"Pestering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the history of his character development, lost sight of him as he struggles in a morass of desires and purposes of power, fellowship and superiority. His situations become still more complex as we watch him seek to unify his life around permanent purposes, against a pestering, surging, recurring, temporary desire. He desires, let us say, to conform to the restriction in sex, but as he approaches adolescence, within and without stimuli of breathless ardor assail him. He must inhibit them if he proposes to be chaste, and his continent road is beset with never-resting ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... had I seen him thus at a first meeting, I should have thought at once, "This man is a sensualist and a ruffian!" His answers were distinctly rude; he said the question was foolish (probably it was)—that people had been pestering him with that kind of thing ever since he left India; in short, he gave me to understand that he regarded me as a nuisance. I had never before seen in him any approach to this manner; indeed, I had continually ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... very early opportunities of Inquiry from Sir W. Davenant, that he was no extraordinary Actor; and that the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet. Yet this Chef d'Oeuvre did not please: I will give you an original stroke at it. Dr. Lodge, who was for ever pestering the town with Pamphlets, published in the year 1596 Wits miserie, and the Worlds madnesse, discovering the Devils incarnat of this Age. 4to. One of these Devils is Hate-virtue, or Sorrow for another mans good successe, who, says ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... denote that all ten fingers are being shown, or chiarella for all but one. Five points usually make the game, and these are commonly marked by holding up one or more fingers of the disengaged left hand.—These are a few of the many sights to be witnessed by those who can afford to endure the pestering attentions of small boys, and the uncomplimentary staring of the adult population in such places as the Torres or Castellamare; and such as wish to make themselves acquainted with the details of southern ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... Arab's jibbeh, clawing with his brown fingers at the edge of the cotton skirt. The Emir tugged to free himself, and then, finding that he was still held by that convulsive grip, he turned and kicked at Mansoor with the vicious impatience with which one drives off a pestering cur. The dragoman's high red tarboosh flew up into the air, and he lay groaning upon his face where the stunning blow of the Arab's horny foot had ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... touching, pathetic. irritating, provoking, stinging, annoying, aggravating, mortifying, galling; unaccommodating, invidious, vexatious; troublesome, tiresome, irksome, wearisome; plaguing, plaguy^; awkward. importunate; teasing, pestering, bothering, harassing, worrying, tormenting, carking. intolerable, insufferable, insupportable; unbearable, unendurable; past bearing; not to be borne, not to be endured; more than flesh and blood can bear; enough to drive one mad, enough to provoke a saint, enough ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the house of the good woman with this silly story. Prithee, good man, let us sleep in peace; begone in God's name; and if thou hast a score to settle with her, come to-morrow, but a truce to thy pestering to-night." ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... cheerfully, as he shook hands with the late second mate of the Florence Ricks. "We don't see much of each other now that you're a mate. But don't worry, you'll be a master again, and then you'll be dropping in here a couple of times a month pestering me for a lot of things for your ship that you could probably get along without. You're ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... is a bird placed in the woods of Cayenne, with a bill a yard long, making a noise like a puppy-dog, and laying eggs in hollow trees? To be sure, the toucan might retort, To what purpose were gentlemen in Bond Street created? To what purpose were certain members of Parliament created, pestering the House of Commons with their ignorance and folly, and impeding the business of the country? There is no end of such questions. So we will not enter into the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... that Val and I had set that rick on fire, and so got us into a row through the man's speaking to us at Melchester. And last year, when we met him, you made out you didn't know why he should be always pestering us ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... to read everything she could lay her hands on about the business of building construction, and very soon when she asked a question it was a fairly intelligent one, because it had some knowledge back of it. She didn't make the mistake of pestering him with questions before she had any groundwork of technical knowledge to build on, and I'm not sure that he ever guessed what she was up to, but I do know that gradually, as he found that he did not, for instance, have to draw a diagram and explain laboriously what a caisson was because ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... who died when the child was born. Then Elizo brought her home to the Mazet, and there she has lived her whole lifelong. Esperit is waiting only until he shall be established in the world to speak the word. And the scamp is in a hurry. Actually, he is pestering me to put him at the head of ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... and they have a villanous propensity of following you home from your club of an evening, and inveigling you every now and then to Bow Street, thrusting a broken knocker or two into your pocket as you go along, and then pestering your bewildered memory with all sorts of nocturnal misdemeanors; truly they are a race of noxious vermin; pretty well, perhaps, for the protection of the swinish multitude; but for us gentlemen, why, they "come betwixt the wind and our nobility," and their remembrance stinks ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... their death; there had been no moment; like good soldiers they had never died, but faded away, and till to-night he had not known that they had gone. He would show Nan now that she need fear no more pestering from him; she need not keep on talking without pause whenever they were alone together, which had been her old way of defence, and which she was beginning again now. They could drop now into undisturbed friendship. Nan was the most stimulating ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... give up a joke, once he thinks he has one," said Mary. "But I'll tell him to stop pestering ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... tallow down there in the hottest part of the fire. Look out; don't tip it—there! Now, you come here an' help me pour this soup into the bottle. I'm goin' to git that ole hoss so het up he'll think he's havin' a sunstroke! Seems sorter bad to keep on pestering him when he's so near gone, but this here soup'll feel good when it once gits ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... I want a dog for my daughter, sir, to keep off a worthless, good-for-nothing dude who comes pestering around here after her because he knows that her father has a lot of money, and thinks that if he marries his daughter he can move ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... Alaskan cinnamon bear, three years old, that had been christened "Christian," at Skagway, because it stood so much pestering without flying into rages, as the grizzly did. After a short time with us, the concrete floors of our bear dens reacted upon the soles of its feet so strangely and so seriously that we were forced to transfer the animal to a temporary cage that had a wooden floor. While I was ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... looked upon him as a struggling friend or a poor relation or an agreeable, persuasive grafter, whose only work consisted in talking them into indifferent acceptance of an insurance policy and then pestering them into a reluctant payment of the premium. Of course big business firms recognized a broker's expertness or lack of it, though, quite frequently, as in Hilmer's case, they were more snared by a share in the profits than by ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... and his wife to look after them, and I try to make it as nearly like a happy family as I can. But Miss Brown says she can't stay there any longer. This young man—a decent enough chap he had seemed to me—is pestering her with his attentions. He is quite in ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... mend all!' said Harry, drawing a long breath. 'For my part, all I know is, that I would these great folks who rule us now had let my father end his days in peace, without pestering him about surplices and Prayer-Books and the sign of the cross, all which he holds for rank Papistry, I suppose; and I cannot wish him to lie, even about such foolish trifles as these things appear to me. But what ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... wants to get away. He doesn't seem quite content with his job of idle aristocrat. I believe he's been pestering the old man to send him West. Old man ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... have admitted that a girl who hadn't got her own bread or her family's to earn by it was justified in spending her time in fiddling than he would have approved of her spending it in dancing. I have heard him take a text out of the Imitation and lecture Rose when she was quite a baby for pestering any stray person she could get hold of to give her music-lessons. "Woe to them"—yes, that was it—"that inquire many curious things of men, and care little about the way of serving me." However, he wasn't consistent. Nobody is. It was actually he that brought Rose ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to the other two who had been pestering the little fellow. They weren't quite so aggressive and as yet had come to no conclusion about their stand. Probably the three had been unacquainted before their bullying alliance to deprive the smaller man of his place. However, a moment of hesitation ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... Henry VIII. did not buy books extensively, he sometimes borrowed them, and several entries chronicle the lending of books to him by monastic and other libraries, when he was pestering Christendom for arguments in favour of his divorce ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... all,—knows there was never any more manhood in Master Mervale's disposition than might be gummed on with a play-actor's mustachios! Why, she is my cousin, Stephen,—my cousin and good friend, to whom I came at once on reaching England, to find you, favored by her father, pestering her with your suit, and the poor girl well-nigh at her wits' end because she might not have Pevensey. So," said Master Mervale, "we put our heads ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... Pomerania of the blasphemous lies which I had vomited against him, and which must sorely offend every Christian heart. Item, what an avaricious wretch I must be to be always wanting something of him, and to be daily, so to say, pestering him in these hard times with my filthy letters, when he had not enough to eat himself. This, he said, should break the parson his neck, since his princely Grace did all that he asked of him; and that no one in the parish need give me anything more, but ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... and secluded minds, a continual dwelling upon the subject had magnified to colossal proportions the space she assumed herself to occupy or to have occupied in the occult critic's mind. At noon and at night she had been pestering herself with endeavours to perceive more distinctly his conception of her as a woman apart from an author: whether he really despised her; whether he thought more or less of her than of ordinary young women who never ventured into the fire of criticism at all. Now she would have the satisfaction ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... have been made and amply allowed for, Emerson remains among the most persuasive and inspiring of those who by word and example rebuke our despondency, purify our sight, awaken us from the deadening slumbers of convention and conformity, exorcise the pestering imps of vanity, and lift men up from low thoughts and sullen moods of helplessness ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... is simply pestering Nellie with his attentions. There! I must speak plainly. He has gone to extremes that can no longer be misinterpreted. In our small community, Mr. Brett," she explained, "though we dearly love a little gossip, ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... ain't natural, Mr. Knowles—not in him, it ain't. Nor it ain't natural for him to be so all-fired polite to everybody, nor his pestering you ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... and your questions are a nuisance, Peter Rabbit, and I may as well get rid of you now as to have you keep coming down here and pestering me to death. Besides, any one who has to keep such a sharp watch for Reddy Fox as you do ought to know why he wears a red coat. If you'll promise to sit perfectly still and ask no foolish questions, I'll ...
— Mother West Wind 'Why' Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... same party crowding the Park on a Sunday; but on the following day, return, like school boys, to their work, and you see them with their pen behind their ear, calculating how to make up for their late extravagances, pestering you with lies, and urging you to buy twice as much as you want, then officiously offering their ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... may reign in the heart, the heart must first repose in the bosom of Divine Providence—free from the pressure of doleful souvenirs, and from the pestering desires stirred up by vanity; in a word, exempt from every obstacle, whether intrinsic or extrinsic, that might in any way oppose the designs of God. But, alas! by some unaccountable inconsistency, we are in contradiction with ourselves; ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... that I was a kind of over-affectionate pestering dull dog, who made this brilliant youth's life a burden to him. It was really not so; we had very many tastes in common; and with all his various temptations, he had a singularly constant and affectionate nature—and ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... to the fire she passed close to where Pete sat, never looking at Phil above the level of his boots. And as often as she bent over the pot, Pete put his arm round her waist, being so near and so tempting. For thus pestering her she beat her foot like a goat, and screwed on a look of anger which broke down in a stifled laugh; but she always took care to come again to Pete's side rather than to Phil's, until at last the nudging and shoving ended in a pinch ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... experiment, they anticipated nothing more wonderful than the murder of a mouse in an air pump, or the examination of a cobweb by the microscope, or some similar nonsense, with which he was constantly in the habit of pestering his intimates. But without waiting for a reply, Dr. Heidegger hobbled across the chamber, and returned with the same ponderous folio, bound in black leather, which common report affirmed to be a book of magic. Undoing the silver clasps, he opened ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... first to question me in gentle terms, which afterwards they changed to words of considerable harshness and menace, apparently because I said to them: "My lords, it is more than half-an-hour now since you have been pestering me with questions about fables and such things, so that one may truly say you are chattering or prattling; by chattering I mean talking without reason, by prattling I mean talking nonsense: therefore I beg you to tell me what ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... have any wit," retorted the new-comer, "you'll not come pestering me with questions; I'm not in the humour, and when I am ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... found, by her taught songs, what a delightful singer she was capable of becoming, I really had not patience to hear her little French airs, and entreated her to give them up, but the little rogue instantly began pestering me with them, singing one after another with a comical sort of malice, and following me round the room, when I said I would not listen to her, to say, "But is not this pretty?—and this?—and this?" singing away with ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... ought to be kicked," Trego agreed heartily. "I only started this in fun, anyway, to make you see why it is you look so good to me—different—so sound and sane and wholesome that I just naturally can't help pestering you." ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... from place to place, teaching this strange theology, shaking like an aspen leaf in his paroxysms of fanatical excitement, forcing his way into churches, which he nicknamed steeple houses interrupting prayers and sermons with clamour and scurrility, [31] and pestering rectors and justices with epistles much resembling burlesques of those sublime odes in which the Hebrew prophets foretold the calamities of Babylon and Tyre. [32] He soon acquired great notoriety by these feats. His strange face, his strange ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lighters came out, and we were hard at work till dusk getting out the cargo. The next morning at daylight fresh cargo began to come out to us, and things went on well, and would have gone better had not people come on board pestering me with questions about our fight with the Spaniards. And just at noon two of the queen's officers came down and must needs have the whole story from beginning to end; and they had brought a clerk with them to write it down from my lips. They said we had ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... the rest of the folks was Cherokees, and they'd been killing each other off in the feud ever since long before I was borned, and jest because old Master have a big farm and three-four families of Negroes them other Cherokees keep on pestering his stuff all the time. Us children was always afeared to go any place less'n some of ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... observations. Canoes of savages met the white men, and one impudent fellow kept whining out that he had once been shot at by men of Mackenzie's color. Mackenzie took refuge for the night on an isolated rock which was barely large enough for his party to gain a foothold. The savages hung about pestering the boatmen for gifts. Two white men kept guard, while the rest slept. On Monday, when Mackenzie was setting up his instruments, his young Indian guide came, foaming at the mouth from terror, with news that the coast tribes were to attack the white men by hurling spears ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... "Don't be pestering, you devil!" clumsily, altogether like a cadet before a quarrel, grumbled out Petrov in ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... not appeal to him as it would if he had not been preoccupied. And instead of laughing at the crowds of children who clattered after us, waking the clean and quiet streets with the ring of sabots, he let them get upon his nerves. The girls were amused, however, and said that the little pestering voices babbling broken English without sense or sequence, were like the voices of the story in the "Arabian Nights"—haunting voices which tempted you to turn round, although you had been warned beforehand that, if ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... of Arthur Constant, presented by an unknown donor to the Bow Break o' Day Club, and it was to be a great function. The whole affair was outside the lines of party politics, so that even Conservatives and Socialists considered themselves justified in pestering the committee for tickets. To say nothing of ladies! As the committee desired to be present themselves, nine-tenths of the applications for admission had to be refused, as is usual on these occasions. The committee agreed among themselves ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... disturb him, but, if the sky fell, and eight thousand chief clerks threatened to march upon him in a body demanding reports and o.k.s, he would imperturbably make you wait until the work was done. Once, when I interrupted him to question him concerning some of these same wretched, pestering aftermaths of labor, concerning which he alone could answer, he shut me off with: "The reports! The reports! What good arre the reports! Ye make me sick. What have the reports to do with the work? If it wasn't ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... Wonder if Tom Rochford will do anything with that invention of his? Wasting time explaining it to Flynn's mouth. Lean people long mouths. Ought to be a hall or a place where inventors could go in and invent free. Course then you'd have all the cranks pestering. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Mr. Moore who seemed too much taken up with the current of his own thoughts to note the symptoms of his guest's ennui—"to think that these ridiculous gossips of Whinbury and Briarfield will keep pestering one about being married! As if there was nothing to be done in life but to 'pay attention,' as they say, to some young lady, and then to go to church with her, and then to start on a bridal tour, and then to run through a round of visits, and then, I suppose, to be 'having ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... asked him to help her—but he never paid any attention. Finally he said to himself: 'I don't care about this woman, but she is becoming a nuisance. Perhaps if I give her what she wants she will stop pestering me.'" Jesus said very emphatically, "If this wicked man finally helped a widow because she kept on asking for justice, won't God, who is good and just, answer you ...
— Men Called Him Master • Elwyn Allen Smith
... thing," broke in Elaine, as if she had been thinking aloud, "is that Berenice has been pestering Eloise for her ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... life of Joe Smith. They'd go right out and make Amalon look like a whole cavayard of razor-hoofed buffaloes had raced back and forth over it. And the rest of the two thousand men on Ezra Calkins's pay-roll would come hanging around pestering you all with Winchesters. They'd ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... that I should marry Bayard, and on that understanding I promised to marry him when I came into possession of the estate. But that didn't suit—or rather, it seemed to satisfy them only for a little time. Very soon they were pestering me again to marry at once. I couldn't see the need—and finally I kept my word and ran away—took my room in Thirty-eighth Street, and before long secured work in my own store. At first I was sure they'd identify me immediately; but somehow ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... did. You have been pestering him for the last half-hour, and he is getting tired of it; but I may say, Howard, I shall hardly be able to sleep to-night, I am so anxious to see ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... to answer for. He was all right when I left him, two hours ago, with not a sign of fever. Has the Countess been pestering him?" ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... the absence of their husbands, the musicians' wives hung around the building pestering the officials. Pobloff has been found, they were informed, in a solitary fit, on the floor of the auditorium. The stage was in the greatest confusion—chairs and music stands being piled about as if a tornado had visited the place. Not a musician was there, and with the missing was Luga, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... no need to spoil one's brief rest by allowing a beastly doubt like that to rear its ugly head! One thing he was sure of—Robert Fenley could never be a rival; and Fenley, churl that he was, had known her for years, and could hardly be pestering her with his attentions if she were pledged to another man. Moreover he, John, newly in love and tingling with the thrill of it, fancied that Sylvia would not have clung to him with such complete confidence when the uproar arose in the park if——Well, well—the ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... green and black flies came pestering and tormenting like a host of wicked jinn. The glare of sunlight on the yellow sand hurt the eyes. The deadly silence of the place was oppressive—especially when you had strung yourself up to concert pitch to face the crash and turmoil of a ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... I didn't write a word. I had the courage to wait for the real thing, nobody pestering me to be a "genius"! Some day you may read that first book. People said I had re-discovered the virtue of ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... movement. What a pity he did not know all this! What a shower of splendid additional sarcasms he would have poured over those flat-nosed Franks, had he known what I know now, that it is the eternal way of the Christian to be a rebel, and that just as he has once rebelled against us, he has never ceased pestering and rebelling against any one else either of his own ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and buckler, the chariots and the horses of the party; but it is impossible for his lordship to govern well with such colleagues as he has—colleagues which have been forced upon him by family influence, and who are continually pestering him into measures anything but conducive to the country's honour and interest. If Palmerston would govern well, he must get rid of them; but from that step, with all his courage and all his greatness, he will shrink. Yet how proper ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... the thing to do is to keep them from going to the church next Thursday fortnight, and from pestering you with presents in the mean while. When you've headed them off on that you'll feel more free to—to give your mind ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... the coulee road, they went—when Simon saw the grove at the landing. Among those trees many a pestering buffalo-fly had been outwitted; there, where grapevines tangled, many a mosquito had been rubbed away. Quick as a flash, Simon made for the cut, with ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... but in spite of herself it was caressing. Her heart had gone out to the child the moment she had seen her enter the school-room. She was as helpless before her as before a lover. She was wild to catch her up and caress her instead of pestering her with questions. "Ellen, you must answer me," she said, but Ellen ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the | |dismal hours of the night by chopping | |spectral cordwood with a phantom axe. | |Instead of going to board with Mrs. | |Pepper or another medium and being of | |some use in the world and having a | |pleasant, dim-lighted cabinet all its | |own, this unhappy ghost—or ghostess—is | |pestering Marciana Rose of 1496 Bergen | |street, who owns the cellar and the house | |over it—over both the ghost and the | ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... give me my dinner?" he quizzed, his lips' lifting humorously at the corners. "I kinda thought, from the way you turned me down cold when we met before, you'd shut your door in my face if I came pestering around. ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... answered, "and better still if I can get rid of that pestering deer and her fawn. The two have laid waste my garden patch. See yonder!" he pointed with the squirrel rifle. "And it won't be good for the two the next time they come nibbling ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... however, invented by Raffles, was sufficiently specious in itself. That sick gentleman, Mr. Maturin (as I had to remember to call him), was really, or apparently, sickening for fresh air. Dr. Theobald would allow him none; he was pestering me for just one day in the country while the glorious weather lasted. I was myself convinced that no possible harm could come of the experiment. Would the porter help me in so innocent and meritorious an intrigue? The man hesitated. I produced my half-sovereign. ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... is he talking about?" demanded Spencer. "Has he been pestering Miss Wynton this morning with some ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... a hiding, the young cur," growled my foe, the sentry. "He's been pestering me this half-hour to let him in. He was one of Monsieur's men, he said. Monsieur would see him. Well, we have seen ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... — How would a lovely handsome woman the like of you be lonesome when all men should be thronging around to hear the sweetness of your voice, and the little infant children should be pestering your steps I'm thinking, and you ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... now whenever Jenkins wanted a ghost, he called on me. And I had never found it healthy to contradict Jenkins. Jenkins always seemed to have an uncanny knowledge as to when the landlord or the grocer were pestering me, and he dunned me for a ghost. And somehow I'd always been able to dig one up for him, so I'd begun to get a bit cocky ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... and ride by the side of the carriages, urging their claims in incessant clamor, pressing about us, intercepting the views, good-tempered enough but decidedly an annoyance. We speak them fair, and request, then direct, them to abandon the chase. It has no effect whatever. They continue their pestering tactics, now falling behind, then ranging again alongside, hindering conversation, interrupting constantly with their jargon. Plainly it is a time for firm measures. We call a halt, and, standing up in the carriage, I tell them once for all and finally that we will have nothing to do with ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... "Wilmer's pestering me to get married right away," she told him; "before ever the house is built. He seems to think I ought to be just crazy to take him and go to that ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... frogs all croaking together in a marsh? Or if I must absolutely answer, in spite of my disdain, how can I prevent any lover, such as thyself, from persuading himself of what he wishes to believe? For all of them resemble thee, behaving like unreasonable bulls, the very moment that they see me, and pestering me like flies, to my torment, and yet would blame me for driving them away. And every one of them, exactly like thee, imagines me his own, for no reason that I am ever able to discover, although I tell them all, exactly as I told thee, that I ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... said till I'm tired," Brown answered, with sudden heat. "This is pestering a man at a very unfortunate time. Look! the people are coming. I must go. My poor mistress! and poor Miss Carmel! I liked 'em, do ye understand? Liked 'em—and I do feel the trouble at the ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... Rogers, after his separation from the Seventh-day Baptists, perversely chose Sunday as the day most convenient for the Rogerines to hold their meetings. They not only exhorted and testified in the streets, but forced their way into the churches, pestering the ministers to argue disputed points. They offended in another way, for, according to the colony law, they profaned the Sabbath by working, claiming that, as all days were holy, all were alike good for ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... different manner, "if you give one inch to that Greek, he will make it a mile, and as to Janet, if she can't bring down her pride to write to you like a daughter, I wouldn't give a rap for her receipt, and it might lead to intolerable pestering. Now you know she can't starve on 50 a year besides her medical education. Wakefield will always know where she is, and you may ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Sebosus, that friend of Catulus! Which way am I to turn? I declare that I would go at once to Arpinum, if this were not the most, convenient place to await your visit: but I will only wait till May 6: you see what bores are pestering my poor ears."[402] ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... horses, and a buzzard that wheeled high in the blue above, there was no living, moving thing within his range of vision, and the only sounds were the soft rattle of bit-chains as the horses thrashed lazily at pestering flies, and the sullen gurgle of the swollen river. Again he swore. His lips drew into a snarl of hate as his glance once more sought the face of the woman. In his eyes the gleam of hot desire commingled with a glitter of revenge as his thoughts flew ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... The flies were pestering him, and he was thirsty—not with that thirst of the mouth which may be quenched with a long draught, but with the thirst of the throat that sands and sears. He felt thirsty all over. He had been thirsty, ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... nurse," by any number of anonymous people. Indeed, names have been mentioned. A lady's name has been drawn, most unwarrantably as it appears to me, into the discussion, and I have no doubt that this lady has been subject to a good deal of pestering and annoyance. She has written to the Editor of The Evening News denying all knowledge of the supposed miracle. The Psychical Research Society's expert confesses that no real evidence has been proffered to her Society on the matter. And then, to my amazement, ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... responsibilities connected with the election of members of your state councils, just the same as we have; but surely there are other and proper means of obtaining their rights and privileges without resorting to such childish and unwomanly tactics as chaining themselves up, pestering high officers of state, and forcing their way into your ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... today managed to obtain conveyances to transport several of them out of the city—men with sweat on their brows and hands that trembled. There is an element of humor in it all, despite the sadness. One of the staff remarked, "Do you notice how all the newspaper men, who for weeks have been pestering us with requests to be sent to the front, now demand as insistently to be sent away, when the front is at last coming to them?" In time of peace diplomats and war correspondents are easily the most pugnacious people in the world. If one has taken them at their own estimation ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... haven't they been pestering me to sell them my land all along, and when the fire ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... slowly, pestering my memory with fruitless calls upon it, hopelessly trying to recover the place where I could have seen the stranger before. In vain memory traveled over Europe in concert-rooms, theaters, shops, and railway ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... dainty country cousins. They come day by day for their meed of crumbs spread for them outside my window, and at this season they eat leisurely and with good appetite, for there are no hungry babies pestering to be fed. Very early in the morning I hear the whirr and rustle of eager wings, and the tap, tap, of little beaks upon the stone. The sound carries me back, for it was the first to greet me when ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... old hand. He has carried off the buffaloes of my villagers over yonder for years and years, and of late he has also become a man-eater. He once ate a whole family at a meal—a man, his wife, and his three children. The people at Janwargurh have been pestering me for weeks to come and shoot him; and each week he has eaten somebody—a child or a woman; the last was yesterday—but I waited till you came, because I thought it would be something to show you that you would not be ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... word, major, and then I'll leave off and quit a-pestering you," he exclaimed. "If you won't make them two fellows give back the plunder they have stolen from me, you won't raise any row if I go to work and get it back in ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... "What dark, hookemsnivey creatures be in it—men most times. Do you know who's been pestering me to marry him ever since the people all thought you'd falled in the river and was drownded, Nicky? Not Mr. Chuff, but Billy Westaway himself. He's your rival, my dear, and none other. Fifty times has that man called ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... here in Tangier; four, five, six hours afterwards, he mounts his horse, is thrown on to his head. When he wakes again to his senses, the last thing he remembers is—what? A sign, perhaps, over a shop in the street he walked down, or a leper pestering him for alms. The intervening hours are lost to him, and forever. It is no question of an abeyance of memory. There is a gap in the continuity of his experience, and that gap he ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... of Attica was being plundered by Mikion, who had landed at Rhamnus[638] with a large force of Macedonians and mercenary soldiers, and was overrunning the country, Phokion led out the Athenians to attack him. As men kept running up to him and pestering him with advice, to seize this hill, to despatch his cavalry in that direction, to make his attack in this other place, he said "Herakles, how many generals I see, and how few soldiers." While he was arraying his hoplites in line, one of them advanced a long way ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... "Excuse me," said Hella, "all this happened in the spring, and even earlier, in the winter, for we were still skating at the time. Rita's mother was pretty well then. Besides, Zerkwitz was continually pestering us to tell her. I often warned Rita, and said: 'Don't trust her,' but she was quite infatuated with Zerkwitz. Please, Frau Direktorin, don't say anything about it to Rita's father, for he would be ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... only here have I been jealous of my own shadow, and pestering her who 'your puppy' was: and she never would tell me. All I could get from her," added he, turning suddenly from gratitude to revenge, "was that he was no greater ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... get the ship finished?" he was asking. "Kurt Fawzi's pestering the daylights out of me. He wants ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... he strained his brain to make perfect, torn to pieces by a dozen wise old women, who claim the right of carrying the church on their shoulders; he must have dictated to him what sort of dame he may take for wife;—in a word, he must bear meekly a deal of pestering and starvation, or be in bad odor with the senior members of the sewing circle. Duly appreciating all these difficulties, Brother Spyke chose a mission to Antioch, where the field of his labors would be wide, and the gates not open to restraints. And though ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... second day following Patsy played Juliet at Brambleside, and more than satisfied George Travis. While his mind was racing ahead, planning her particular stardom on Broadway, and her mind was pestering her with its fears and uncertainties into a state of "private prostration," the manager of the Brambleside Inn was telephoning the Green County sheriff to come at once—he had ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... five dollars to any Indian when he's got as good a thing as that. These engineers want to see our camp so Matty's to bring 'em up this afternoon while everybody's at the swim. He doesn't want the crowd around to be pestering ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... peace, pestering me to tell him why I had signed. I signed, that's all about it. I didn't do it on purpose. They brought the papers to the shop and I signed them. I am no great hand at ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... brought about a slump in our mutual love. My mother used to read the thing and become depressed and anxious for my spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to unintelligent pestering.... ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... this particular symbol had escaped my memory. There it was, staring me in the face from my note-book, but what it meant for my very life I could not at the moment tell. And the telegraph messengers were pestering me for my copy, and, worst of all, the reporters from London seemed to my guilty conscience to be eyeing me askance, and wondering what the delay meant. In a desperate moment I made a guess, not at the meaning of my symbol, but at some word which might take its place, and possibly pass unnoticed; ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... says to me, 'there's a widow woman here that's pestering the soul out of me with her intentions. I can't get out of her way. It ain't that she ain't handsome and agreeable, in a sort of style, but her attentions is serious, and I ain't ready for to marry nobody and settle down. I ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... Mr. Ring, perplexed, as he came up to them. "What ye driving at? What was that thing that just sailed over the house? Did you see it? I heard Daisy going on out here like the devil before day—or was it you two who were pestering her? What's that ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... His smile became more pronounced. "If I were more energetic, I should be for ever pestering you to marry me. And, you know, you wouldn't like that. As it is, I take 'No,' for ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... dummy and let you buy wi' my brass; the first that pesters me again ah'll just fell him on t' plaace, like a caulf, and ah'm not very sure he'll get up again in a hurry.' So they dropped me like a hot potato; never pestered me again. But if they won't give over pestering you, mistress, ah'll come round and just stand behind your chair, and bring nieve with me," showing a fist ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... of men, above the noisy teeming streets, they rise like some soft strain of perfect music, cleaving its way amid the jangle of discordant notes. Here, where the voices of the world sound faint; here, where the city's glamour comes not in, it is good to rest for a while—if only the pestering guides would leave ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... "Stop pestering me ... let's talk ... read me some of that Tennyson you gave me...." and I began reading aloud, for there was nothing else she would for the moment, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... from a woman. To say truth, he thinks himself invincible to 'em all, and when he finds one of 'em proof against him, even though she may once have seemed—when she didn't know her mind—well, she is the woman he must be pestering, to show that he's ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... wedding-day. That the ceremony was to be a private one—which it probably would be because of the disparity of ages—did not in his opinion justify her secrecy. He had shown himself capable of a transmutation as valuable as it is rare in men, the change from pestering lover to staunch friend, and this was all he had got for it. But even an old lover sunk to an indifferentist might have been tempted to spend an unoccupied half-hour in discovering particulars now, and Christopher had not lapsed nearly so far as ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... to say that Isene, your mare, is very well. Papa and the children are well, and Ruyven a-pestering General Schuyler to make him a cornet in the legion of horse, and Cecile, all airs, goes about with six officers to carry her shawl ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... her by mistake, either," he went on, confused. "For we'd sold her, that same day, to a kid in our town. I ought to know. Because the kid kept on pestering us every day for a month afterward, to find if she had come back to us. He said she ran away in the night. He still comes around, once a week or so, to ask. A spindly, weak, sick-looking little chap, he is. I don't get the point of this thing, from any angle. But we ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... swells! How it dwells In our houses! How it tells Of the folly that impels To the breeding and the speeding Of the Smells, Smells, Smells, Of the Smells, Smells, Smells, Smells, Smells, Smells, Smells— To the festering and the pestering of the Smells! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... before he returned to Piero and gave it back to him by public contract, declaring that he refused to lose his peace of mind by having to think of household cares and listen to the importunity of the peasant, who kept pestering him every third day—now because the wind had unroofed his dovecote, now because his cattle had been seized by the Commune for taxes, and now because a storm had robbed him of his wine and his fruit. He was so weary and disgusted with all this, that ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... never communicated with the man, or given him any chance of pestering you," said Mr. Ford. "I should hardly do so now, ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... time at All Souls. "The other boys," said the atheist, "I can always answer, because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually pestering me with something ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Disregarding the essential evils of the Prussian idea, this mischievous organisation has set itself to persuade the British people that the Germans are diabolical as a race. It has displayed great energy and ingenuity in pestering and insulting naturalised Germans and people of German origin in Britain—below the rank of the Royal Family, that is—and in making enduring bad blood between them and the authentic British. It busies itself in breaking up meetings at which sentiments friendly to Germany might ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... blame for tricks the field-workers put out so that they can earn their money quick and easy. What's the good of pestering me with questions at this awful time? I'm going to die! I'm going to die!" ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... for the carriers. He thought about this some while mending the moccasin, and decided to take the bug gun. It might not kill the stingers, but it ought to discourage them enough so they wouldn't keep pestering him. ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... was passed midnight; when every snake in Buzabub had coiled himself up, shut his eyes and gone quietly to sleep; when pestering centipedes, lizards, and cockroaches were gone peaceably to their holes; and not even a monkey winked, lest he disturb the elements, which were hushed into perfect silence,-there might have been seen at the door of the inn no less an animal than old Battle, harnessed to a vehicle quite resembling ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... worse than a tom-cat in love. At first she was only employed by him in connection with his taverns and in some other shady business, but now he has suddenly realized all she is and has gone wild about her. He keeps pestering her with his offers, not honorable ones, of course. And they'll come into collision, the precious father and son, on that path! But Grushenka favors neither of them, she's still playing with them, and teasing them both, considering which she can get most out of. For though she could filch a ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
