"Surliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... leathery, peat faced, with a deep voice and a surliness that is meant to be aggressive, and is in effect pathetic—the voice of a man of hard life and many sorrows—comes in at the gate. He is old enough to have perhaps worn a long tailed frieze coat and knee breeches in his time; but now he is dressed respectably in a black frock coat, tall ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... suppose it makes much difference to the excluded whether it is done out of mere surliness, or for the sake of ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... information to a certain point is general. Those who have knowledge are not shy of imparting it, and those who are ignorant take care not to seem so; but are sometimes agreeable, often amusing, and seldom betes. Nowhere have I seen unformed sheepish boys, nowhere the surliness, awkwardness, ungraciousness, and uneasy proud bashfulness, I have seen in the best companies in England. Our French friend Lucien has, at fifteen, the air and conversation of a finished gentleman; ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... writer has a manner sui generis, purely his own; but it is somewhat surprising, how he becomes so well informed of the actual state of things, and of the feelings and opinions of both parties in our country. His acuteness, his wit, his logic, and his surliness, form, altogether, a curious portraiture of an English politician. We, now and then, get sight of American papers; but they are almost all of them federal papers, and contain matter more hostile to our government than the English papers. The most detestable paper printed in London, is called, ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... quality of his intellect that it is almost laughable to think how eagerly they must have awaited criticism of the books they gave him—criticism that never came. Yet he never seems to have given the impression of surliness; he was not surly, he was silent. He must have been the despair of diagnosticians; even in his last illness, it was impossible for the doctors and nurses to discover how he felt, for he would not tell. I think his burning mind ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... majestic. We would have tarried here, but the custode was very nervous and hurried us through the thickets of bushes growing up between the stones of the pavement, and fairly pushed us out again into the small parkway, accepting the very generous fee which I gave him with what I should call surliness. But we ignored this completely, after the manner of old travelers, which we had been ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... tenants, for they had seen their young crops ridden over, or used as pasture, by the cavalry of both sides, and were therefore not merely without means of paying rent, but were faced by actual want for their own families. The surliness or threats with which the squire's demands were met should have proven to him their impolicy; but if to the simple-minded landlord a debt was a debt and only a debt, he was quickly to learn that there are various ways of payment. No sooner had ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... day Watusk must have thought better of his surliness for he sent a polite message to Ambrose at Simon Grampierre's house, requesting him and Simon to come to a tea dance ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... I mean to be,' he answered, with added surliness. 'If the speech and the clothes and the vittles as have been good enough for me ain't good enough for any young upstart as may follow after ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... was somewhat incongruous, and, for some inexplicable reason, the same face and figure which did not look inconsistent in rags and extreme poverty now at once suggested a higher social rank both of intellect and refinement than his workman's dress indicated. This, added to his surliness of manner and expression, strengthened a growing suspicion in the mind of the party that he was a fugitive from justice—a forger, a derelict banker, or possibly a murderer. It is only fair to say that the moral sense of the spectators was not shocked ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte |
