"Irritating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... impossible to a solitary speculatist, that a human being can want employment. To be born in ignorance with a capacity of knowledge, and to be placed in the midst of a world filled with variety, perpetually pressing upon the senses and irritating curiosity, is surely a sufficient security against the languishment of inattention. Novelty is indeed necessary to preserve eagerness and alacrity; but art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects; and every moment produces ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... the following resolution was offered in the House of Commons: "That this House disapproves the conduct of her Majesty's Government, which has resulted in the war with Afghanistan." Mr. Gladstone strongly condemned the war with Afghanistan and the irritating policy towards the Ameer, and concluded his address with the following eloquent responses to the historical and moral aspects of the Afghan difficulty: "You have made this war in concealment from Parliament, in reversal of the policy ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... the burnt wood are extremely rich in potash, and the fruit, which is about the size and shape of a date, is sometimes pounded and used by the Arabs in lieu of soap for washing their clothes. This fruit is exceedingly pleasant, but in a raw state it has an irritating effect upon the bowels, and should be used in small quantities. Barrake had been cautioned by the Arabs and ourselves, but she had taken a fancy that she was determined to gratify; therefore she had eaten the forbidden fruit from morning until ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... her affairs; looking through her books, catechising her, cross-questioning her, giving her advice in his tyrannical, bullying way. From this her thoughts glanced off to the subject Bessie had held forth upon in her irritating, worrying fashion, ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... coasts, the implacable Corsairs of Barbary. For, however great may be the dangers of which we have just spoken, and no matter now many examples they may see of the fury and inconstancy of Neptune, they cease not their irritating performances, kindling warfare in all the coasts of the Christian nations. It is there that they exercise their infamous piracies, and there also that they glory in the most shameful of all commerce—the trade of ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... said Shelton, "it's irritating to look at people who have n't a chance of success—fellows who make a mess of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the mails, was distributed through the post-offices as an item of party service; and matter of a political character, passing through the mails in the usual course and addressed to patrons belonging to the opposite party, was withheld; disgusting and irritating placards were prominently displayed in many post-offices, and the attention of Democratic inquirers for mail matter was tauntingly directed to them by the postmaster; and in various other ways postmasters and similar officials annoyed and vexed those holding opposite political opinions, ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... appurtenances, suppose you, in your prettiest and most docile way (docility not being your strong point!) ask your aunt if she has any objection to your taking care of Mrs. Prettyman during the few years remaining to her. Meantime keep her from irritating Mrs. de Tracy, and make the poor old dear happy with plans for her future. If you are short on docility you are ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... it shall be!" retorted Percy, passion increasing, it appeared, at every gentle word his brother spoke, and irritating him beyond control. "Herbert, you will drive me mad with this mistimed calmness; you know not half ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... temper that nothing could shake, and he looked upon human nature with a sort of cold magnanimity that would find excuses for absolutely anything. It wasn't a pose; you could see it was a part of him. He never put it forward, but it was there always. It was quite irritating at times.... Now and then in America, I remember, I have heard people talking about lynching, for instance, when he was there. He would sit quite silent and expressionless, appearing not to listen; but you ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... or three weeks there were many ludicrous accidents in my kitchen and some irritating ones. But on the whole Romoldo took hold of things very well; and though my menu broadened gradually, it was not long before he had learned a few simple dishes, and my labor of supervision was much lighter. I said that I was pleased ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... to keep picking on what he says, but this sentence is irritating. There aren't any paintings there, because things are scattered. You can see torn bits strewed around on the floor of the place, but nothing ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... much wordy fencing, which was at least as irritating as amusing to a man in Ralph's present temper, that there was no minister now in possession of the benefice, and that the church had for some months been closed, the spiritual welfare of the parishioners being consequently in a state of temporary suspension. The old man ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... into constant intimacy, with an endearing community of inheritance, duties, and associations-multitudes of sisters must become ardent friends. The failure of that result, in consequence of base qualities, irritating circumstances, or cold and meagre natures, is a great misfortune and loss in a household: the fruition of it is a blessing worthy of the most earnest gratitude of its subjects. Perhaps there is no species of friendship more sure to elude publicity. It plays ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... principle, the fatalist, if he had a sensible soul, would commisserate the prejudices of his fellow-man— would lament over his wanderings—would seek to undeceive him—would try by gentleness to lead him into the right path, without ever irritating himself against his weakness, without ever insulting his misery. Indeed, what right have we to hate or despise man for his opinions? His ignorance, his prejudices, his imbecility, his vices, his passions, his weakness, are they not the inevitable consequence of vicious ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... particularly useful to iron manufacturers, shipbuilders and shipowners.... The book is beautifully printed on good paper, and its appearance does credit to the publishers; the work of translation has been remarkably well done, the language bearing none of those irritating traces of Teutonism which disfigure so many English versions ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... long time to write his letter, but at last he wrote it. The delay must not be taken as throwing any slur on his character as a correspondent or a man of business, for many irritating causes sprang up sufficient to justify him in pleading that it arose from circumstances beyond his own control. It is, moreover, felt by us all that the time which may fairly be taken in the performance of any task depends, not on the amount of work, but on the performance ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... drill and lecture, just as his neglect of me throughout the morning had been merely habitual and unconscious independence. In the second place, master of his mtier, as I knew him afterwards to be, resourceful, skilful, and alert, he was liable to lapse into a certain amateurish vagueness, half irritating and half amusing. I think truly that both these peculiarities came from the same source, a hatred of any sort of affectation. To the same source I traced the fact that he and his yacht observed none of the superficial etiquette ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... course than Aunt Judith could know. There was an unread paper and a biscuit, a tailless dog invading sanctity, a yelling boy by a woodpile, and now the memory of a twilight ride and the tears of a choking lad upon his sleeve, an irritating record of moments of weakness which it behooved a first citizen to stamp out of his life forever. Aunt Judith read in his face an inexorable death-sentence of her hope and ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... wondered why? Had Bower been too confident,—too sure of his prey to guard his tongue? Of all the unlooked for developments that could possibly be bound up with the harmless piece of midsummer madness that sent Helen Wynton to Switzerland, surely this roue's presence was the most irritating and perplexing. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... world, instead of—well, perhaps shivering on the Embankment at night and partaking of the hospitality of the charitably disposed. Yet you upbraid me as though I had treated you shabbily!" He spoke with an irritating air of superiority, for he knew that this man who occupied such a high position, who was an intimate friend and confidant of the Minister of War, and universally respected throughout the country, was but a tool ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... night of Yasmini's escape Samson sat sweating in his private room, with moths of a hundred species irritating him by noisy self- immolation against the oil lamp-whose smoke made matters worse by being sucked up at odd moments by the punkah, pulled jerkily by a new man. Most aggravating circumstance of all, perhaps, was that the movement of the ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... Isis. He was excessively uncomfortable. He'd said to his uncle, and implied to the king, that he had some plan in mind. He did, but it angered him to know that he counted on assistance; that, in theory, he could not possibly accomplish it alone. It was irritating to realize that he expected Gwenlyn and her father to turn up, with their Talents, when absolutely nobody outside of the fleet could possibly imagine where the fleet had gone. On Kandar it must be assumed, by now, ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... things had not been going well. Indeed, while yet several houses off he had heard the voices of the Partan's wife and his grandfather in fierce dispute. The old man was beside himself with anxiety about Malcolm; and the woman, instead of soothing him, was opposing everything he said, and irritating him frightfully. The moment he entered, each opened a torrent of accusations against the other, and it was with difficulty that Malcolm prevailed on the woman to go home. The presence of his boy soon calmed ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... effort was made to create a character wholly unlike the first. The Professor was more outspoken, however, on religious subjects, and brought down a good deal of hard language on himself and the author to whom he owed his existence. I suppose he may have used some irritating expressions, unconsciously, but not unconscientiously, I am sure. There is nothing harder to forgive than the sting of an epigram. Some of the old doctors, I fear, never pardoned me for saying that if a ship, loaded with an assorted cargo of the drugs which used to be considered ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was coursing feverishly through her veins, her spirit had been made reckless by the wilful violence that she was doing her conscience, and also by her deep and growing dissatisfaction with herself, that was like an irritating wound. She was therefore prepared to resent any interruption to the whirl of excitement, which gave her a kind of pleasure in the place of the happiness that was impossible ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... thing which must not be spoken, the abomination of abominations—infandum—and I believe that it is necessary now and again to speak the thing which must not be spoken. But if it leads to nothing? Even if it should lead only to irritating the devotees of progress, those who believe that truth is consolation, it would lead to not a little. To irritating them and making them say: Poor fellow! if he would only use his intelligence to better purpose!... Someone perhaps will add that I do not know what I say, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... way to meet them, the greater would be his advantage. If Matthews were another Hickok the situation would have been vastly different. If there were any real fighting men on Hardman's side Pan would recognize them in a single glance. He was an unknown quantity to them, that most irritating of newcomers to a wild place, the man ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... 'No, no! How wilfully irritating you are! This Mr. Drake, of course. By the way, I suppose he will get on?' She spoke in a voice which implied regret for the supposition, and almost appealed for a ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... in it would be in a very abnormal condition. At ordinary times the land is infested with flies; so much so, indeed, that large numbers of the people suffer from diseased eyes, in consequence of these insects incessantly fastening on the sores caused by the irritating sand which fills the air. It was absurd for this Hebrew story-teller to scotch the last fly; he should have left sufficient to maintain the character ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... the majority! The object of Mr. CALHOUN at the time was to play into the hands of a combination which had been formed to break down the Administration of John Quincy Adams, and to cripple Henry Clay. The instrument used was the sarcastic, irritating, and personal rhetoric of John Randolph, then a member of the Senate. To this end, Randolph was suffered to deliver in the Senate a long succession of tirades, disgraceful to the Senate, abusive of New England and of Henry Clay. Here ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... by irritating the tips without any object being left in contact with them. Nine radicles, suspended over water, had their tips rubbed, each six times with a needle, with sufficient force to shake the whole bean; the temperature was favourable, viz. about ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... said with a certain dignity which Fracasse, who was a good deal of a martinet, found very irritating. ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... a shaving soap, apart from its freedom from caustic alkali or any substance exerting an irritating effect upon the skin, is the quick production of a profuse creamy lather which is lasting. Gum tragacanth is used in some cases to give lasting power or durability, but is not necessary, as this property is readily attained by the use of a suitable proportion ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... acknowledge as erroneous and to withdraw several of his former views and assertions, which he had defended with great assurance, and this disturbed his equanimity; secondly, and still more, there were the miserable political circumstances of North America, which could not but exercise an irritating and galling effect on so warm a patriot as Whitney, an effect which was transferred unconsciously to his literary criticisms and polemics, whenever he felt ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... difficulty in the Navy, which became so grave that the large force of disciplined men employed in protecting the revenue were drilled in gunnery to fit them for sea service. Many of them were called out to serve aboard ship during the war with Russia in 1854. One of the grievances in the service was the irritating and unfair policy of the Board of Customs in constantly moving the men from one station to another. In many instances the hardships constituted a public scandal. Adequate recompense was never made for this breaking-up of their little homes, ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... from this irritating interview, during which Myner had never discontinued painting, to the studio of my old master. Only one card remained for me to play, and I was now resolved to play it: I must drop the gentleman and the frock-coat, and approach art in the ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... assemblage of houses," The puzzle is solved; the jig-saw—I think they call it—has been successfully fitted together, There in a box lay all the jagged, irregular pieces, each in itself crazy and meaningless and irritating by its very lack of meaning: now we see each part adapted to the other and the whole is one picture ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... of the man before the common, practical requirements of life would have been irritating to ordinary individuals. The getting of a meal or the clothing of the body with reference to the weather, were things that he thought of vaguely, uncomfortably, only with forced attention. What he saw clearly, entranced by the vision, was the future—the free future. He had been touched by the wan ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... wine did some people harm, by inflaming, confusing, and irritating their minds; but that the experience of mankind had declared in favour of moderate drinking. JOHNSON. 'Sir, I do not say it is wrong to produce self complacency by drinking; I only deny that it improves the mind. When I drank wine, I scorned ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... beings. I heard an old lady, whose son is a rifleman, and just like all the other volunteers of his corps, lately declare, that, on the occasion of a certain grand review, her Tom looked so entirely different from all the rest. No doubt he did to her, poor old lady,—for he was her own. But the irritating thing was, that the old lady wished it to be admitted that Tom's superiority was an actual fact, equally patent to the eyes of all mankind. Yes, my friend: it is a thing very slowly learnt by most men, that they are very much like other people. You see the principle which underlies what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... to ask each of us how much "Bank" he required, and to deliberate, when the sum was proposed, whether the boy's account would stand so large a draft. The boy would argue with glowing force that it would stand that and more; and Fillet would put the opposing case with irritating contumacy. ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... Professor Morris was the cause of the disaster. The Professor was, fortunately, of uncommon type. He was a modest man — so modest that it even ceased to be a virtue, and became an annoying and irritating trait. He never stood up for himself, nor for his family ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... perhaps, the essence of the love token, is not its history, and I shall hazard a guess as to why that is not written. The reason is that it is not only the cherished token of a woman's love, but is also the irritating reminder of her equality with man. At the altar she unhesitatingly swears to love eternally—an oath sometimes beyond her power to keep; but in increasing numbers she refuses to make the promise of obedience—a promise always possible to fulfill. With the freedom that in this generation is hers, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... our position necessitated the cultivation of early rising; but the Boers had, so far, invariably set the ball rolling; they had acquired a knack of irritating us in their choice of unexpected moments for starting operations day by day. On Tuesday the practicability of reversing this order of things was tested by our gunners. The effect was not clearly apparent, but ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... the eighteenth century, philosophy, on the one hand, invaded the novel and the short tale; on the other hand it was invaded by a flood of sentiment. An irritated and irritating sensuality could accommodate itself either to sentiment or to philosophy. Voltaire's tales are, in narrative form, criticisms of belief or opinion which scintillate with ironic wit. His disciple, Marmontel, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... which does not admit of a precise solution, we may go on to ask what was the impression which Plato in the Apology intended to give of the character and conduct of his master in the last great scene? Did he intend to represent him (1) as employing sophistries; (2) as designedly irritating the judges? Or are these sophistries to be regarded as belonging to the age in which he lived and to his personal character, and this apparent haughtiness as flowing from the natural elevation ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... the fifth day brought me to the extreme of suffering, when a terrific simoon burst over the desert, gathering up and dispersing the sands with indescribable fury. My mouth and nostrils were filled with earthy atoms, and my eyes were filled with irritating particles. The storm grew so dense and awful that it became a tornado, and we were soon enveloped in total darkness. All routes of travel were obliterated, and destruction threatened my command. These sand spouts are frequent, making ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... opportunity of so doing occurred. Now, learning on credible authority that Sir Charles's name was still one to conjure with in India, it clearly became his duty to bid his son seek out and secure whatever modicum of advantage—in the matter of advice and introductions—might be derivable from so irritating a source. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... with a rather irritating slowness, for which perhaps the excellence of Cicely's buffet arrangements was partly responsible. The great drawing-room seemed to grow larger and more oppressive as the human wave receded, and ...
— When William Came • Saki
... obligations of love and guardianship to his young sister. The young sister, with her tender, quizzical understanding, regarded him as a mere child, with a deliciously humorous way of always taking himself very seriously; a brilliant brain, an irritating fund of superiority, and something altogether apart that made him dearer than heaven and earth and ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... with him to Paris. It was I who secured for him from Prince Radziwill the invitation to the Rothschild's ball where he won his first triumph. I made him practise. I bore his horrible humors, his mad, irritating, capricious temper. I wrote down his music for him. Wrote it down, did I say? Why, I often composed it for him; yes, I, for he would sit and moon away at the piano, insanely wasting his ideas, while I would force him ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... example to her sex, in rendering her feeble assistance. Clanrickarde, in Preston's tent, was doing the work of stimulating the old antipathy of that general towards O'Neil, which led to conflicting advices in Council, and some irritating personal altercations. To add to the Confederate embarrassment, the winter was the most severe known for many years; from twenty to thirty sentinels being frozen at night at their posts. On the 13th of November, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... young women had committed to memory these causes of evil and their remedies, many a badly-built chimney might have been cured, and many smoke-drawn tears, sighs, ill-tempers, and irritating ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... walk of five miles which was before her, and soon the sinking of heart with which she had set out, began to disappear before the necessity of setting one foot before the other in a steady walk. The irritating pain of rheumatism began, too, to vex her and distract her thoughts. It was not a very familiar country to her after she had passed the Ashley high road. There were fewer houses. The farms were larger, and portions of an old forest ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... a fortnight or so after they were received. There was no sense of urgency or hurry. We might have been corresponding about a monument to be erected at a remote date to some one still alive and quite young. This, if slightly irritating, gave me a feeling of great confidence in the Chaplains' Department of the War Office. It was evidently a body which worked methodically, carefully, and with due consideration of every step it took. Its affairs were likely to prove efficiently organised. I looked forward to finding myself ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... paused. I had been successfully engaged in the pursuit of trouble, and had conjured up so irritating a picture, that actually a small tear had left its source, and was running over the bridge of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... she, with a rather broken attempt at gayety, "you are in love with that good, charming, irritating, impossible, but most lovable person ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... country in the world where so little is required. The consumers are not the Indians, who cannot afford it, but the better classes, who generally eat meat three times a day. This, with the quantities of chile and sweetmeats, in a climate which every one complains of as being irritating and inflammatory, probably produces those nervous complaints which are here so general, and for which constant hot baths are the universal and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Purgatory. His caution had not been wasted, and his vigilance in guarding the ranchhouse must have been irritating to the man ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... theory I started with. I am a case of fatigue under irritating circumstances with very little mental complication ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... another, even at the time and in the place fittest of all, he can say thence, open-faced before the whole congregation; and the person in need thereof may hear it without umbrage, or the choking husk of individual application, irritating to the rejection of what truth may lie in it for him. Would that our pulpits were all in the power of such men as by suffering know the human, and by obedience the divine heart! Then would the office ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... only a dependent on the bounty of another, whom he could expect to support him no longer than he endeavoured to preserve his favour by complying with his inclinations, and whom he nevertheless set at defiance, and was continually irritating ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... shot of inference went home. It was the first of many. Kenny fought back his temper. Affronted, he crossed the room and laid a roll of bills upon the table. Craig counted them with an irritating ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... finesse and geniality, as well as advantages of station, only aggravated the injury; and this with a singular want of tact Carlyle further aggravated when he insisted on his wife accepting the invitations of his hostess. These visits, always against the grain, were rendered more irritating from a half-conscious antagonism between the chief female actors in the tragi-comedy; the one sometimes innocently unobservant of the wants of her guest, the other turning every accidental neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an affront. Carlyle's ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... him, that he could not go to sleep for hours. What a sensational "bed book" is to some tired brains, that was his past to the head of the Hands. Besides, he had everything in the world that he or anybody else (it seemed to him) could possibly want. Perhaps it was a little irritating when you could have all you wanted not to know what to want. But, he consoled himself, that must be so with all rich people. The best thing was not to ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... satire was, therefore, of itself a biting sarcasm. His claims to sonship were transferred from Jonson, then held the first of dramatic writers, to Flecknoe, the last and meanest; and to aggravate the insult, the "Mac" was inserted as an irritating allusion to the alleged Irish origin of both,—an allusion, however harmless and senseless now, vastly significant at that era of Irish degradation. Of the immediate effect of this scarification upon Shadwell we have no information; how it ultimately ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... the timid fellow-traveller of Frank Osbaldistone, who carried the portmanteau. Osbaldistone says, concerning him, "Of all the propensities which teach mankind to torment themselves, that of causeless fear is the most irritating, busy, painful, pitiable."—Sir W. Scott, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Swiss and Italian, come into the book, and a great many people, some of them very individual and lifelike; but the author's concentration on Linda gives them, people and scenery alike, an unreal and irritating effect of having been called into being solely to influence her heroine, and that lessens their fascination. Yet it is a book which makes a distinct impression, and once read will not easily be forgotten. It seems a strange comment to make on a new volume of a "First Novel ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... townspeople and the Bishop about his rights of jurisdiction continued with more or less frequency. It must certainly have been irritating to good Bishop Trilleck "gratus, prudens, pius" as the mutilated inscription on his effigy describes him, when one William Corbet forced his way into the palace, carried away the porter bodily, shut him in the city gaol, and took away the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... mature face of the man with the hair thin at the top and the long, thick moustaches. Heyst stood the frank examination with a playful smile, hiding the profound effect these veiled grey eyes produced—whether on his heart or on his nerves, whether sensuous or spiritual, tender or irritating, he ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... is almost ready;" then to Martha, "Leave the sweeping, deary, and run down to the spring for the cream." To her father, Mary explained: "The little girls are a great help. Betty manages to do for the boys without irritating them. Now we'll eat while the cakes are ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... wire which brought the soul of them and left the body by the way. Duff Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came running with open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam one saw almost a midwife to one's idea. But the comparison was subtly irritating, and after a time she turned from it. She awoke once in the night, moreover, to declare to the stars that she was less worried by the consideration of Arnold's sex than she would have thought it possible to be—one hardly paused to consider that he was a man ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Upper and Central Doab, and occupied all Rohilkand excepting the small territory of Farakhabad, to the south of the latter and north of the former Zabita khan, instead of endeavouring to prepare for the storm, occupied himself in irritating the Emperor, by withholding the tribute due at Allahabad, and by violating the sanctity of the Imperial zenana at Dehli by intrigues ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... tolerate this mischievous and worthless "son of France," even for the grave reasons which influenced him. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that he only intended to keep him in reserve, for the purpose of irritating the jealousy and quickening the friendship of the English Queen. Those who see anything tortuous in such politics must beware of judging the intriguing age of Philip and Catherine de' Medici by the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... face thrust out into the black night, in the hope of hearing the shouts of the home-coming men. Joan could not keep away from the door; and the yawning of Denas, her shifting movements, her uncontrolled sleepiness, irritated Joan. In great anxiety, companionship not perfectly sympathetic is irritating; mere mortals quiver under its infliction. For Denas could not perceive any special reason for unusual fear; she longed to go to bed and sleep, as she had done many a time before under the same circumstances. She laid the Bible on the table ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... gathered him in his strong arms like a child. "Tak' ma gun, Stewart," he directed, "and see that ye dae guid work wi' it if driven to it." Then we made a second break for the open by the river. The whole forest seemed to be alive with Sakis now; they yelled at us from every other tree, and shot their irritating arrows from every sheltered clump of brushwood. Luckily the range of their odd weapons was not extensive, and by skilful manoeuvring we managed to save ourselves greatly, otherwise we should have been perforated from ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... derogation from their dignity to act as banderilleros. But they usually accompany the act with some exaggeration of difficulty that reaps for them a harvest of applause. Frascuelo sits in a chair and plants the irritating bannerets. Lagartijo lays his handkerchief on the ground and stands upon it while he coifs the bull. A performance which never fails to bring down the house is for the torero to await the rush of the bull, and when the bellowing monster comes at him with winking eyes and lowered head, to put his ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... any good quality can lead one to "forget his station"; to the servant the spirit of management in the master seems mere "driving." This is only a sample of what is going on all society over. The relation between the higher and lower classes becomes irritating, and therefore injurious, not from any conscious unfairness on either side, but simply from the want of a common understanding; while at the same time every class suffers within its own limits from the prevalence of habits and ideas, under ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... I saw him I abstained from applauding, knowing, by a lightning-quick intuition, that it would be highly irritating to him. He showed no emotion; if he had done, I should not have thought the occasion was anything special to him. It was his absurd gravity, stony inexpressiveness, which impressed me with the fact that he was moved—moved against his will ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... delightful sensation of uneasiness to which he had been a stranger in connection with his many later easy love adventures. A light, penetrating and sweet odor floated around Marianne, reminding Lissac of the intoxicating perfume of vanished days, an irritating odor as of ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... still more undisguised authority. To nobles like Egmont and Orange, who looked down upon the son of Nicolas Perrenot and Nicola Bonvalot as a person immeasurably beneath themselves in the social hierarchy, this conduct was sufficiently irritating. The Cardinal, placed as far above Philip, and even Margaret, in mental power as he was beneath them in worldly station, found it comparatively easy to deal with them amicably. With such a man as Egmont, it was impossible for the churchman to maintain friendly relations. The Count, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... undertaken in this brief review of Anglo-American relations to outline the more important controversies that have arisen between the two countries. They have been sufficiently numerous and irritating to jeopardize seriously the peace which has so happily subsisted for one hundred years between the two great members of the English-speaking family. After all, they have not been based on any fundamental conflict ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... knave,—but the resolve to use the words should have been made only at the moment, and they should come hot from the heart. There was much neatness and some acuteness in Mr. Daubeny's satire, but there was no heat, and it was prolix. It had, however, the effect of irritating Mr. Gresham,—as was evident from the manner in which he moved his hat and shuffled ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... sentimental, and any exhibition of feeling appeared to have an irritating effect upon his nerves. There were times when he shrank from some little sudden caress of Charlotte's as from the sting of an adder. Aversion, surprise, fear—what was it that showed in the expression of his face at these moments? Whatever that strange look was, ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... reason and loved me much. When I was sick, he was inconsolable. I believe, had it not been for my mother-in-law, and the girl I have spoken of, I should have been very happy with him. Most men have their moods and emotions, and it is the duty of a reasonable woman to bear them peaceably, without irritating them ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... many people who find all superiority irritating. For them, every piece of advice is an offense, every criticism an imposition, every order an outrage on their liberty. They would not know how to submit to rule. To respect anything or anybody would seem to them a mental aberration. They say to people after their fashion: "Beyond ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... in exasperation, and the dry night air was vibrant with half-whispered but perfervid curses. She was irritating, erratic, irrational, irresponsible—preposterous, simply preposterous—damn that kind of women anyhow! They pretended to be a lot, but there wasn't ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... and Forward When? The Futile Thought The London Season Christmas The New Year February Tub-thumpers I Wonder If . . . Types of Tub-thumpers If Age only Practised what it Preached! Beginnings Unlucky in Little Things Wallpapers Our Irritating Habits Away—Far Away! "Family Skeletons" The Dreariness of One Line of Conduct The Happy Discontent Book-borrowing Nearly Always Means Book-stealing Other People's Books The Road to Calvary Mountain Paths The Unholy Fear The Need to Remember Humanity Responsibility The Government of the Future ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... you are irritating!" he burst forth impetuously. "One would think I were no more to you than a stranger. This is no light affair to be laughed away. Have ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... it cannot escape a certain responsibility as an immediate though innocent occasion of this exhibition of international courtesy, because its last November number contained some papers that seem to have been irritating. In one of them Mr. Howells let fall some chance remarks on the tendency of modern fiction, without adequately developing his theory, which were largely dissented from in this country, and were like the uncorking of six vials in England. The other ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... "What's irritating you, Dockie?" asks one of the girls, coming up and standing back of me. I look at her reflection. She does ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... Sally, dogged everywhere by Gaga, was perfectly aware of her contempt for him. Twenty-four hours had been enough to show her the exacting and irritating characteristics of her new husband. Did she stir, he looked up; his hand was ever ready for her hand; those chocolate eyes were eternally suffused with a love that moved Sally to impatience. He did not even amuse her by his calf-like pursuit. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... was teasing and his smile was irritating, and Patty was angry at him anyway, yet she couldn't help laughing at his speech, for she looked as cross as a thunder cloud, and she knew it. That is, as near to the crossness of a thunder cloud as Patty Fairfield could ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... proceeded to limp about the apartment, clearing his throat the while with that odd musical chirp which had already grown so irritating in the ears of Denis de Bealieu. He first possessed himself of some papers which lay upon the table; then he went to the mouth of the passage and appeared to give an order to the men behind the arras; and lastly he hobbled out through the door by which Denis had come in, turning ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... What was irritating this mollusk? No doubt the presence of the Nautilus, even more fearsome than itself, and which it couldn't grip with its mandibles or the suckers on its arms. And yet what monsters these devilfish are, what vitality our Creator has given them, what vigor in their ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... he began, with that irritating reasonableness of manner which implies that the speaker is going to be reasonable for two, "I've been thinking over the situation. I know that you don't love me, but then I don't believe you will ever be deeply in ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... Wilde, Pater, Whitman, Stendhal, D'Annunzio and Barres. And this "gravity of egoism" is precisely the thing which, for all his humorous humanity, distinguished the great Montaigne and which his early critics found so irritating. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... try the prisoner. There could be no conceivable question about the case. The murder had been committed during broad daylight, in a crowded room, and indeed, the prisoner confessed his guilt, and only pleaded gross provocation as an excuse. There was no proof, however, that Avanzi had used irritating language; and even if he had, too long a time had elapsed between the supposed offence and the revenge taken, for the excuse of provocation to hold good. Indeed, as the sentence of the court argues, in somewhat pompous language, "Woe ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... music seems to waft us along on a magic carpet of delight. But just as Unity depends upon a definite basic tonality, so Variety is gained by this very freedom of modulation. Without it is monotony; with too much modulation, an irritating restlessness. By the perfect balance in his works of these two related elements a genius may ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... that, sir?" cried the officer petulantly; and for the moment it seemed to the lad that his superior had caught the captain's irritating manner. "So would any sensible person. Here, I have it! Pass the word for Mr Dempsey. The boatswain's whistle will bring the stragglers ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... led,—which, occasionally coarsened by stories that set the table in a roar, was ever and anon refined by songs that filled his eyes with tears. His life was a hard one,—a succession of dull, monotonous, laborious days, haunted by anxiety and harassed by petty, irritating cares,—but he faced it cheerfully, manfully, and wrestled with it triumphantly, for he compelled it to forge the weapons with which he conquered it. He sang like a boy at Lochlea; he wrote like a man at Mossgiel. The first poetical ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... his new country. Why should he not do this in regard to bird life? It is not too much to ask, nor is it too much to exact. Does the Italian workman, or store-keeper who makes his living by honest toil enjoy breaking our bird laws, enjoy irritating and injuring those with whom he has come to live? Does he enjoy being watched, and searched, and chased, and arrested,—all for a few small birds that he does not need for food? He earns good wages; he has plenty of good food; and he must be educated ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... fired upon, it is inconceivable that the man who then had such courage of his opinions entertained any further doubt as to his future course; though it may well be that he did not imperil his personal liberty and safety by any irritating avowal of his purpose. In a reception given to him, when he thus revisited the place which should no longer be his home, he recalled those days and said: "I was told by a brother officer that the State had seceded, and that I must either resign and turn traitor ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... looked at the black figure inquiringly. It was not often that poor, cringing Jocko ventured to question him. "Yes, sloop," he said with an emphasis born of his irritating disappointment. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... arrangement must be, in the first place, presented to this Government and then referred to Spain. Spain again refers it to her local authorities in Cuba for investigation, and postpones an answer till she has heard from those authorities. To avoid these irritating and vexatious delays, a proposition has been made to provide for a direct appeal for redress to the Captain-General by our consul in behalf of our injured fellow-citizens. Hitherto the Government of Spain has declined to enter into any such arrangement. This course on her part ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... expect that man to say something of some sort! Even if she thought him a feeble hypochondriac, even if she had heard from others that he was a disappointment to his own people, even if she had seen for herself that he was a useless and irritating encumbrance everywhere, she might expect him at least to speak—she might expect him to open his mouth and try to make sounds, if he only barked. If he did not even try, but sat every step of the way as dumb as a frozen fish, she might THINK him a frozen ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... processes where milk is required—will also immeasurably aid in sugar conservation. The substitutes mentioned are all available in large amounts. Honey is especially valuable for children, as it consists of the more simple sugars which are less irritating than cane sugar, and there is no danger of acid stomach from the amounts ...
— Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918) • C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss
... Christine's attitude that seemed to Raoul not natural. He did not feel any hostility in her; far from it: the distressed affection shining in her eyes told him that. But why was this affection distressed? That was what he wished to know and what was irritating him. ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... Applied to the nose, it occasions sneezing, and taken internally, giddiness and nausea. It is therefore one of the active constituents of tobacco, though to a much less degree than nicotin itself. For while Hermstadt swallowed a grain of nicotianin with impunity, the vapor of pure nicotin is so irritating that it is difficult to breathe in a room in which a single drop ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... entrance of the sentry. This time I was received even more suspiciously than in the morning, and was allowed to wait for nearly half-an-hour before it was decided that I might safely be admitted into the premises. For this irritating delay I had probably to thank the impatience with which I met the sentinel's questions; for when at last I found myself at the house, his honour met me with an inquiry why I had delayed my coming to ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... very opportunely to save Nicuessa and his men from starving, which they certainly must have done without this seasonable relief. Yet this did not in the least soften his resentment against Olano for deserting him, whom he would have hanged, if he had not been afraid of irritating the men, and instead of that he put him in irons, threatening to send him to Spain in that condition. The authority, however, did not remain long in his hands; for, endeavouring to establish a settlement on the Bethlehem river, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... for removing objects from the eye: Take a horse-hair and double it, leaving a loop. If the object can be seen, lay the loop over it, close the eye, and the mote will come out as the hair is withdrawn. If the irritating object cannot be seen, raise the lid of the eye as high as possible and place the loop as far as you can, close the eye and roll the ball around a few times, draw out the hair, and the substance which caused the pain will be sure to come with it. This method is ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... before the telephone renewed its irritating clamor, like a fretful child which yelled whenever it heard his footstep. He responded to its fretfulness in very much the same mood, seizing hold of the receiver as though he would ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... the Representatives, have been a fortnight debating between a more or less irritating answer to the President's speech. The latter was lost yesterday, by forty-eight against fifty-one or fifty-two. It is believed, however, that when they come to propose measures leading directly to war, they will lose some of their numbers. Those ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... it is our lot to share in doing large tasks, the children help us. What of the days which bring with them only a "petty round of irritating concerns and duties?" Do they not help ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... so sweet and satisfying lying there talking desultorily with her. It was sweeter than sunshine, and not so evanescent. It was even irritating the way the church-clock kept on chiming: there seemed no space between the hours, just a moment, golden and still, whilst she traced his features with her finger-tips, utterly careless and happy, and he ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... give to the simple ardour of her utterance. What he felt for her was what all men feel for each woman who in turn attracts their wandering fancies—the desire of conquest and possession. He was moved to this desire by the irritating fact that this girl had startled an apathetic public on both sides of the Atlantic by the display of her genius in the short space of two years—whereas he had been more than fifteen years intermittently at work without securing ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... straightened himself up and was wiping his brow. The timing of the strokes was very slow. Probably, therefore, the labour itself was fatiguing. Sometimes, too, the axe fell with a different swing, as if other hands grasped it, but always with the same dull thudding and irritating slowness. ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... electric fire, launched upon the storm-tost President from Berlin itself, and even from the King's House itself,—by whom, too clearly recognizable,—what an irritating thing! Unseemly, in fact, on Voltaire's part; but could not be helped by a Voltaire charged with electricity. Friedrich evidently in considerable indignation, finding that public measures would but worsen the uproar, took pen in hand; wrote rapidly the indignant LETTER ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... exasperating the warrior, who would thus have been placed at a slight disadvantage; but he was already like a concentrated volcano—calm outwardly, but surcharged with fire and death within. The taunt did not move his nerves an iota, and he replied in words which were scarcely less irritating. ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... whip, they cannot be trusted to do what they are told. It is not that they are not willing, but that they are stupid. No one would believe that people could be so stupid. They drive me well nigh to madness sometimes, and it is the more irritating because, against stupidity, one is powerless. Beating a man or knocking him down may do him good if he is obstinate, or if he is careless, but when he is simply stupid it only makes him more stupid than before. You might as well batter a ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... smothering, choking them. The horses crowded nearer to the man, and the woman clung tighter to him as he wrapped her more closely in the protecting cloth. He felt suffocated, stifled, his lungs bursting, his throat burning, while every breath he drew was laden with the irritating sand. It penetrated through all the openings of his clothing, down his collar, inside his shirt, into his boots. The heat was terrific, unbearable, the darkness intense. Wargrave began to wonder if his first apprehensions were not justified, if they ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... was striding over what might prove to be his own acres, and shooting birds which in the future he would himself possess the right to preserve, to invite other people to shoot, to keep less favoured persons from shooting, as lord of the Manor. This was a truth sufficiently irritating to accentuate all his faults of character ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... should have lived when the beloved mother died was in itself an offence. But that that freedom, and peace, and prosperity, which were so dearly purchased by her death, should be risked afresh by him, was irritating to a degree. He was frantic. It was impossible to fail that very peremptory old gentleman, his father. It was out of the question to allow his father-in-law to come to England. He could not throw away all his prospects. And ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Irritating class legislation began to be systematically resorted to, to the prejudice of Uitlanders (the majority of whom, it will be borne in mind, were English), which painfully pointed to a fixed determination on the part of the Boers to lord it over them ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... that some of the jelly-fishes possess the power of stinging. Only a few of the larger species, however, seem to be thus endowed; and the name sea-nettle is by no means applicable to the class as a whole. The poisonous fluid which produces the irritating effect on the skin, and no doubt paralyses the creatures upon which the jelly-fish feeds, is secreted by the arms. By means of its poison-bearing tentacles, the soft, gelatinous medusa is more than a match for the armed ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... gonorrhoea and similar diseases in both sexes, and held in high estimation for this purpose; juice used as an ointment for sores and for sore nipples, and in connection with other herbs for cancer. Dispensatory: The juice of all of the genus has the property of "powerfully irritating the skin when applied to it," while nearly all are powerful emetics and cathartics. This species "has been highly commended as a remedy in dysentery after due depletion, diarrhea, menorrhagia, ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... the Bible, which this semi-theological tractate necessitated, had much to do with the clarification of the author's style. At all events, from this time forth, Nash drops, except in polemical passages where his design is provocative, that irritating harshness in volubility which had hitherto marked his manner of writing. Here, for example, is a passage from "Christ's Tears" which is not without a strangely ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... presence; the squirrel, directly she caught sight of him, would hurry from her seat aloft in fir or beach, to the lowest bough, and thence—though more wary of Vulp than of Brighteye, the water-vole—fling at him the choicest assortment of names her varied vocabulary could supply. Still, for all this irritating abuse Vulp had only himself and his ancestry to blame. The fox loved—as an article of diet—a plump young fledgling that had fallen from its nest, or a tasty squirrel, with flesh daintily flavoured by many a feast of nuts, or beech-mast, ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... imagine how the fellow said it, with what a devilish concentration of malice. He had the most irritating manner of any man in England; I never heard him speak without wanting to dash my ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... self-culture and self-improvement, instead of constant cultivation of the good opinion of others; single-hearted aims and purposes, instead of improper objects, sought and approached by devious and crooked ways, would free our meditations of many disturbing and irritating questions. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... this hide, just as it had been stripped from the starved horses of the cattlemen six months back. In its frozen state it was more like strips of galvanized iron, and when a dog wrestled it into his stomach it thawed into thin and innutritious leathery strings and into a mass of short hair, irritating and indigestible. ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... husbands or wives. They are easily spotted if one is only keen in noticing what takes place, because they are constantly showing their childishness, and we can be sure that they will continue both to reveal and to nurse their weakness throughout life in such a way as to be discouraging and irritating in ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... was indescribable. Yet the man remained a strangely sympathetic creature. Benevolence radiated from him ridiculously, mildly, impressively. It was irritating, too. But I pointed out coldly, as one who deals with the incomprehensible, that I didn't see any reason to expose myself to a snub from the fellow. He was a very unsatisfactory steward and a miserable wretch besides, but I would just as soon think ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... the moment we arrived here—before, sir, we even had a formal vote,—this question of slavery was raised by the introduction of the resolution of the gentleman from Missouri. It has had the effect of exciting the public mind with an irritating controversy. It has impaired the public credit and retarded the public business. The debate founded upon it has been unjust, offensive, wrong, not only to the Republicans here, not only to those with whom I act, but to all our common constituents, north and south. The gentlemen who have ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... towns, has been curiously and intensely rural in the tracts that lie between; but now, as we descend the steep incline into the valley of the Meuse, we enter on a scene of industrial activity which, if never quite as bad as our own Black Country at home, is sufficiently spoilt and irritating to all who love rustic grace. The redeeming point, as always, is that infinitely superior good taste which presents us, in the midst of coal-mines and desolation, not with our own unspeakably squalid Sheffields or Rotherhams, but with a queenly city, with broad and handsome ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... impossible soup made of sea-weed. After which there are little fish dried in sugar, crabs in sugar, beans in sugar, and fruits in vinegar and pepper. All this is atrocious, but above all unexpected and unimaginable. The little women make me eat, laughing much, with that perpetual irritating laugh, which is the laugh peculiar to Japan,—they make me eat, according to their fashion, with dainty chop-sticks, fingered with mannered grace. I am becoming accustomed to their faces. The whole effect is refined,—a ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... announcement of the disease,—visible now even to Sons of Night. Insurrection usually 'gains' little; usually wastes how much! One of its worst kinds of waste, to say nothing of the rest, is that of irritating and exasperating men against each other, by violence done; which is always sure to be injustice done, for violence does even ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Mr. Britling's habit, a habit he had set himself to acquire after much irritating experience, to disregard Aunt Wilshire. She was not, strictly speaking, his aunt; she was one of those distant cousins we find already woven into our lives when we attain to years of responsibility. She had ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... the graveled walk, leaving the young man alone. Lawford's calmness was as irritating to him as sea ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... urbane tranquillity which gave him on all occasions the full possession of his extraordinary faculties, enabled him to concentrate them instantly upon whatever was submitted to his attention, however suddenly—and to conquer without irritating or mortifying even the most eager and sensitive opponent. He never suffered himself to be in a hurry, or fidgeted; however sudden and serious the emergency which frighted others from their propriety, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... individual becomes subject to gout and rheumatism, which in turn frequently destroy the bony support of the teeth and bring about Riggs's Disease. The last named is a prevalent and disfiguring disease, whose symptom is receding gums. The irritating toxins deposited on the teeth cause inflammation of the tissues at the gum margins. The gums withdraw more and more from sections of the teeth; the poisons get underneath and work back toward the roots; the infection increases and hastens the loosening of the teeth. ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... indicated by five marriages, and by (perhaps as a consequence) pecuniary difficulties. In 1781, Washington wrote to another brother, "In God's name how did my brother Samuel get himself so enormously in debt?" Very quickly requests for loans followed, than which nothing was more irritating to Washington. Yet, though he replied that it would be "very inconvenient" to him, his ledger shows that at least two thousand dollars were advanced, and in a letter to this brother, on the danger of borrowing at ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... mosquitoes are a terrible annoyance anywhere in the vicinity of water, and delight in attacking the tender skin of the stranger. Then, again, beware of scratching any exposed part of the skin, for, unless it is quickly covered by plaister or otherwise attended to, an irritating sore, which may take months to heal, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... easily satisfied. A Pelion always rises beyond an Ossa. It was not enough to feel that he had re-established the prosperity and prestige of France, that fresh glory had been added to the Napoleonic name. Was there not, after all, a certain irritating reserve in the homage paid him? was there not a touch of condescension in the friendship of his royal neighbors? And had he not always a Mordecai at his gate—while the Faubourg St. Germain stood aloof and disdainful, smiling at his ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... sweeping back around her pink ears and curling in stray ringlets that the wind danced with while she worked, she inflamed her brawny cousin's ardor afresh. "You used to care for me, Nan. You can't deny that." Her silence was irritating. "Can you?" he demanded. "Come, put up your work and talk it out. I didn't use to have to coax you for a word and a ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... were so rightly irritating, the departure of the "young couple" and Isabel had left Tilling, already shocked and shattered by the death of Captain Puffin, rather flat and purposeless. Miss Mapp alone refused to be flat, and had never ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... head-stewards to be much more dignified men than dukes; and parsons of no earthly reputation, and of very limited means, to be infinitely more stuck-up than archbishops. And though at first the airs of stuck-up small men are amazingly ridiculous, and so rather amusing, they speedily become so irritating that the men who exhibit them cannot be classed otherwise than with the disagreeable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... of the Ballantyne firm told her for the first time that they were sharers in the ruin. A psychologist might trace this strange twist of his mind in the numerous elfish Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep their irritating secret through the long chapters of ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stand by her side with fly-whisks, that she might be free to write. But the struggle was too exciting for her, and the flying insects seemed to increase. Moths of every description—large brown moths, small, delicate white millers—whirled about her, while the irritating hum of the mosquito kept on more than ever. Mr. Peterkin and the rest of the family came in to inquire about the trouble. It was discovered that each of the little boys had been standing in the opening of a wire door for some time, watching ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... do something wrong," answered Jephson. "A consistently irreproachable heroine is as irritating as Socrates must have been to Xantippe, or as the model boy at school is to all the other lads. Take the stock heroine of the eighteenth-century romance. She never met her lover except for the purpose of telling him that she could not be his, and ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... by a lively but harmless malice, hoped to Heaven that Plank might arrive before Quarrier left, because she adored the tension of situations and was delightedly persuaded that Plank was more than able to hold his own with her irritating cousin. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... the strange streets and alleys and stranger shops; it was a joy to ramble about, minus the irritating importunities of guide or attendant. It was great fun, but it was not always wise. There were some situations which only men could successfully handle. Elsa would never confess that there had been instances when she had been confronted by such situations. She could, however, truthfully ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... of her sons, and adding a lustre to the Sun of Peace that should never be dimmed by the black clouds of Militarism! And all this was not to be? He had never even heard that Liege had fallen, let alone Brussels, and here were the Germans apparently right round the Allied flank. It was astounding, irritating. In a vague way he felt deceived and staggered. It was a disillusionment! If the Germans were across the Sambre, the French could scarcely launch their victorious attack on ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... You will excuse me, Belden, but your aunt, Mrs. Wetherly, is a somewhat unusually irritating woman. I'll see you, Miss Strong—ah, yes, ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam
... the Russian charge d'affaires, was intriguing to excite the north of Europe against France. He repeatedly received orders to obtain the insertion of irritating articles in the 'Correspondent'. He was an active, intriguing, and spiteful little man, and a declared enemy of France; but fortunately his stupidity and vanity rendered him less dangerous than he wished to be. He was universally detested, and ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... of time to revolve his speculations, matrimonial and otherwise, during his journey to Ecclesfield Manor by one of those mid-day trains so irritating to through-passengers, which stop at intermediate stations, dropping brown-paper parcels, and taking up old women with baskets. He reviewed many little affairs of the heart in which he had lately been engaged, without, however, suffering his affections to involve themselves ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... said the doctor. "Now, Mme. Cibot, be careful never to contradict the invalid. You must be prepared to be very patient with him, for he will find everything irritating and wearisome, even your services; nothing will please him; ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... and destroys her fool's paradise. Love does make fools of us all, surely, but I wanted to make Desdemona out the fool who is the victim of love and faith; not the simpleton, whose want of tact in continually pleading Cassio's cause is sometimes irritating to ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose. But I have to recognise the facts of the case. In spite of all my large liberality, I find it less irritating to be ruled by people of my own language and race and tradition, and I perceive that for the mass of people alien ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... a considerable amount of friction was inevitable until they got to understand each other. The occasional over-riding of local desires by the 'autocratic' Department, which in the first rush of its work had to act in a somewhat peremptory fashion, was, no doubt, irritating. Now, however, it is generally recognised that the central body, having not only the advice of its experts and access to information from similar Departments in other countries to guide it, but also being in a position ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... the wall, which Thorn had not seen. Sylva was there, sleeping the same heavy, dreamless sleep from which Thorn himself had just awakened. He went to her swiftly. She was breathing naturally, though tears from the irritating gas still streaked her face and her skin seemed to be pinkened a little from the ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins |
