"Hanger-on" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... good-naturedly to take leave of them when she no longer found them useful. Gratitude among certain rich folks is scarcely natural or to be thought of. They take needy people's services as their due. Nor have you, O poor parasite and humble hanger-on, much reason to complain! Your friendship for Dives is about as sincere as the return which it usually gets. It is money you love, and not the man; and were Croesus and his footman to change places you know, you poor rogue, who would have the ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... certainty can be learned of his career during this period. That he sold "base-ball" cards (a unique kind of playing-cards) at the Providence railroad station is stated on credible authority; that he "worked the trains" between New York and Providence; that he sold books; that he was a hanger-on at race-tracks, has been alleged. Any or all of these rumors may be true—or false—for whatever may be said of Lawson, his career has undoubtedly been one of marvellous activity in many ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... delusions receive a shape from our fears. For my part, I am led to believe in their existence, especially by what I hear happened to Curtius Rufus. While still in humble circumstances and obscure, he was a hanger-on in the suit of the Governor of Africa. While pacing the colonnade one afternoon, there appeared to him a female form of superhuman size and beauty. She informed the terrified man that she was "Africa," ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... that a man was there. I concluded it was Andrews, waiting to take the horse; and as he is a great hanger-on of Sam, I wished to avoid him, and not keep my candle alight to attract his attention. That was the whole reason of my getting out of window, and starting so soon; as unlucky a thing ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to a stunted Hebrew maid of Polish culture, Judson Flack launched at once into the subject of Letty. He did this for a two-fold reason. First, his grievance made the expression of itself imperative, and next, Gorry being a hanger-on of that profession which lives by knowing what other people don't might be in a position to throw light on Letty's disappearance. If he was he gave no sign of it. As a matter of fact he was not, but he meant to be. He remembered the girl; had admired ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... want you to let me remind you of it. I should like you to know that I never forgot it. We were at St. John's then; you were right above me—in a different world altogether. You were a leader amongst the best of them, and I was a hanger-on amongst the worst. You were in with the gentlemen set and the reading set. Neither of them would have anything to do with me—and they were quite right. I was what they thought me—a cad. I'd no head for work, and no taste for anything worth ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... make the terms less sounding by his reading. Wind in leaves, went a stir through the room. I heard a page near me whispering, "O Sancta Maria! The hanger-on, the needy one! Since the beginning of time I've seen him at doors, sunny and cloudy days, the big, droning bee!" Manuel Rodriguez painted on. I felt his thought. "I should like to paint you, ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... but to succeed at that period appeared hopeless; and success could only be accomplished by the greatest patience, perseverance, and most careful tact and management of all parties. It was most galling to be a hanger-on to this company of traders, who tolerated me for the sake of presents, but who hated me ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... Andrew Larkspur, late Bow Street runner, now hanger-on of the new detective police. He was renowned for his skill in the prosecution of secret service; and it was rumoured that he had amassed a considerable fortune ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... well excite wonder. But wonder should always be watched with a wary eye; for he is apt to bring in his train a hanger-on called worship, who can do nothing but mischief here. It is a short step from a passage like that quoted above to a glorification of the existing system of society, to a defence of all manner of indefensible things; and a cross-grained attitude towards all projects ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... narrow slits. This man had always an air of being profoundly interested in the smallest affairs of life, perhaps because the slits through which he gazed magnified the objects gazed upon, and he peered about him now with profoundest solicitude. This was Watt Brooks, a mechanic, and hanger-on about the mills, where he did an occasional bit of odd work, and employed the balance of his time in gossiping among the women, or lounging at the drinking saloons, talking a great deal about the wrongs of the working classes, and winning to ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... to give it up. I wasn't enough of a hanger-on to sink into a state of perpetual whining protest, or to commit suicide. When I was finally convinced that I couldn't draw him nearer I gave it up and began to take notice again, of other things. I let him live his life ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... intend that, you must lay down the matter; for this rapier, it seems, is in the nature of a hanger-on, and the good gentleman would happily be rid ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... superintendents at her belt. She can make Bruce do pretty nearly anything, they say. He's the latest conquest. I got the story on pretty good authority, but until I verified the names, dates and places, of course I wouldn't dare print a line of it. The story goes that her husband is a hanger-on of the System, and that she's been working in their interest, too. That was why he was so complacent over the whole affair. They put her up to capturing Bruce, and after she had acquired an influence over him they worked it so that she made him make love to Mrs. Parker. It's ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... publishing country; the Books about Catharine are few, and of little worth. TOOKE, an English Chaplain; CASTERA, an unknown French Hanger-on, who copies from Tooke, or Tooke from him: these are to be read, as the bad-best, and will yield little satisfactory insight; Castera, in particular, a great deal of dubious backstairs gossip and street rumor, which are not delightful to a reader of sense. In fine, there ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... book the names of the other eight wealthy men who were pilloried by the journalist. The younger men, Shirley felt sure, were of that peculiarly Manhattanse type of hanger-on—well-groomed, happy-go-hellward youths who danced, laughed and drank well,—so essential to the philanderings of these rich old Harlequins and their gilded Columbines. As he scribbled, the telephone of the room ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... scientific ranks for yourself. If you do not, you had better stick to commerce. Nothing is less to be desired than the fate of a young man, who, as the Scotch proverb says, in "trying to make a spoon spoils a horn," and becomes a mere hanger-on in literature or in science, when he might have been a useful and a valuable member of Society in ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... that he became Pollyooly's perpetual companion, or, to be exact, her perpetual hanger-on. He could not be said to afford companionship to her, for, like the Lump, he preferred the grunt to articulate speech. He played in all the games in which she played—at least, if they were not too difficult for his understanding. If they were, ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... than was good for his reputation and morals, but who was a good-hearted fellow, always ready to do a friendly turn, and with plenty of time on his hands to do it. The genius born to live without work will make his way by his wits, whether it be in the lobby at Washington City, or as a hanger-on at ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... expressed herself, in contempt of the rest of the audience, when she was hissed [by the populace]. What, shall that grubworm Pantilius have any effect upon me? Or can it vex me, that Demetrius carps at me behind my back? or because the trifler Fannius, that hanger-on to Hermogenes Tigellius, attempts to hurt me? May Plotius and Varius, Maecenas and Virgil, Valgius and Octavius approve these Satires, and the excellent Fuscus likewise; and I could wish that both the Visci would join ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... odd jobs for people. For one thing, he carries out all Dr. Wellesley's medicines for him. And he shows strangers round the place—he knows all about the history and antiquities of the Castle, St. Hathelswide, and St. Laurence, and the Moot Hall, and so on. A hanger-on, and a sponge—that's what he is, Mr. Brent. But clever—as ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... circle discontentedly, thinking this matter over with deepening displeasure. When he came to the orchestra again the handsome Greek was there, with an expression so devilish on his face that Barndale regarded him with amazement. Demetri Agryopoulo, salaried hanger-on to the Persian embassy, was glaring like a roused wild beast at these two shadowy figures in the shadow of the orchestra. The band was crashing away at the overture to 'Tannhaeuser,' the people were laughing and chattering as they circled, and not an eye but Barndale's regarded this drama ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... in the parlour of what is passing in the towns, inventing scandals to please the canons, or the families who protect the house. And there are priests who envy me! hungering against me for this coveted chaplaincy of nuns! looking upon me as a flattering hanger-on of the archiepiscopal palace, not understanding how otherwise, being so young, I could have hooked out this preferment that allows me to live in Toledo on seven ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... not as yet become acquainted with the true basis of his character. The two young men met together to consult in this dilemma and to examine their finances. It appeared that Ralph had scarcely one penny in his pocket. He had intended to be a hanger-on upon Franklin, in whose ability to take care of himself and others he had the greatest confidence. Franklin's ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... sort of people. He shook himself, scowled, muttered: "I am a damn fool! What do I amount to except as I rise in politics and stay risen? I must be mighty careful or I'll lose my point of view and become a wretched hanger-on at the skirts of these fakers. For they are fakers—frauds of the first water! Take their accidental money away from them and they'd sink to be day laborers, most of them—and ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... down on a bench, a nerveless and shaken man if there ever was one. He had been a hanger-on round the gambling dens, the kind of sneak I never ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... little one in attack on one lone detachment that might not come at all. But Lame Wolf reasoned that the people penned at the stage station were in no condition to attempt escape. They were safe whenever he chose to return to them, and Lame Wolf knew this of Stabber—that he had long been a hanger-on about the military reservations, that he had made a study of the methods of the white chiefs, that he was able to almost accurately predict what their course would be in such event as this, and that Stabber had ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... one Dirk Schuiler (or Skulker), a kind of hanger-on to the garrison, who seemed to belong to nobody, and in a manner to be self-outlawed. He was one of those vagabond cosmopolites who shark about the world, as if they had no right or business in it, and who infest the skirts of society like poachers and interlopers. Every garrison and country ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... "Darrell—he! I set my springe for other game than this; Of hare or rabbit dreamed I, not of wolf. His frequent visitations have of late Perplexed me; now the riddle reads itself. A proper man, a very proper man! A fellow that burns Trinidado leaf And sends smoke through his nostril like a flue! A fop, a hanger-on of willing skirts— A murrain on him! Would Elizabeth In some mad freak had clapped him in the Tower— Ay, through the Traitor's Gate. Would he were dead. Within the year what worthy men have died, Persons of substance, civic ornaments, And here 's this gilt court-butterfly on wing! O thou ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... see this; being hot at the time Jacky could not feel the cold to come. Jacky became a hanger-on of George, and if he did little he cost little; and if a beast strayed he was invaluable, he could follow the creature for miles by a chain of physical evidence no single link of which a civilized man would ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... there, for some unknown reason, the caida, which tonight serves as the dining-room and at the same time affords a place for the orchestra. In the center a large table profusely and expensively decorated seems to beckon to the hanger-on with sweet promises, while it threatens the bashful maiden, the simple dalaga, with two mortal hours in the company of strangers whose language and conversation usually have a very restricted and ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... parts of the picture. The wilful stubbornness and youthful petulance of Bertram are also very admirably described. The comic part of the play turns on the folly, boasting, and cowardice of Parolles, a parasite and hanger-on of Bertram's, the detection of whose false pretensions to bravery and honour forms a very amusing episode. He is first found out by the old lord Lafeu, who says, 'The soul of this man is in his clothes'; and it is ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... You don't think I can stop my brother's marrying because it might be a poor connection for me? The point is that it wouldn't be good for Dave—to be a poorly tolerated hanger-on. That's why I'm going hot-foot to Newport. And while I'm away do try to do something about the book page. Get me a culture-hound—get one of these Pater specialists from Harvard. Or," he added, with sudden inspiration ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... Wherever he has gone he has reached the popular heart. Here in the United States he has quickened the pulse beats of four generations. But this master creator of a country's only native songs has invariably here at home been apologized for as a sort of 'cornfield musician,' a mere banjo strummer, a hanger-on at barrooms where minstrel quartets rendered his songs and sent the hat round. The reflection will react upon his country; it will not detract from the real Foster when the constructive critic appears to write his brief and unfortunate life. I am not contending ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... sighed and as the barkeeper began to sweat he caught the hanger-on's eye. It was Pisen-face Lynch and he was winking at him fiercely, meanwhile ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... I am only a hanger-on to mother since we reached France," he confessed. "My French is of the sort to be exploited only among my intimates, and luckily ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... name. During the Revolutionary War he had been a spy and "horse-provider" to the loyalist troops. More recently he had been chiefly known as one of the most bigoted and unprincipled of the Compact's minor satellites; a hanger-on who was ever ready to undertake any disreputable work which the Executive might have for him to do. He was a smooth-tongued hypocrite, who made extravagant professions of zeal for religion when he was in the society of religious people, but afterwards laughed at their credulity for believing ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... the English universities, for a hanger-on to noblemen and persons of quality. So called from the tuft in the cap ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... nearly ten years had passed. Then the vicious De La Motte laid an adroit plan for getting it into her possession, through the aid of the Cardinal de Rohan, who had come to admire her. She was a hanger-on of the court, and began her work by persuading the cardinal that the queen regarded him with favor. The credulous dupe was completely infatuated with the idea. One night, in August, 1784, he was given a brief interview in the groves around Versailles with a woman whom ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... expressed a great contempt for the Patriarch, and for their Matraam or Metropolitan, whom the English papers call the Abuna. Abuna is Arabic for 'our father.' The man is a Cairene Copt and was a hanger-on of two English missionaries (they were really Germans) here, and he is more than commonly a rascal and a hypocrite. I know a respectable Jew whom he had robbed of all his merchandise, only Ras Alee forced the Matraam to disgorge. Pray what was all that nonsense about ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... was described by Erasmus as litterarum Anglicarum lumen et decus. Later in life he was promoted to the rectory of Diss in Norfolk, but was severely censured by his bishop for his buffooneries in the pulpit and his satirical ballads against the mendicants. He finally became a hanger-on about the court of Henry VIII.; and, daring to write a rhyming libel on Cardinal Wolsey, was driven to take refuge in the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. There he was kindly entertained and protected by Abbot Islip until his death in 1529. ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... contemporary, and in fact his near relation, was Thomas Stukely, afterwards so notorious—and a word may be said of Stukely's career as a contrast to that of Hawkins. He was a younger son of a leading county family, went to London to seek his fortune, and became a hanger-on of Sir Thomas Seymour. Doubtless he was connected with Seymour's pirating scheme at Scilly, and took to pirating as an occupation like other Western gentlemen. When Elizabeth became Queen, he introduced ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... service of a man of base estate, and first asked his birth and calling. The man said that his profession was that of a sergeant. Starkad, not content with despising him, also spurned him with revilings, because, neglecting all honourable business, he followed the calling of a hanger-on; and because he had tarnished his whole career with ill repute, thinking the losses of the poor his own gains; suffering none to be innocent, ready to inflict wrongful accusation upon all men, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... year. It is an absolute impossibility to educate the child for any fixed station in life. So far as education is conducted unconsciously or consciously on this basis, it results in fitting the future citizen for no station in life, but makes him a drone, a hanger-on, or an actual retarding influence in the onward movement. Instead of caring for himself and for others, he becomes one who has himself to be cared for. Here, too, the ethical responsibility of the school on the social side must be interpreted in the broadest ...
— Moral Principles in Education • John Dewey
... onward, that cheers and exclamations, such as, "Good heavens! see the deacon's old horse!" "Look at him! look at him!" "What a stride!" etc., ran ahead of him, and old Bill Sykes, a trainer in his day, but now a hanger-on at the village tavern, or that section of it known as the bar, wiped his watery eyes with his tremulous fist, as he saw Jack come swinging down, and, as he swept past with his open gait, powerful stroke, and stiffles playing well out, brought his hand with a mighty slap against his thigh, and ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... face flushed with a resentment far greater than that of Rudyard's, and it was heightened by a humiliation which overwhelmed her. She had been but a tool in every sense, she, Jasmine Byng, one who ruled, had been used like a—she could not form the comparison in her mind—by a dependent, a hanger-on of her husband's bounty; and it was through her, originally, that he had been given a real ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... waited twenty or thirty years longer for the auburn-haired lady my father saw in a chapel at Toronto, she will bethink herself that Owen, or Owen's eldest son, had better have it than the Queen. That's the sense of it; but I hate the hanger-on ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... encomiast, laudator [Lat.], whitewasher. toady, toadeater^; sycophant, courtier, Sir Pertinax MacSycophant; flaneur [Fr.], proneur [Fr.]; puffer, touter^, claqueur [Fr.]; clawback^, earwig, doer of dirty work; parasite, hanger-on &c (servility) 886. yes-man, suckup, ass-kisser [Vulg.], brown-noser [Vulg.], teacher's pet. Phr. pessimum genus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... young man, one whom, from her years in the Bad Lands as the White Moll, she recognized as a hanger-on at a gambling hell in the Chatham Square district, came toward her, plowing his way, contemptuous of obstructions, out ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... and came back to England, like many another English gentleman who has travelled, with a character by no means improved by his foreign experience. He had dissipated his small paternal inheritance of a younger brother's portion, and, as truth must be told, was no better than a hanger-on of ordinaries, and a brawler about Alsatia and the Friars, when he bethought him of a means ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... and the blue-faced Major, it was enough for Princess's Place—as with a very small fragment of society, it is enough for many a little hanger-on of another sort—to be well connected, and to have genteel blood in its veins. It might be poor, mean, shabby, stupid, dull. No matter. The great street round the corner trailed off into Princess's Place; and that which of High Holborn would have become a choleric word, spoken of Princess's ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... developed a virtuous anxiety to track the culprit, and all resources were directed to that end. Journalism is perhaps the only profession in which so fine a public spirit may be found. So it was that the North Country paper of which I was a hanger-on flung every available man into the fighting line, and the editor told me that I might, in place of the casual paragraphs for the London Letter, do something good on the ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... this her pride was roused. Why should she remain in this position—a hanger-on—forcing herself on an unwilling man who at best only tolerated her? The only soft feeling for her that had ever arisen in his heart was nothing more than pity. Could she hope that ever this pity would change to love, or that even the pity itself would ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Kazusa, to his uncle Kyu[u]bei in the Kanda quarter of Edo. O'Mino seemed to divine his thoughts. She would overload him with favors; or openly express her purpose of following wherever he went in life. Kanda? Kyu[u]bei was a well-known hanger-on at the Tamiya. Matazaemon entered him up in his expense book at so much a year. To[u]gane? He could not get there except through Kyu[u]bei. Matazaemon had farms there, and the nanushi or village bailiff was his servant. Besides, he would be a runaway. Matazaemon surely ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... too much wealth, he would remain a mark for future exactions; and if he made no display, his rivals in consequence would treat him with contempt. He had not deigned to consult me for along time, and I had dwindled into a mere hanger-on; but recollecting the success which had attended my negotiation with the European doctor, he called me again into ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... of the other Herod of whom we hear in the Acts as a persecutor. This one appears from other sources, to have had the vices but not the force of character of his bad race. He was weak and indolent, a mere hanger-on of Rome, to which he owed his kingdom, and to which he stoutly stuck during all the tragedy of the fall of Jerusalem. In position and in character (largely resulting from the position) he was uncommonly like those semi-independent ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... come. Accordingly, just as the provincial grand seigneur of France became the courtier of the King at Paris or Versailles, so the previously quasi-independent German knight or baron became the courtier or hanger-on of the prince within or near whose territory his ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... softly with amazement each time. For on April 28th, and again on May 5th, Nita Selim had deposited $5,000! Where had she got the money? Were the sums transfers from accounts in New York banks? But it was hardly likely that a little Broadway hanger-on had had so much hard cash on deposit. Then where had she got it—$5,000 at a time, ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... liberty, but on condition that he should use his pen to support the Government. So although Defoe was now free to all seeming, this was really the beginning of bondage. He was no longer free in mind, and by degrees he became a mere hanger-on of Government, selling the support of his pen to whichever party ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... replied, "he is not exactly that. He is merely a kind of hanger-on; his father died in our service, and this man was, in his younger days, one of our stable-boys, but he left us about a year ago to become a wood-cutter and charcoal-burner, and since then he just comes and goes when he likes, finding ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... bore of the first magnitude, and an inveterate hanger-on about cabinet-ministers and other prominent persons. He was constantly worrying Lord Burlington and Lord Burlington's servants by his Paul-pry-like presence. On calling at Burlington House, and being told that his lordship had gone out, he would desire ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... answered Mr. St. George, who was a hanger-on of Sir Philip's; "but they left me to bring you after them. Faith, Clary, you've had a squeak for your life! 'Pon my honour, we thought at one time it was all over with you—but you're a rough one: we shan't have ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... whatever he pleased without allowing anybody to reply to him, and made the King smile by this sally. But M. de la Rochefoucauld treated the matter in another manner he said that he could not induce himself to go like the merest hanger-on about the Court, and beg a seat of the officer who distributed them, and then betake himself early to church in order to have a good one, and wait about in order to put himself where it might please that officer to place him. Whereupon the King immediately gave him a fourth seat behind him, by ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... consumption, was among us. My father was broken-hearted as well as ill, but whenever he could sit at his table he still worked at his ecclesiastical records. My elder sister and I were in good health, but I was an idle, desolate hanger-on, that most hopeless of human beings, a hobbledehoy of nineteen, without any idea of a career, or a profession, or a trade. As well as I can remember I was fairly happy, for there were pretty girls at Bruges with whom I could fancy that I was in love; and I had been removed from the real misery ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... struck me—me, in public! That is the end. Oh, why couldn't I have killed him? But if you stayed here, so should I. Not with him, though. Never with him. Maybe I'm talking wildly. You'll say I'm in love with you. Perhaps I am—quien sabe? No matter as to that. I shall be no hanger-on, sir. I only ask a kind of partnership—the encouragement of some decent man near me. I have money; plenty, till we both get a footing. But you wouldn't live on me; no! I don't fancy that of you for a moment. I would be glad merely to tide you over, if you'd let me. And I—I'd be willing to wash ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... cheerful wisdom he laughs away the fancy, which threatened to become an obsession, that Allegra was still alive in 1869: "My dear Clare, you may be well in body; but you have a bee in your bonnet." He suggests raking up "some plausible cranky old dried-up hanger-on" of fifty-two or so, who "should follow you about like a feminine Frankenstein," as he carelessly puts it. He tried to mitigate the crazy malevolence she cherished for her earliest lover: "Your relentless ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... cried. "You will become a dependent in this house, a hanger-on, a sponger. I will hate you. You will hate yourself. It went through me like a knife when I ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... bothered the constitution of little Sweeny, and that, after lying in garrison hospital at San Francisco for several months, he had been discharged from the service on "certificate of physical disability." Thurstane, who had kept track of him, immediately took him to his house, first as an invalid hanger-on, and then as ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... waiting for him. This was not customary; as in these latter days Richard, though he always drove the car, as a sort of subsidiary coachman to the young ladies to whom the car was supposed to belong in fee, did not act as general groom. He had been promoted beyond this, and was a sort of hanger-on about the house, half indoor servant and half out, doing very much what he liked, and giving advice to everybody, from the cook downwards. He thanked God that he knew his place, he would often say; but nobody else knew it. Nevertheless, ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... you observe. He took your decision in silence—'ware Rokesle when he is quiet! Eh, I know the man,—'tisn't for nothing that these ten years past I have studied his whims, pampered his vanity, lied to him, toadied him! You admire my candor?—faith, yes, I am very candid. I am Rokesle's hanger-on; he took me out of the gutter, and in my fashion I am grateful. And you?—Anastasia, had you treated me more equitably fifteen years ago, I would have gone to the stake for you, singing; now I don't value you ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... Wiltshire where I put up once, in the days of the hard Wiltshire ale, and before all beer was bitterness. It was on the skirts of Salisbury Plain, and the midnight wind that rattled my lattice window came moaning at me from Stonehenge. There was a hanger-on at that establishment (a supernaturally preserved Druid I believe him to have been, and to be still), with long white hair, and a flinty blue eye always looking afar off; who claimed to have been a shepherd, and ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... husband's stalwart frame as they would go. Carey had wanted to be the end man, but Doctor Barnes would have none of it. "You have to take care of Mrs. Robeson," he said firmly, and placed him next. This brought Miss Redding last, and Dr. Roger Barnes, knowing man, as hanger-on behind upon bobs already fairly full. The last man, as every coaster understands, has to be alert to help out any possible bad steering, and so keeps a watchful head thrust half ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... good deal of lawlessness and violence is not to be wondered at. It has been said that for every bona fide miner there was at least one hanger-on or camp follower, who had no intention of doing any digging or washing, but who was smart enough to realize that a veritable thief's paradise would be built up by the hard workers. Sometimes these men went to the trouble of digging tunnels under ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... and often at dinner at his own well-ordered table. Occasionally, to the inconvenience of his wife, he would bring in unexpected guests of diverse gifts, any one whom he might happen to meet—amateurs, fellow-artists, singers, poets. An idle hanger-on whose only merit lay in his companionable mood or in his jests, was as welcome as a gifted connoisseur or a distinguished musician. But the greater part of his recreation Mozart sought away from home. He was to be found almost every afternoon at billiards in the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... himself, no doubt, was anxious to appear as the intimate friend of the great writers of England; but what reason is there to believe that he was not embroidering upon the facts, and that his true position was not that of a mere literary hanger-on, eager simply for money and reclame, with, perhaps, no particular scruples as to his means of getting hold of those desirable ends? The objection to this theory is that there is even less evidence to support it ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... was merely a round-faced boy of nineteen, proud of the distinguished bad company he kept. He was that weak-minded type which is only strong when it becomes wholly evil. With a different leadership he would have become simply a tobacco-chewing hanger-on at cross-roads saloons and general merchandise stores. As it was, feeling dignified by the brotherhood of crime into which he had been admitted as a full member, and eager to prove his qualifications, he was as dangerous as any member of ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... body else does. Ther' is lots of young men a hanging aroun' it, an' why—'cos it's made pleasant for 'em, an' it's the only place in town that is. I've been a faithful attendant at that tavern for nigh onto twenty year, an' I never knowed a hanger-on there that had a comfortable home of his own. Some of them that don't hev to go to bed hungry hev scoldin' or squabblin' parents, an' they can't go a visitin' an' hear fine music, an' see nice things of every sort to take their minds off, as ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... was also very kind-hearted. She loved to tease Master Jezzard, who was an indefatigable hanger-on at her pretty skirts, and whose easy conquest had rendered her somewhat contemptuous, but at the look of perplexed annoyance and bewildered distress in the lad's face, her better nature soon got the upper ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... crew, with which he met the Captain's line. Victory was not always upon one side. Politics is a very uncertain res gestoe. And human nature, more uncertain still, would vacillate from wing to wing, now being a Sharp's retainer, and anon a hanger-on of Rush. Such changelings would not count, but that their ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... disintegration. You cannot go far in Chinese poetry without meeting references to him. He rose during the reign of the last Han,—the Chien-An period, as it is called, from 196 to 221,—by superiority of energies and cunning, from a wild irregular youth spent as hanger-on of no particular position at the court,—the son of a man that had been adopted by a chief eunuch,—to be prime minister, commander of vast armies (he had at one time, says Dr. H. A. Giles, as many as a million men under arms), father of the empress; holder of supreme power; then overturner ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... superciliousness and superiority of Paul, or to look down upon him? I ask you, as I have been asking myself every day these three weeks—is he not the wise man and I the fool? He the useful member of society, and I the mere hanger-on? His life the real, mine the shadow? That he is happy I have already said; that I am not, I know. His system therefore leads to peace and contentment, mine does not. He has set a child into the world, and though, of course, he does not know what its ultimate fate will be, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... death of his royal master, Charles the First, on the scaffold. He lived long enough to witness the return of the Stuarts to England. But the Luck was gone, and with it the good fortune of his line. Rupert, his son, was but a penniless hanger-on at the royal court; the manor ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... I lay at your feet, a future for which fate perhaps intends great duties and greater deeds. I cannot fulfil these duties, I can perform no heroic deed, unless you, princess, grant me the blessing of happiness. I shall be a silent, unknown, and useless prince, the sad and pitiful hanger-on of a throne, despised and unloved, a burden only to my people, unless you give freedom and strength to my sick soul, which lies a prisoner at your feet. Wilhelmina, put an end to the tortures of the last few months, release me from the curse which binds my whole life in chains; speak ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... sense of complete absence of all habit of literary form; extremely noble and pure of mind, chaste, gentle, with a funny, puzzled sense of humour, reminding one distantly of Jean Paul in his drowsy moments; a hanger-on of courts, but perfectly simple-hearted and childlike; very poor and easily pleased: such is, for good and for bad, Herr Wolfram von Eschenbach, the only real personality in his poem. And he narrates, in a mooning, digressive, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... digging for weekly wages, hired by a company of miners at 2l. 10s. a week; but he is not saving money. He came out with two cousins, one of whom broke away and pursued his profession; he is now the head of a military hospital in India. The other cousin remained in the colony, and is now a hanger-on about up-country stations. There is also the son of a baronet here, who came out in the time of the gold-fever. He has never advanced a step, but is wood-cutting and rail-splitting in the bush, like a poor Savoyard. Still the traces of his education can be seen through ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... was back again, seeking amusement and profit. This time he followed up three of a kind to his doom. There was a better hand across the table, held by a pugnacious Irish youth, who was a political hanger-on of the Tammany district in which they were located. Hurstwood was surprised at the persistence of this individual, whose bets came with a sang-froid which, if a bluff, was excellent art. Hurstwood began to doubt, but ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... no souls, and no necessity to waste their precious time (as they think) upon religion. But, my friends, my friends, the day will come when you will see yourselves in a true light; when your soul will not seem a mere hanger-on to your body, but you will find out THAT YOU ARE YOUR SOUL. Then there will be no more forgetting that you have souls, and thrusting them into the background, to be fed at odd minutes, or left to starve,— no more talk of GIVING UP time to ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... twice cursed, which curses him that gives and him that receives; which is to the rich man as a mere drug to still his conscience and offer a spurious receipt in full for his neglect of social duties, and to the poor man an encouragement to live without self-respect, without providence, a mere hanger-on and dead-weight upon society, and a standing injury and source of ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... jail. You don't allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most influential citizens have not only risen recently, but risen comparatively late in life. Todd's daughter was fully eighteen when her father first made his pile; so there isn't really anything impossible in her having a hanger-on in low life; or even in her hanging on to him, as I think she must be doing, to judge by the lantern business. If so, the hand that held the lantern may not be unconnected with the hand that held the gun. This case, sir, ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... sang-froid of this rail bird, movie usher, alley dodger, and hanger-on at dancing academies, I could not so much as summon up the cheek to ask what he had done with the body. You'll say I ought to have acted; that I ought at least to have got up and left him. That shows two things—first, that you've never been a trader in the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... been a great hanger-on of garrisons, and should know the use that I can make of his back. You will remember, Tuscarora, that I have had you flogged, more than once, in ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... was not acquainted with their weaknesses would imagine these chaps were on intimate terms with players—who, as a rule, are slow to cultivate new acquaintances, attend strictly to their own business, and do not particularly relish that particular class of hanger-on. No man knew this type better than Handy. However, he never antagonized them. That he considered would not be wise policy. He good-naturedly humored them with much superficial gossip that really meant nothing. His good nature never forsook him, and he always had his temper well ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... a shabby outcast, a tavern hanger-on, a genial wayfarer who tarries longest where the inn is most hospitable, yet with that suavity, that distinctive politeness and that saving grace of humor peculiar to the American man. He has his own code of morals—very exalted ones—but honors ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... two straws about Deronda, or any other conceited hanger-on. You may talk to him as much as you like. He is not going to take my place. You are my wife. And you will either fill your place properly—to the world and to me—or you will go ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... wit, great at charades, capping verses, and posies to Chlora, lived in society, was a hanger-on to the Duc de Nivernais, and fancied himself obliged to follow the nobility into exile; but he took care to carry his money with him. Thus the rich emigre was able to assist more than one ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac |
