of that false comfort which is worse than discomfort, and the small, fat, irritable people, give me the shivers. I had been making these reflections even more devoutly than usual one very tiresome evening toward the beginning of last summer, when, as I re-entered my hotel at ten o'clock, the little reptile of a portress handed me your gracious lines. I was ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... Bo Cualnge, or Cooley Cattle-raid, and it is full of combats and feats of strength and prowess. High character meant high pride, always ready to give account of itself and strike for its ideals: "Irritable and bold", as one historian has it. They were jealous and quick to anger, but light-hearted laughter came easily to the lips of the ancient Irish. They worked cheerfully, prayed fervently to their gods, loved their women and ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Advertiser under the heading of The Inspector; and also with Smollett, whom he (Fielding) had ridiculed in his second number, perhaps on account of that little paragraph in the first edition of Peregrine Pickle, to which reference was made in an earlier chapter. Smollett, always irritable and combative, retorted by a needlessly coarse and venomous pamphlet, in which, under the name of "Habbakkuk Hilding, Justice, Dealer and Chapman," Fielding was attacked with indescribable brutality. Another, and seemingly unprovoked, adversary whom the Journal of the War brought upon him was ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... light-hearted and gay, but Mabel often had moods of despondency, which, while they never made her cross or irritable, were so pathetic that it worried Patty's ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... said," observes he, "that he was irritable. Such may have been the case at times; nay, I believe it was so; for what with the continual pursuit of authors, printers, and booksellers, and occasional pecuniary embarrassments, few could have avoided exhibiting similar marks of impatience. But it was never so ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... I tell?" Ali sounded irritable. "I can give you oxgy for quarters for about two hours. Depends upon how fast we can move. No telling until we ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... Tripoli has arrived by the way of Derge, avoiding the more dangerous route of Seenawan, by which latter I came here. No mail. All the people now in a hurry to be off to Ghat, as their goods have arrived. I begin to feel extremely irritable and irresolute at the prospect of the new unknown Desert journey. The old bandit called, and asked, "Well, are you going?" I answered, "Yes, very soon, but I must first have a letter of permission from the Pasha of Tripoli, so the Rais says, for the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... sensitive, his whole personality bespeaking force and decision. Quite different was Harriman; a small, ordinary looking man, with glasses and a scraggy mustache, giving the impression of nervous force rather than of power; an irritable man, easily angered; a fighter clear through, but fighting sometimes when peace were ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... had grown languid; all her usual occupations were pursued with the same weary indifference; she spent hours alone in her own room; she lost her interest in being brightly and prettily dressed; her eyes were heavy, her nerves were irritable, her complexion was altered visibly for the worse—in one word, she had become an oppression and a weariness to herself and to all about her. Stoutly as Miss Garth contended with these growing domestic difficulties, ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... of the upper classes so admirably achieves. He was, in fact, unmistakably a gentleman, at least by birth, though his bored manner held a hint of insolence, a suggestion of the bounder. His hazel eyes, glancing about with irritable restlessness, were curiously devoid of any depths, his mouth showed a mixture of weakness and obstinacy, devil-may-care courage and lack of moral stamina. An after-the-war product, no doubt, nervy ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... spirit, making it light and happy. As she laid her hand on Olivier's bell, her breast throbbed with impatience, and the stair-carpet seemed the softest her feet ever had pressed. But Bertin became gloomy, a little nervous, often irritable. He had his moments of impatience, ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... adverse, baffling, contrary, perverse; petulant, peevish, cynical, surly, unamiable, inaffable, crabbed, crusty, captious, fractious, churlish, vixenish, querulous, fretful, choleric, touchy, waspish, morose, sullen, ill-natured, irascible acrimonious, irritable; inverse, interchanged. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... for the Lord of heaven and earth, how small a whisper do we hear of Him! Some minds are constitutionally ill-adapted for fellowship with Him because they lack what Keats calls "negative capability"—"that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go a fine isolated verisimilitude, caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge." We have to trust God with His secrets, ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... you. I don't love you and I can't love you and I won't love you. I resent your actions. You have been making this house headquarters for your diplomatic schemes and when they have gone astray, you have made us all the creatures of your irritable whims. You made me a laughing stock when you backed out of the theatre party, and have done nothing but consider your own convenience irrespective of any plans I may have formed for your entertainment. You were so disagreeable ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... fancied that his uncle had grown to utterly dislike him,—being so irritable and unjust at times; then again his heart was light with joy and hope, for he fancied that the grim man was just on the point of losing his great burden of gloom, and becoming hopeful and unoppressed. But how could he be hopeful for whom there was no ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... did not return till a comparatively late hour; and the necessity of sitting up after her usual time of retiring, by making the old lady irritable, had the effect of giving some additional force to the suggestions of Mr. Calvert. When Margaret did return, she came alone. Stevens had attended her only to the wicket. She did not expect to find her mother still sitting up; and started, with an ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... your head with some more of her nonsense." Mr. Travers spoke in a voice which astonished d'Alcacer as much as the smile, a voice that was not irritable nor peevish, but had a distinct note of indulgence. "My dear d'Alcacer, that craze has got such a hold of her that she would tell you any sort of tale. Social impostors, mediums, fortune-tellers, charlatans of all sorts do obtain a strange influence ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... unencountered, but just as she knocked at the door, Mewks came behind her from somewhere, and snatching the letter out of her hand, for she carried it ready to justify her entrance to the first glance of her irritable master, pushed her rudely away, and immediately went in. But as he did so he put the letter ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... off year after year. This series of postponements—ordered, despite the wishes of the prisoner and (as he contended) against his interests—had got on to Luis de Leon's nerves, had led to occasional moods of depression, and had betrayed him into a few irritable or intemperate outbursts. But these results were unintentional. The Valladolid judges were well aware from the outset that no time was to be lost. As early as July 29, 1572, they delegated a piece of work to one of their commissaries in Salamanca, and impressed on him the ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... patience, trying to attract his absorbed attention from its engrossing speculation till he grew irritable and got up, asking why I would not allow him to have his own time in taking his meals? and saying that on the next occasion I needn't wait—I might set the things down and go. Having uttered these words, he left the house, slowly sauntered down the garden ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... and ate it. She had not been taught any of this business. They had merely said to her, "Play about, Lola," and, being the daughter of artists, she had played about with an unconscious spontaneity that was startling. Had there been an irritable uncle on the scene ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... hard-worked; she hoped to persuade him to get a few days abroad at Whitsuntide. Her manner was quiet, without a trace of either discourtesy or effusion. Cliffe began to twist his mustache, a sign she knew well. It meant that he was in truth both irritable and nervous. ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Here, however, they encountered the most obstinate opposition from the Scottish Commissioners. The mood of these gentlemen (Loudoun, Lanark, Lauderdale, Sir Charles Erskine, Hugh Kennedy, and Robert Barclay), sufficiently irritable before the King's flight from Hampton Court, was now that of the Thistle in full bloom. The King, they declared, had done right in fleeing from the hard usage of the English. Could his Majesty be expected to endure longer ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... this subject: "Mediumship occasionally acts in such a manner that it becomes a stimulant to every organ and function of the system, and the individual becomes excited, nervous, and irritable; hence, the greater the acceleration of physiological functions as the result of psychical influences upon the human body, the more need of caution and restraint in every department of physiological life." But it ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... ambition, seek notoriety—which, by the way, they are near obtaining in more respects than they probably desire—by obtruding themselves on every stranger who touches our shore. Theirs is not a generous and frank hospitality that would fain serve others, but an irritable vanity that would glorify themselves. The liberal and enlightened monikin is easily to be distinguished from all of this clique. He is neither ashamed of, nor bigoted in favor of any usages, simply because they are domestic. With him the ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that seem to kill the nerve and take away the sense, nor can we ever tell the effect till we see it produced; and so we could not have told beforehand—nay, we would have looked for something quite opposite—that Mysie, shrinking and irritable as she was by nature, was saved from a faint (which had for some moments been threatening her) by the cruel insult which thus had been added to her misfortune. She had even power to have recourse to that strange device of some natures, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... valued his amazing equipment of energy until now, when some subtle ailment had begun to sap it. The change was less in his muscular strength than in his nerves and his mental vigor. He found himself growing peculiarly irritable; his failures excited spasms of blind fury which left him weak and spent; he began to suffer the depressing tortures of insomnia. At times the nerves in his face and neck twitched unaccountably, and this ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... matter with the birds to-day?' said the captain, who was in rather an irritable mood himself. 'They are silent enough generally'—for the voice of the albatross is rarely heard ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... came near quarreling, but not seriously, her disposition to quarrel was so small. Yet, two could not be outspoken and one of them irritable, and those ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... of war, was bombarded with complaints and bickerings of the officers under him; they seemed to revel in annoying one famed for being of the irritable genus. Once he showed his principal a letter written in answer to a general who had abused him and accused him of favoritism. Lincoln listened with his ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... seemed raised more to drown the groans which involuntarily burst forth, than as the echo of the heart. They dared not evince the faintest sign of disapproval, for they stood on precarious ground; a groan even might be punished by their irritable king as treachery; but there was one present who cared little for this charge. Scarcely had the words passed the herald's lips, before a young man, whose bare head and lack of all weapons would have proclaimed him one of the Earl of Hereford's prisoners, had not ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... candor, his ever-present, yet shrinking tenderness, and that sadness of the moral sentiment which the world persisted in regarding as cynicism. This impression deepened with my further acquaintance, and was never modified. Although he belonged to the sensitive, irritable genus, his only manifestations of impatience which I remember were when that which he had written with a sigh was interpreted as a sneer. When so misunderstood, he scorned to set himself right. "I have no brain above the eyes," he was accustomed to say; "I describe what I see." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... after you have come into a large fortune as on the day after you have left your new silk umbrella in the train. Its effect upon you is somewhat similar to what would probably be produced by a combined attack of toothache, indigestion, and cold in the head. You become stupid, restless, and irritable; rude to strangers and dangerous toward your friends; clumsy, maudlin, and quarrelsome; a nuisance to ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... spoken at great length and very dictatorially. Miss Polly Burton did not venture to contradict him, knowing by now that whenever he was irritable he was invariably rude, and she then had ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... they had departed. But now, alas, how welcome would have been the feel of their presence, the frou-frou and swish-swish of their skirts which I had so cordially detested! I am sure, if I ever get home, that I shall never be irritable with them again. They may dose me and doctor me morning, noon, and night, and dust and sweep and put my den to rights every minute of the day, and I shall only lean back and survey it all and be thankful in that I am possessed of a mother and some ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... I resolved to get rid of the cause of sorrow by the aid of ether; not sorry, either, to try its efficacy, after all the marvellous stories I had heard. The first time I inhaled it, I did not for several seconds feel the effect, and was just thinking, "Alas! this has not power to soothe nerves so irritable as mine," when suddenly I wandered off, I don't know where, but it was a sensation like wandering in long garden-walks, and through many alleys of trees,—many impressions, but all pleasant and serene. The moment the tube was removed, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the commoner claim, the claim to be felt and respected and regarded in one's own little circle, it is wholesome and humiliating to observe how generously and easily that regard is conceded to affectionateness and kindness, and how little it is won by any brilliance or sharpness. Of course irritable, quick-tempered, severe, discontented people can win attention easily enough, and acquire the kind of consideration which is generally conceded to anyone who can be unpleasant. How often families and groups are drilled and cautioned ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... mood, no other tone, in which he could have addressed her. Did the grave chancellor, then—some one, who in his way, also, is very grave, may ask—did he, by constant fondness, spoil his child? No. It is the fondness which is not constant that spoils. It is the half-love of weak and irritable natures, who are themselves children amongst their children, who can themselves be petulant, selfish, and capricious—it is this that mars a temper. But calm and unalterable love—oh, believe it not that such ever ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... friend to their room, full of irritable reproaches. But Lottie puzzled her again, as she had done before that day. Gayety vanished from the face as light from a clouded landscape, and with an expression that was even scowling and sullen she sat brooding before the fire, heeding Bel's complaining words no more than she would ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... spice, and monotony wearies the soul. After nine years had passed, and his wife absented herself every Friday night, he began to wonder why it could be. His curiosity, to know the reason for her going away, so increased that it so wore on him that he became both miserable in himself and irritable toward others. Everybody in the castle noticed the change in their master, and grieved ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... this fashion when Father Carheil plucked at my sleeve. "Do you think you are running from the Iroquois?" he grumbled, and he pushed his irritable, brilliant face close to mine. It was an old face, lined and withered, and the hair above it was scanty and gray, but never have I met a look that showed more fire and unconquerable will. "The commandant wishes you," he went on. "He asked me to fetch you. I should not have complied—it ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... "Eastward Hoe" achieved the extraordinary popularity represented in a demand for three issues in one year. But this was not due entirely to the merits of the play. In its earliest version a passage which an irritable courtier conceived to be derogatory to his nation, the Scots, sent both Chapman and Jonson to jail; but the matter was soon patched up, for by this time Jonson had influence ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... friend and literary executor, the historian J. A. Froude, of Carlyle's autobiographical Reminiscences and Letters. After Mrs. Carlyle's death Carlyle blamed himself bitterly for inconsiderateness toward her, and it is certain that his erratic and irritable temper, partly exasperated by long disappointment and by constant physical misery, that his peasant-bred lack of delicacy, and his absorption in his work, made a perpetual and vexatious strain on Mrs. Carlyle's forbearance throughout the forty years of their life together. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... conduct this spontaneity assumed a form of inconsiderate rashness, which brought him into collision with persons of importance, and rendered universities and Courts, the sphere of his adoption, perilous to the peace of so naturally out-spoken and self-engrossed a man. His irritable sensibilities caused him to suffer intensely from the petty vengeance of the people he annoyed; while a kind of amiable egotism blinded his eyes to his own faults, and made him blame fortune for sufferings of which ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... her lap. Her eyes looked as though she was going to cry again. But she didn't cry. That is, not much. Mostly she just sighed. "It isn't as though he was an easy child to understand," she sighed. "He catches cold so easily, and mumps and everything.—And he's so irritable.—He kicks,—he bites,—he scratches!" ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... a dry, irritable, heated condition of the mouth and throat which, as the correspondent surmises, equally affects the stomach and the rest of the digestive organs. He should have a breakfast of fresh fruit only, take salads and grated raw ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... no means of an irritable or envious disposition, but somehow or other the tall man with the brown coat and the bright basket buttons did rouse what little gall he had in his composition, and did make him feel extremely indignant, the more especially as he could now and then observe, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... In this irritable state of the public mind, and critical situation of public affairs, it was to be expected that every day would furnish new matter of discontent and jealousy. General Gage deemed it a necessary measure of security, to fortify Boston neck; and this circumstance induced the inhabitants ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... were not honorable, and able men! Conceive them, for a moment, disposed everywhere to stir up litigation, by availing themselves of their perfect acquaintance with almost all men's circumstances—artfully inflaming irritable and vindictive clients, kindling, instead of stifling, family dissensions, and fomenting public strife—why, were they to do only a hundredth part of what it is thus in their power to do, our courts of justice would ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... one magazine rarely lasted long, and there is much diversity of opinion as to the cause; some ascribing it to Poe's dissipated, irregular habits and irritable temper, others to the meagre support of the magazines, still others to Poe's restless disposition and desire to establish a periodical of his own. His uncontrolled and high-strung nature, so sensitive that a single ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... then he turned slowly on his heel and looked at the man. Willems held himself very straight, but was unsteady on his feet, and moved about nearly on the same spot, like a tipsy man attempting to preserve his balance. After gazing at him for a while, Lingard called, rancorous and irritable— ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... visited oftenest and lay most on the rug was Lydgate's. The two men were not at all alike, but they agreed none the worse. Lydgate was abrupt but not irritable, taking little notice of megrims in healthy people; and Ladislaw did not usually throw away his susceptibilities on those who took no notice of them. With Rosamond, on the other hand, he pouted and ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... strange and forced manner of Ophelia, that the sweet girl was not acting a part of her own, but was a decoy; and his after speeches are not so much directed to her as to the listeners and spies. Such a discovery in a mood so anxious and irritable accounts for a certain harshness in him;—and yet a wild up-working of love, sporting with opposites in a wilful self-tormenting strain of irony, is perceptible throughout. "I did love you once:"—"I lov'd you ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... under his patronage the next term of life, and therefore man in his middle age is fond of work, devoted to labor, and resolute to amass wealth and to husband his resources. The end of life was reserved for the Dog, wherefore the old man is often snappish, irritable, hard to please, and selfish, tolerant only of his own household, but averse to strangers and to all who do not administer to his ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... turn bred a languor which is the sickest, most soul- and temper-destroying affair invented by the devil. They could not muster up energy enough to walk down the beach and back, and yet they were wearied to death of the inaction. After a little they became irritable toward one another. Each suspected the other of doing less than he should. You who know men will realise ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... antiquary in Scott's novel of the name, devoted to the study and collection of old coins, a man with an irritable temper, due to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... or less of madness, whether solitary or epidemic. It may be very active; it may be very quick at catching at new and grand ideas—all the more quick, perhaps, on account of its own secret malaise and self-discontent; but it will be irritable, spasmodic, hysterical. It will be apt to mistake capacity of talk for capacity of action, excitement for earnestness, virulence for force, and, too often; cruelty for justice. It will lose manful independence, individuality, originality; and when ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... is peculiarly irritable, (from teething,) it is of paramount necessity to withhold all the nostrums which have been so falsely lauded as 'sovereign cures for cholera infantum.' The true restoratives, to a child threatened with disease, are, cool air, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... and detested the grind of the real-estate business, and disliked his family, and disliked himself for disliking them. The evening before, he had played poker at Vergil Gunch's till midnight, and after such holidays he was irritable before breakfast. It may have been the tremendous home-brewed beer of the prohibition-era and the cigars to which that beer enticed him; it may have been resentment of return from this fine, bold man-world to a restricted region of wives and stenographers, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... Andrew Henry. It was difficult to get letters from the Federal soldiers unless some messenger came direct, but she guessed how much pleasure the bit of news would be to him. She rode out to the farm occasionally and took a message from Aunt Lois to Andrew. Uncle James was growing quite deaf and irritable in temper, but Aunt Lois softened perceptibly and was always glad to ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... he begged. "I fear that I am a little irritable to-night. This constant espionage gets on one's nerves. Look at them all around us,—Crawshay in the corner, trying his best to get something incriminating out of Nora Sharey; Brightman smoking a cigar out there, with his eyes wandering all the time through the glass ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that his uncle had grown to utterly dislike him,—being so irritable and unjust at times; then again his heart was light with joy and hope, for he fancied that the grim man was just on the point of losing his great burden of gloom, and becoming hopeful and unoppressed. ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... reanimating cattle slaughtered for food, the pious abandoned the practice of killing kine altogether. Another story is that Muchiram, the ancestor of the caste, was born from the sweat of Brahma while dancing. He chanced to offend the irritable sage Durvasa, who sent a pretty Brahman widow to allure him into a breach of chastity. Muchiram accosted the widow as mother, and refused to have anything to do with her; but Durvasa used the miraculous power he had acquired by penance to render the widow ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... fancied your sister might have told you that," said Giovanni, growing more and more irritable, and yet not daring to change the subject, lest he should lose some valuable information. "Because Orsino makes her acquaintance accidentally, every one must say that he is in ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... some degree of asperity on the subject, which I endeavored to moderate, as I always did on such occasions." How he swore at Randolph and at Freneau is mentioned elsewhere. Jefferson is evidence that "his temper was naturally irritable and high-toned, but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it. If however it broke its bonds, he was most tremendous ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... nothing, and went off in high delight. In his naive egoism he thought only of the pleasure of having Jacqueline all to himself. He was not suffered to rejoice for long. When she heard that Olivier was not coming, Jacqueline at once became peevish, irritable, bored, and dispirited: she lost all desire to please: she did not listen to Christophe, and answered him at random: and he had the humiliation of seeing her stifle a weary yawn. She was near tears. Suddenly she went away in the middle of the evening, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... own opinion. The Ox took under his patronage the next term of life, and therefore man in his middle age is fond of work, devoted to labor, and resolute to amass wealth and to husband his resources. The end of life was reserved for the Dog, wherefore the old man is often snappish, irritable, hard to please, and selfish, tolerant only of his own household, but averse to strangers and to all who do not administer to his comfort or to ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... looked up. He understood at once that the man had come in his turn to take leave. Kakusuke alone had remained with him. He was chu[u]gen, stable boy, cook, maid; and did the work of all four without complaint. The change in his master was too marked. Kibei, in his turn, had become irritable, timorous as a girl, subject to outbreaks of almost insane rage. To Kakusuke the young man seemed to have lost all nerve. Kakusuke wanted to serve a man. As long as the Wakadono gave promise of redemption, of rising ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... these young women except the profligacy with which it offered its people attractions competitive with bazaars and violin solos. But he thought it unlikely that any occasion would have evoked from them this serene despair, which was no more irritable than that which is known by the nightingale. It was impossible that they could shed such tears as smudged her bright colours now, such exquisite distillations of innocent grief at the wasting of the ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... thinking. Believing that the men were seeking her only, she knew that their intention would be directed from her companion when it was found out he was no longer with her, and she dreaded to meet them in his irritable presence. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... kindness, to take active trouble, that he should have followed the raw student with long and careful letters of advice upon the proper direction of his studies. For five years Barry was maintained abroad by the Burkes. Most unhappily for himself he was cursed with an irritable and perverse temper, and he lacked even the elementary arts of conduct. Burke was generous to the end, with that difficult and uncommon kind of generosity which moves independently of gratitude or ingratitude in ...
— Burke • John Morley
... and dark; my second is connected with the sea; my whole is an acid concrete salt, or some one keen and irritable. ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... Hester's irritable nerves relaxed. She stretched out her small, neatly shod foot in front of her, leaned her back against the wall, and presently could ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... amiable and good-natured, with strong feelings, possessed an irritable temper, which made him very petulant and impatient at times with his patients and medical men who applied to him for his opinion and advice on cases. When one of the latter asked him once, whether he did not think ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... becomes discouraged. And as soon as he does this he will lag behind; and as he gets sore from this continual banging, he will spread his hind legs and try to avoid the blows; and, in doing this, he forgets his business and becomes irritable. This excites the teamster, and, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he will beat and punish the animal cruelly, expecting thereby to cure him of the trouble. But, instead of pacifying the mule, he will only make him worse, which ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... arranged by Grabut, a Frenchman, whose name does not stand high as a composer. Yet Dryden pays him some compliments in the preface of the piece, which were considered as derogatory to Purcel and the English school, and gave great offence to a class of persons at least as irritable as their brethren the poets. This, among other causes, seems to have injured the success of the piece. But its death-blow was the news of the Duke of Monmouth's invasion, which reached London on Saturday, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... examination next morning, that some readjustment of the amputated limb was necessary, which was submitted to by the Major in a very irritable humor. Friends and enemies of the wounded man were all kind and full of sympathy. Miss Eliza was in a flutter of dreary apprehension that rendered her incapable of doing anything effectively. Benjamin was as tender and as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... remainder of the season and urged those who had a taste for the Great Outdoors to consider what they had to offer. The folders created a sensation. They came in the morning after a night of excessive heat and humidity. The guests found them in their mail when, fishy-eyed and irritable, they went ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... clenched fist threateningly at Hodge, fully convinced that now, as always before, Hodge would retreat before this menacing weapon of his jealous and irritable lady-love, and seek safety under the ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... tiresome as to walk forwards and be shot at in a city which now held little for him but danger and ennui. Not even Manuela's fortunes could prevail against boredom. As he lay upon his hateful bed, disgust with Spain grew upon him hand over hand. He became irritable. To Gil Perez he announced his determination. This sort ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... But Harry Annesley had absolutely declined; and his uncle having found out that he never attended the church service, although he always left the Hall with his father, made this a ground for a quarrel. It at last came to pass that Mr. Prosper, who was jealous and irritable, would hardly speak to his nephew; but the two hundred and fifty pounds went on, with many bickerings on the subject between the parson and the squire. Once, when the squire spoke of discontinuing it, Harry's father ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... to the Count's raillery, and replied at once so happily and so respectfully, that the change of his tone and manner made obviously a more favourable impression on the Count than he had entertained from his prisoner's conduct during the preceding evening, when, rendered irritable by the feelings of his situation, he was alternately moodily silent or fiercely argumentative. The veteran soldier began at length to take notice of his young companion as a pretty fellow, of whom something might be made, and more than hinted to ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... to Otaheite, Captain Bligh had several disturbances with his men. He had an extremely irritable temper, and would often fly into a passion and make most terrible accusations, and use most terrible language to ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... fifteen dollars from a friend and promising to pay it back the next day, and then avoiding that friend for ten months. When at home his mother had aroused him for the early labour of his life on the farm, it had often been his fashion to be irritable, childish, diabolical; and his mother had died since he ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... she was too tired even to be irritable. She lay quiet, sunk in the hollow of her bed, and kept her eyes shut, so that she never knew, she said, whether they were there or not. And it didn't matter. Nothing mattered so long as she ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... in Second Avenue the evening before, the latter was puzzled. He had never seen Gouverneur so depressed and irritable. But when they had separated, Millard was relieved that he no longer had to force a conversation about things of no interest to himself, and that his thoughts were at length free to range where ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... final word of both to him in the personalities of Joe Powers and his daughter. It had come home to him that the only way to satisfy his ambition was by making money and a lot of it. This morning, with the sharpness of his hunger rendering him irritable, he was in no mood to conciliate disaffectants to the cause of which he was himself ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... excitement played on my nerves. I became restless and irritable, and chafed more and more at my confinement. Whatever was about to happen, I wished it was over and ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... has been ascribed to the misunderstanding between Olivarez and Buckingham; and it is no wonder that such a misunderstanding arose, for the latter was conceited and irritable, the former imperious and assuming. But these causes are only of a secondary character; the root of the failure lies in the political, or in the combination of the religious with the political relations of the two countries. While in England Protestantism was moving ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... affinities and alimony. You may have it wherever you are shunted into a backwater of life, and lose the sense of being borne along in the full current of progress. Be sure that it will make you abnormally sensitive to little things; irritable where once you were amiable; glum where once you went whistling about your work and your play. It is the crystallizer of character, the acid test of friendship, the final seal set upon enmity. It will betray your little, hidden weaknesses, cut and polish your undiscovered virtues, ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... to depart; an inward feeling of boldness excited me to it; but I might say, like a well known Frenchman, "I tremble at the dangers to which my courage is about to expose me." In truth, what adds to the horrible barbarity of persecuting females, is, that their nature is both irritable and weak; they suffer more acutely from trouble, and are less capable of the strength required ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... an abatement of the irritable and painful symptoms of his loathsome malady; and, in a short time, by persevering in the use of the remedy which the natural sagacity of his humble companions had suggested, he became wholly cured of the leprosy and was delighted to find himself ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... immediately before the crime, meditated at any time on the advantages that would accrue to him from Parkman's death. Webster replied "Never, before God!" He had, he protested, no idea of doing Parkman an injury until the bitter tongue of the latter provoked him. "I am irritable and violent," he said, "a quickness and brief violence of temper has been the besetting sin of my life. I was an only child, much indulged, and I have never secured the control over my passions that I ought to have acquired early; and the ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... impression at Paris than the Turkish ambassador. He was generous and more gallant, paid his court with more address, and conformed more readily to French customs and manners. The Turk was irascible, austere, and irritable, while the Persian was fond of and well understood a joke. One day, however, he became red with anger, and it must be ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... sat down on one of the wide divans, and so doing began to know, once more, how very tired she was. A new tiredness seemed, indeed, to have been added to the original one. That first was, at worst, bored and irritable. This was of a different, a more ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... depressed, and so irritable that he could not tolerate approach. If the men of learning had been but wise in the dangers of ocean travel, they would have recognized in their commander the symptoms of the common sea-scourge of the age—scurvy. Presently, he was too ill to leave his bed, and ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... dislike, and the bitter retort would rise to my lips; but I believe I can say with truth that I never gave utterance to a disrespectful word. My mother's counsel to me before leaving home, recurring to my mind, often prevented the impatient and irritable thought from finding expression in words; and before the winter was over, I found, what every one has found who tried the experiment, that there is scarcely a nature so cold and unfeeling as to withstand the charm of continued kindness. The last remaining feeling of animosity ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... time, in remote parts), no Czech blows into his pipe in the woodlands, without certain precautions, and preliminary fuglings of a devotional nature. [Bollandus, ubi supra.]—From which miracle, as indeed from many other indications, I infer an irritable nervous-system in poor Adalbert; and find this death in the Romova was probably a furious mixture ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... in those days, and kept it for as long on each day as was possible to her. But the Duke, hobbling on the terrace—for as a consequence of his journey on horseback he had developed a slight lameness, being all rotten with disease—would grow irritable at her absence, and insistent upon her presence, hinting that her retreat was a discourtesy; so that she was forced to come forth again, and suffer his ponderous attentions ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... of character which I had expected to find among the people of the West. Of all virtues patience would have been the last which I should have thought of attributing to them. I should have expected to see them angry when robbed of their time, and irritable under the stress of such grievances as railway delays; but they are never irritable under such circumstances as I have attempted to describe, nor, indeed, are they a people prone to irritation under any grievances. ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... muttered, but he had to grin despite himself. A lumbering form had blundered past him from the direction of the camp and was swallowed up by the night as it sought the herd, annoying and arousing the thirsty and irritable cattle along its trail, throwing challenges right and left and stirring up trouble as it passed. The fact that the challenges were bluffs made no difference to the pawing steers, for they were anxious to have things ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... man any less a man for having arisen from something lower, and being in a fair way to become something higher? Certainly not, unless I am less a man for having once been a baby. It is only when I am unusually cross and irritable that I object to being reminded of my infancy. But a young child does not like to be reminded of it. He is afraid that some one will take him for a baby still. And the snob is always desperately afraid that some one will fail to notice what a ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... is assisted," says a seignior of the same province,[5142] "protected, and rarely maltreated, but he is looked upon with disdain. If kindly and pliable he is made subservient, but if ill-disposed he becomes soured and irritable. . . . He is kept in misery, in an abject state, by men who are not at all inhuman but whose prejudices, especially among the nobles, lead them to regard him as of a different species of being. . . . The proprietor gets all he can out of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... empowered, as The Master had empowered his more intelligent subjects, to exact the most degraded of submission from all beneath him in the horrible conspiracy. Once, indeed, Bell was humbly implored by a panic stricken man to administer "the grace of The Master" to a moody and irritable child of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... would come back, and stayed there until almost seven, waiting for her, though pretending it was necessary that he take down and then put up again the front curtains. All the next day he was restless and irritable. As if to make up to the girl for the contemptible trick he had played he spent a whole hour that afternoon arranging a tapestry background for the picture. "She'll think," he told himself, "that this was why it was out, and won't be worried about its being gone again. This will just be ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... Ned; that shows in itself that she does not wish for your championship, that in her eyes the trouble in the house is in fact caused by you. You must remember that when a woman loves a man she makes excuses for his faults of temper; his irritable moods, sharp expressions, and what you call snapping and snarling do not seem half so bad to her as they do to a third person, especially when that third person is her partisan. Instead of your adding to her happiness by renouncing your idea of going into ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... creature dark and colourless, yet splendidly alive. She knew him by heart, every detail of him, the hair, close-cropped, that left clean the full backward curve of his head; his face with its patches of ash and bistre; his eyes, hazel, lucid, intent, sunk under irritable brows; his mouth, narrowish, the lower lip full, pushed forward with the slight prominence of its jaw, the upper lip accentuated by the tilt of its moustache. Tanqueray's face, his features, always seemed to her to lean forward as against a wind, suggesting ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... all over and done with! Throughout my whole life I was constantly finding my place taken, perhaps because I did not look for my place where I should have done. I was apprehensive, reserved, and irritable, like all sickly people. Moreover, probably owing to excessive self-consciousness, perhaps as the result of the generally unfortunate cast of my personality, there existed between my thoughts and feelings, and the expression ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... "I'm just tired and irritable, Bunny, and I'm taking it out on you.... Because you were always kind—and even when foolish you were often considerate.... That's a ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... provoking the irritable vanity of Sir Piercie Shafton, by presenting him with a bodkin, indicative of his descent from a tailor, is borrowed from a German romance, by the celebrated Tieck, called Das Peter Manchem, i. e. The Dwarf Peter. The being who gives name to the tale, is the ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... baffling, contrary, perverse; petulant, peevish, cynical, surly, unamiable, inaffable, crabbed, crusty, captious, fractious, churlish, vixenish, querulous, fretful, choleric, touchy, waspish, morose, sullen, ill-natured, irascible acrimonious, irritable; inverse, interchanged. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... wasn't able to stand it any longer. Shut up in the house all day, he was becoming as irritable as a chained dog. Unless he could get out in the world again, he would surely give himself away. He pleaded that the doctors had warned him that his health would not stand indoor life; he must get some fresh air. So he got away by himself, and after that he found things much easier. He could ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... coop which contained the Shanghai rooster. Irritable as he could be, the bear delayed long enough to strike at this coop. He smashed one end of it flat, but the Shanghai miraculously ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... grand scale in society, if the vast majority of attorneys and solicitors were not honorable, and able men! Conceive them, for a moment, disposed everywhere to stir up litigation, by availing themselves of their perfect acquaintance with almost all men's circumstances—artfully inflaming irritable and vindictive clients, kindling, instead of stifling, family dissensions, and fomenting public strife—why, were they to do only a hundredth part of what it is thus in their power to do, our courts of justice would soon be doubled, together with the number ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... mind must remain undiverted from your studies, and you must be kept free from everything that will detract from your health and strength. Parties will excite you, deprive you of sleep, fill your mind with foolish fancies, retard you in your school work, and make you thin, pale, and irritable. We should sadly miss our bright, blooming Nellie. Do you wonder we refuse to let ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... it happened, did not still distinguish her voice; and in an irritable strain, she rejoined: "It's no matter who you may be; Mr. Secundus has given orders that no one at all should be allowed ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... beneath them. A little learning is a dangerous thing because it knows all and consequently it stands in the way of learning more or much. Hence, it is sorely impatient of novelty, of improvement, of originality. It is intolerant of contradiction, irritable, thin-skinned, and impatient of criticism, of a word spoken against it. It is chargeable with the Law of Copyright, which is not only legalised plunder of the foreigner, but is unfair, unjust and ungenerous to native talent for the exclusive benefit of the short-sighted many-headed. I ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Shakespeare, and by disengaging the true genius of Wordsworth from a hundred extravagances of theory and practice. Coleridge's remarks on the irritability of minor poets—"men of undoubted talents, but not of genius," whose tempers are "rendered yet more irritable by their desire to appear men of genius"—should be written up on the study walls of everyone commencing author. His description, too, of his period as "this age of personality, this age of literary and political ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... portion of a manuscript, which he was preparing for the press, to a friend, the latter suggested some improvements, and pointed out some errors; but instead of receiving his suggestions, the irritable man of letters plainly showed that he did not intend to adopt them. A short time after, he submitted the remainder of his work to the same judge, who having perused it, exclaimed, it could not possibly be better. "Indeed, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... grey hair, a white military moustache, bushy dark eyebrows, and in his eyes that humorous twinkle that is so often seen in those men of the last generation who are most devoid of a sense of humour. Sir James was liable to the irritable changes of mood that would nowadays be called neurotic or highly strung, but was in his young days merely put down as bad temper. He had a high estimation of his mental powers, and a poor opinion of those who did not share this estimation. ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... seem in one of his most sunshiny humors, but perhaps the long morning service, so trying in its present arrangement of lengthy prayers, praises, and preaching, to a restless and irritable temper, is to blame ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Penny was both weary and irritable. Mariana declared, remorsefully, that she had selfishly dragged him away from Shadrach; and proposed countless trivial amends, which he fretfully blocked. He had no intention of affording her such a ready escape from a sense, he hoped, of error and responsibility. Before dinner, however, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... it in his pocket with a smile and half audible chuckle that did not tend to make Sully feel any the less irritable. ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... phenomena is still undetermined, but that they are not purely imaginary is generally agreed. In the histories of all countries and of all times, we are familiar with accounts of young women of bad health and irritable nerves, who have exhibited at recurring periods certain unusual powers; and these exhibitions have had especial attraction for superstitious persons, whether they have believed in God, or in the devil, or in neither. A further feature also uniform in such cases, has ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... life being seized with what is called a "nervous breakdown,"—which generally means a digestive breakdown—to be followed by an era of misery for the unfortunate subject and his scarcely happier family. Nervous and irritable, the slightest inconveniences are magnified into terrible calamities, he constantly fears death, and his sleepless nights become a saturnalia of gloomy thoughts ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... conduct? Look, here it is!" (Showing his pipe.) "Before our marriage, you forbade me to smoke, and I promised to obey you. For some months I kept my promise; but you know what it cost me; you remember how irritable and sad I became. It was my pipe, my beloved pipe, that I regretted. One day, in the country, I discovered a little cottage, where a peasant was smoking. I asked him if he could lend me a blouse and cap; for I should like to smoke with him, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... dressed beautifully, was sweet tempered, and possessed all good gifts and graces except repose and simplicity. She perhaps worked too hard to keep abreast of the times in too many currents, and her mental weariness instead of showing itself by an irritable temper found a less disagreeable outlet in a certain nervous manner apt to seem artificial to those who did not know her well. She was a clever, even a brilliant woman, who assembled clever and brilliant people about her, although as has been intimated, the result was by ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... those who thought at all about Louis could not but be struck with the wide difference between the gentle, humble, happy-looking boy, who bore so meekly what was unkindly done and spoken, and the equally industrious, but fevered, restless, anxious, and now rather irritable being, who toiled on day after day almost beyond ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... were over, I inquired about my father; she replied, that he was so wild that nobody could manage him. That he was melancholy and irritable at the same time, and was certainly deranged, fancying himself to be made of various substances, or to be in a certain trade or capacity. That he generally remained in this way four or five days, when he went to bed, and slept for twenty-four hours, or more, and awoke with some ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... also his pugnacity—secured universal respect. He spent every moment of his spare time in Jimmy's cabin. He tended him, talked to him; was as gentle as a woman, as tenderly gay as an old philanthropist, as sentimentally careful of his nigger as a model slave-owner. But outside he was irritable, explosive as gunpowder, sombre, suspicious, and never more brutal than when most sorrowful. With him it was a tear and a blow: a tear for Jimmy, a blow for any one who did not seem to take a scrupulously ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... and waited upon; if she gratifies every idle whim and indulges every depraved desire and perverted appetite—as thousands of mothers do—the result will surely be a peevish, fretful child, that will develop into a morose and irritable man or woman, imperious, unthankful, disobedient, ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... hour; the elder children rushing off without food, miserable and untidy, the youngest bewildered under her swift, indifferent preparations for school. He thought of Beatrice in the evening, worried and irritable, her bills unpaid, the work undone, declaiming lamentably against the cruelty of her husband, who had abandoned her to such a burden of care while ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... wary, or the other more indulgent. They both exacted too much, and the wife in especial conceded too little. Mrs. Welford was altogether and emphatically what a libertine calls "a woman,"—such as a frivolous education makes a woman,—generous in great things, petty in small; vain, irritable, full of the littleness of herself and her complaints, ready to plunge into an abyss with her lover, but equally ready to fret away all love with reproaches when the plunge had been made. Of all men, Welford could bear this the least. A woman of a larger ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his wife. The poor man had been in agony while she was in danger; but now that the peril had passed he could only express his relief in irritable scolding: ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... is the result of our transgressions. Once having offended our own souls, we are quick to offend others. And vice makes us irritable, ungenerous, unjust. And not a crime can be committed, but its evil consequences follow, not the author of it only, but also the innocent, upon whom ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... Christmas Day that the best of it was over in the morning—the stockings and the presents and the postman, leaving long, over-eaten, irritable hours to be got ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... Knapp's Life that he is charged, or half-charged, with suppressing facts, 'because they do not reflect credit upon the subject of his biography.' Now, there were really no facts to suppress. Borrow was at times a very irritable man, he was a very self-centred one. His egotism might even be pronounced amazing by those who had never met an author. But those of us who have, recognise that with very few exceptions they are all egotists, although ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... did not look very promising, and Dorothy asked, in an irritable tone, before she parted with her aunt for ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... neat enough to the eye. I never could find anything when they had departed. But now, alas, how welcome would have been the feel of their presence, the frou-frou and swish-swish of their skirts which I had so cordially detested! I am sure, if I ever get home, that I shall never be irritable with them again. They may dose me and doctor me morning, noon, and night, and dust and sweep and put my den to rights every minute of the day, and I shall only lean back and survey it all and be thankful in that I am possessed of a mother and some ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... fainted. I am convinced that he shot himself rather than marry a woman he did not love, and what is more, my daughter. You can imagine my feelings! I have taken care not to breathe a word of this to Reginald, whose gout is making him more irritable every day, or to anyone else. So no one suspects ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... out of his pocket. I felt a kind of fright on perceiving a barrel of white metal terminating in a slender tube. At the sight of this mechanism, which the doctor exhibited with satisfaction, Their Graces blushed, became irritable, and muttered several fine sentiments about the dignity of the English: for instance that the Catholics of old England were more distinguished for their opinions of this infamous instrument than for their opinions of the Bible. The Duke added ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... look over the heads of most of his compeers he regards the sting of a gnat as little as the best of them. Perhaps not quite so little as John Bull, whose indifference to criticism and silent assurance of superiority are possibly as far wrong in the one direction as a too irritable skin is ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... fixes the date of the happy change that influenced every thought and every action of his future life, which gave the energy of virtue to his exertions, soothed the asperities of a temper naturally impetuous and irritable, and enabled him, at a period when manhood is full of hope and promise, to view the approaches of death with the calmness of a philosopher, and the resignation ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... memorial and wished to execute its author on the spot. But Han-Yu's many friends saved him and the sentence was commuted to honourable banishment as governor of a distant town. Shortly afterwards the Emperor died, not of Buddhism, but of the elixir of immortality which made him so irritable that his eunuchs put him out of the way. Han-Yu was recalled but died the next year. Among his numerous works was one called Yuan Tao, much of which was directed against non-Confucian forms of religion. It is still a thesaurus of arguments for the opponents of Buddhism ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... mass of irritable beasts was urged forward by the white drover and his boys. It was a ticklish job, and the whips were kept quiet at first, except to flick up one or another which tried to poke out of the mob. All went well till the leading ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... voice saying in irritable tones outside the door; 'what will hev become of ahl ta young ladies and gentlemen? They will ahl pe away just at ta ferry time when they will be wanted. They will pe after some nonsense. I will ahlways pe the ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... had left me somewhat irritable. The lighted windows that I had noticed as I approached had given me the impression that Thorndyke had returned. I had intended to press him for a little further information. When, therefore, I let myself into our chambers and found, instead of my colleague, a total stranger—and ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... chief surgeon's quarters he found that irritable petty tyrant possessed of much temper on account ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... which was sooner than I had expected. She brought Veronica with her. She said she would have been down sooner if she had not waited for Veronica. It appeared that this was just precisely what Veronica had been telling her. I was feeling irritable. I had been up half a day, and ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... make the occasion available for advancing upon Herat, and pushing her designs upon Affghanistan. The intrigues of Russia developed themselves too slowly for her purpose, and 1856 arrived before the war broke out. During the year the temper and spirit of the Persian court became intensely irritable towards, the English ambassador and his suite. A circumstance arose which brought this out painfully. On the 15th of June, 1854, Mr. Thomson, the English minister, wrote to Lord Clarendon, then minister for foreign affairs, informing him that he had ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... She was in a dull, dreary state of consternation, and all she could dwell on was the immediate need of the moment, soothing Jock's terrors, and, what was almost worse, his irritable rejection of the beverages she could offer him, and trying to relieve him by rubbing and hot applications. If ever she could look into Armine's room, she was filled with still greater dismay, even though a sweet, patient smile always met her, and a resolute endeavour ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to strike a horse—then the punishments were inflicted so unjustly, in innumerable instances, that the poor victims knew no more why they were punished than the dead in their graves. The master would be a little ill—he had taken a cold, perhaps, and felt irritable—something were wrong—his passion was up, and away went some poor fellow to the whipping post. The slightest offence at such a moment, though it might have passed unnoticed at another time, would meet with the severest punishment. He said he himself had more than once ordered his slaves ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... affected by a speck of mud upon my only white waistcoat! Oh, to miss the sight of her because I was wet through and bedraggled, and had not so much as five sous to give to a shoeblack for removing the least little spot of mud from my boot! The petty pangs of these nameless torments, which an irritable man finds so great, only strengthened ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... and the crusaders who were still about him might be of real service; and he attempted to win them over. Louis answered that he would engage in no enterprise until he had visited the holy places. Raymond was impetuous, irritable, and as unreasonable in his desires as unfortunate in his undertakings. He had quickly acquired great influence over his niece, Queen Eleanor, and he had no difficulty in winning her over to his plans. "She," says William of Tyre, "was a very inconsiderate woman, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... rest at night it is well for the prospective mother quietly to withdraw from the family circle, when the first signs of fatigue begin to appear, and indulge in a little rest, before she gets into a state of nervousness—where nerves twitch and she becomes irritable. ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... know," Nelly answered irritably. She had never been irritable in all her sunny life. "But although he is gone I am happier than I have been for a long time since I know ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... toilettes to make and paid no further attention to Barbara. She managed to remove some of the carmine, and pat down her hair, hot she could not do things as the French maid generally did them to add to her beauty. Feeling dissatisfied with her appearance made Barbara irritable, but she remained in the room criticizing everything the two other girls did or said. Then just before the horn sounded for supper, a knock ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... long before she could be sensible of mere worldly loss or profit, she was not impressed with a vague sense of Sir Miles's power over her fate,—nay, when trampling, in childish wrath and scorn, upon some menial's irritable feelings, was it possible that she had not been told that, but for Sir Miles, she would be little better than a servant herself? Be this as it may, all weakness is prone to dissimulate; and rare and happy is the child whose feelings are as pure and transparent as the fond ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... king's youngest sister, was married in her sixteenth year to Christian VII., king of Denmark. This monarch was addicted to licentious and degrading pleasures, and was a prince of weak intellect, irritable and capricious, open to flattery, and easily deceived by the crafty. Soon after his marriage he visited England, France, and Germany, where he might, if he had possessed intellect, have obtained such knowledge as would have made him a better man. He returned, however, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the big, dingy room of the police station which had been transformed into a sort of recruiting station. The officer in charge was an overbearing First Lieutenant who was overworked, tired and irritable. He had come from a distant part of Greece, and the name of Zaidos carried no weight with him. He shook his head when Zaidos made his request. He even smiled a little. "Too thin, too thin!" he said. "I should say that all the mothers ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... their fate,—hoping, yet pursued by their terror: peasants bitten by mad wolves in Siberia; women snapped at by their sulking lap-dogs in London; children from over the water who had been turned upon by the irritable Skye terrier; innocent victims torn by ill-conditioned curs at the doors of the friends they were meaning to visit,—all haunted by the same ghastly fear, all starting from sleep in the ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... menace. It is not the North, but the South, that forever agitates the question of Slavery. The seeming prosperity of the cotton-growing States is based on a great mistake and a great wrong; and it is no wonder that they are irritable and scent accusation in the very air. It is the stars in their courses that fight against their system, and there are those who propose to make everything comfortable by ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... inspiration from and sought even to emulate Cruikshank, is shown by the fact that to some of his earlier caricatures he affixed the name of "Shortshanks," a practice which he discontinued on receiving a remonstrance from the irritable George. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... would not hear of any prescription for nerves which did not include his company. Why should she want to be alone? If she was ill or troubled, his place was beside her. He had planned to lunch and spend the afternoon with her. Her faintly irritable "I wish you wouldn't," only wounded and shocked him. Her strength was not equal to discussion, and in the end ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... does not interdict the further saying, if his scruples had been ever so extreme, not improbably he would at this time have smothered them. He was angry; not as the irritable, from chafing of a trifle; nor was his anger like the fool's, pumped from the wells of nothing, to be dissipated by a reproach or a curse; it was the wrath peculiar to ardent natures rudely awakened ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... balance of arms. An expedition to Andalusia in the following year (544) was most successful; Hasdrubal Barcas was beset and surrounded, and escaped a capitulation only by ignoble stratagem and open perfidy. But Nero was not the right general for the Spanish war. He was an able officer, but a harsh, irritable, unpopular man, who had little skill in the art of renewing old connections or of forming new ones, or in taking advantage of the injustice and arrogance with which the Carthaginians after the death of the Scipios had treated ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... rendered them more susceptible? Does the humidity deposited on the parenchyma by the cooling of the leaves, which is the effect of the nocturnal radiation, prevent the action of the first rays of the sun? In our climates, the leguminous plants with irritable leaves awake during the twilight of the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... ma'am: the letters are the same, but the invitation as you call it—" Here Cai paused and cast an irritable glance in the direction of Dinah, who had stepped to the door of the oven to conceal her mirth. If the woman would but go he might be able to explain. "But the invitation don't apply similarly, ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... not? What should I gain by it? Of course she had no answer—that is, no reasonable answer. Then after breakfast I broke my boot-lace in two places. No, I was not angry. I hope I can keep my temper as well as most men. But I was in a state of mind bordering on the irritable. ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... death become of less account. And if the Christians have not helped us to avoid war, how should the pacifists be of use? Those of them whom I happen to know, or to have met, have shown themselves, in the relations of civil life, to be irritable, self-willed, combative creatures, where the average soldier is calm, unselfish, and placable. There is something incongruous and absurd in the pacifist of British descent. He has fighting in his blood, and when ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... and creates an unpleasant and irritable temper. A tight-laced chest and a good disposition cannot go together. The human form has been molded by nature, the best shape is undoubtedly that which she has given it. To endeavor to render it more elegant by artificial means is to change it; to ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... get a passport for England. He begins to regret having remained here. His temper, naturally impatient of restraint, accords but ill with the portion of liberty enjoyed by our republicans. Corporal privations and mental interdictions multiply so fast, that irritable people like himself, and valetudinarians like Mrs. C and me, could not choose a worse residence; and, as we are now unanimous on the subject, I hope soon to leave the country.—There is, as ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... that both my mother and myself (persons of exceptional impatience of disposition and irritable excitability of temperament) should have taken such delight in so still and monotonous an occupation, especially to the point of spending whole days in an unsuccessful pursuit of it. The fact is that the excitement ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... told of a distinguished irritable Scotch lecturer who on one occasion had the misfortune to meet with a loquacious chairman, the presiding genius actually speaking for a whole hour in "introducing" the lecturer, winding up by saying: "It is unnecessary for me to say more, so I call upon the talented gentleman ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... chair. "Why, that was jest three years after the war, I tell you," he said with irritable emphasis; "he hadn't a friend this side of Jordan, I reckon, who could have raised fifty cents to save his soul. The quality were as bad off as thar ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... the cruelest resolution a woman ever formed," replies he, ignoring as beneath notice the latter part of her speech, and, putting away her hands, takes once more to his irritable promenade ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... not the only one who was impatient under the unreasonable absence of Mr Ruthven. Poor Mr Elphinstone, ill and irritable, suffered not an hour to pass without vexing himself and others, wondering at, and lamenting, his delay. Lilias had much ado to keep him from saying angry and bitter things about his nephew, and exaggerated the few details she had gathered with regard to their ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... to the physician and asked him for a cigar, explaining that I could not find any in the clothes I had on, I asked him about Lucretia Borgia. I told the doctor how Lucretia seemed restless nights and nervous and irritable days, and how he seemed to be almost a mental wreck, and asked him what ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... of Cherubini as a man during this serene autumn of his life. Spohr tells us how cordially Cherubini, generally regarded as an austere and irritable man, received him. The world-renowned master, accustomed to handle instruments in great orchestral masses, was not familiar with the smaller compositions known as chamber music, in which the Germans so excelled. He was ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... Blindness means that to all men," he repeated emphatically. "But it must mean more to me, who am deprived of every occupation. If I were a writer, I could still dictate. If I were a business man, I could conduct my business. But I am a soldier, and not a clever soldier. Jealousy, a continual and irritable curiosity—there is no Paul Pry like your blind man—a querulous claim upon your attention—these are my special dangers." And Ethne laughed gently in contradiction of ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... desire to accomplish her object to carry her too far. All her thoughts, all her time, were so engrossed by it, that she had none to spare for anything else. She would not join her cousins in any of their innocent recreations, and became impatient and irritable when she met with claims upon her time that could not be set aside. Even the Lord's day at last began to seem an interruption to the work in which she was so eager. Her too intense application began to affect her health: she was growing ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... well. Sometimes he is rather restless and irritable as if he were worried. Has he anything to worry him, Mr. Wordley—I mean ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... a nature of such strength, and such almost childlike innocence. He is of a nature so sweet and perfect that, though I have seen him thunderously indignant at moments, I never saw him fretful or irritable,—a man who continuously, in every little act of life, is thinking of others, a man that all the children on the street run after, and that every sorrowful, weak, or distressed person looks to as a natural helper. In all this long history there has been no circumstance ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled. Here was that woman moving—actually going to get up—confound her! He struck the canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was too pale—greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just so—too ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... you?" said Dave. "We ain't so fussy about free speech here as they are in that free Russia that he writes about, but we're beginning to take notice. Naturally it's a poor time for free speech when the Government's got a boil on the back of its neck and is feeling irritable. Besides, no one ever did believe in free speech, and no government on earth ever allowed it. Free speakers have always had to use judgment. Up to now we've let 'em be free-speakinger than any other country has, but ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... of the psychology involved and assuming the right psychological frame of mind for the attainment of the somnambulistic state is more important than just working blindly in an attempt to get the somnambulistic tests to work. Being irritable, disgusted and despondent because of your inability to go further into hypnosis is not the answer and will only lead to frustration and failure. The reader is not to assume he will be a difficult subject. If you have come this far, you'll be able to continue in the same manner. The topic under ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... to be allowed to ride a rather high-spirited horse, but when Sylvia retorted hotly, Kathleen offered no further opposition. Thus it came about that Sylvia rode in constant dread, and made a nervous, fidgety horse a thousand times more irritable. ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... was falling, but the crowd between the prison and Kennington Common was immense. At the time of our trials the mob had treated us in ruffianly fashion, but now we found a respectful silence. The lawyer Morgan was in an extremely irritable mood. All the way to the Common he poured into our inattentive ears a tale of woe about how his coffee had been cold that morning. Over and over again he recited to us the legal procedure for bringing the matter into ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... acquaintance. Now, I wished the big chief farther off, but, as it seemed rude to refuse the request of one who had been so kind to me, I ordered the oxen to be unyoked but kept at hand, and in an irritable frame of mind walked up to the kraal. This was about half a mile from my place of outspan, for as soon as I was sufficiently recovered I had begun to sleep in my wagon, leaving the ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... Hatton Garden we wrangled nearly all the way. I own that I feel a certain satisfaction in irritating Pugh, he is such an irritable man. He wanted to know what I thought we should get ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... the details of the interview from the interviewer himself. The magnate—he had no objection to the description—had been irritable and minced no words. The grass was bad alike for production and boxoffice, taking everyone's mind off the prime business of making and viewing motionpictures. It was injuring The Industry and he couldnt conceal the fact that The Industry, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... discoveries. Sir David was of ordinary height, with fair or sandy-coloured hair and blue eyes. He was by no means good-looking, yet with a very pleasant, amiable expression; in conversation he was cheerful and agreeable when quite at ease, but of a timid, nervous, and irritable temperament, often at war with his fellow-philosophers upon disputed subjects, and extremely jealous upon priority of discovery. I was much indebted to Sir David, for he reviewed my book on the "Connexion of the Physical ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... years older and the reverse of No. 1 in feature and figure, and also (alas!) in disposition, being crotchety and irritable whenever events turn out uncomfortably, as frequently happens when there are no members of the fair sex near to make the passage through life's waters smooth. He remembers, though would fain forget, some trifling difficulties in the matter of mending, button sewings, &c., ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... wife could never have one thought in common; that she couldn't possibly understand him. I'll tell you later on whether he was mistaken or not. He was gloomy most times, and she was a bright, sociable, busy little body. When she tried to draw him out of himself he grew irritable. Besides, having found that they couldn't have a thought in common he ceased to bother to talk to her. There are many men who don't bother talking to their wives; they don't think their wives feel it—because the wives cease to complain after a while; ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... struck me as odd and forgetful at times, and sometimes he seemed momentarily to lose touch with his surroundings. He used to be very bright and good-tempered, but he returned from the war irritable and moody, and very silent, disliking, above all things, to be questioned about his experiences at the front. He used to be the very soul of courtesy, but when he returned from the front he refused to attend a 'welcome home' at the village ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
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