"Cussedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anything more ancient than their own memory can recall, the most fundamental factor of all—the line of cleavage between Ulster and the rest of the island—- is more than unintelligible. In the eyes of many it presents itself as an example of perversity, of "cussedness" on the part of men who insist on magnifying mere differences of opinion, which would be easily composed by reasonable people, into obstacles to co-operation which have no ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... real vicious horse, but a dangerous one. Full of vinegar and all-round cussedness, but without malice. Just as soon kill you as not, but in a playful sort of way, you understand, without meaning to at all. Personally, I wouldn't think of riding him. But he's a stayer. Look at them lungs. And look at them legs. Not a blemish. He's never ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... call it religion and some call it cussedness, begging your pardon, Mrs. Dr. dear, for using such a word. It seems they cannot make out which it is in Harrison's case. There are days when he growls at everybody because he thinks he is fore-ordained to eternal punishment. And then there are days when he says he ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... now what happened to Mick Molloy. He was certainly a good horse and a splendid jumper, but he had one bad fault and that was that, every now and again, apparently for no reason whatever, except the same cussedness that held him when he wouldn't go up the hill, he would hit a bank or a wall full hard and turn head over heels into the next field. As the weather, as a rule, was moist, and there was plenty of mud about when Mick Molloy ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... it was just one thing after another. He told me that he never would have believed twelve goats could cover so much cussedness in a day. He said he couldn't fill a radiator but some goat would be chewing the baggage tied behind the car, or Billy would be rooting suitcases off the running board. One party fell in love with a baby goat and Casey in a moment ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... and down, Tony talked between tears and anger—tears for himself and George, anger at the cussedness of things. He looked straight before him, to where the row of lamps divided the lesser from the greater darkness, the town noises from the chafing surf; it is the only time I have ever seen a fisherman walk along shore without a constant eye on ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... — N. obstinateness &c adj.; obstinacy, tenacity; cussedness [U.S.]; perseverance &c 604.1; immovability; old school; inflexibility &c (hardness) 323; obduracy, obduration^; dogged resolution; resolution &c 604; ruling passion; blind side. self-will, contumacy, perversity; pervicacy^, pervicacity^; indocility^. bigotry, intolerance, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... away from it," he heard Crane declare: "there's some sort of funny business going on, or liable to go on, aboard this ship. She wasn't held up for a solid week out of pure cussedness. Neither did they come aboard to-night to give us another once-over through sheer voluptuousness. ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... the result of his unsympathetic nature; it never occurred to any one (but himself probably) that they might have been the cause. In those Sierran altitudes, as elsewhere, the belief in original sin—popularly known as "pure cussedness"—dominated and overbore any consideration of passive, impelling circumstances or temptation, unless they had been actively demonstrated with a revolver. The passive expression of harshness, suspicion, distrust, and moroseness was looked ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Kennedy explained. Then an expression of gratification crept into his face. "Miss Lamar was 'up- stage'?" he mused. "That's a theatrical word for cussedness, ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... flashes of sharpness apt to prove embarrassing to their companions. The Saxons, to use their own expressive parlance, were always "a trifle wary" in dealing with Maud, for what that young lady thought she promptly said, and said without reserve, choosing, as it seemed, out of pure "cussedness" the very moment of all others when they would ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and dinners, which were sharply timed to the minute, were these crisp table speeches, often made in re some particular offender or his offense, at other times mere sarcastic comments on life in general and the innate cussedness of human nature, which amused at the same time that they were certain to irritate some. For who is it that is not interested in hearing the ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... married to other fellows, while I did not even know their present addresses. I pondered upon our earthly existence, upon how hollow, false, and transient it is, and how full of sorrow. I mused upon the wickedness of the world and of everybody in it, and the general cussedness ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... Indianapolis has had her day since then, Chicago is lifting her head. Nevertheless Boston still controls the text-book in English and dominates our high schools. Ironic feelings in this matter on the part of western men are based somewhat on envy and illegitimate cussedness, but are also grounded in the honest hope of a healthful rivalry. They want new romanticists and artists as indigenous to their soil as was Hawthorne to witch-haunted Salem or Longfellow to the chestnuts of his native heath. Whatever may be said of the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... wuz surprised to see no one make a motion at him, but he sunk all the same. "We never waste effort," sed Satan to me; "he carries enough natural cussedness about him, all the time, to sink him, without pilin any devilment on his shoulders wich is ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... bad. He's gone, and—and you and me that was with him for years and years, his very best friends on earth as you might say, wasn't with him when he died. If it hadn't been for her he'd have stayed in South Harniss where he belonged. Consarn women! They're responsible for more cussedness than the smallpox. 'When a man marries his trouble ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... donkeys. Unhappy patient beasts! usually covered with raws and galls, that are urged forward at a gallop by the remorseless stick, or even by the goad, for the Neapolitan donkey-boy is absolutely callous to the feelings of his animal. Not that he is cruel out of sheer cussedness, for cruelty's sake, for he can be really kind to his dog or his cat; but the beast of burden, the helpless uncomplaining servant of man, suffers terribly at his hands. It is useless to remonstrate or argue with the young ruffian, who at ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... who has affection for Thoreau may find worst is a combative streak, in which he too often takes refuge. "An obstinate elusiveness," almost a "contrary cussedness," as if he would say, which he didn't: "If a truth about something is not as I think it ought to be, I'll make it what I think, and it WILL be the truth—but if you agree with me, then I begin to think it may not be the truth." The ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... often anyhow—most being satisfied to work off their high spirits some other way. With them that's not white, things is different. When the Apache streak gets on top it sends 'em along quick into clear deviltry—the kind that makes you cussed just for the sake of cussedness and not caring a damn; and it's them that has give some parts of the Western Country—like it did New Mexico in the time I'm talking about, when they was ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier
... every time I unbattened my mouth a million or so flew in and choked me. That's what I said—a million. Some moskeeters are fat, but these don't get a square meal often enough to be anything but hide-racks filled with cussedness. Moskeeters! ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... tried again. After mother died he left whisky alone, though he still had it in the house. He took to reading philosophy instead. You see, he was not like you. There was a hardness, a bravery in him that you haven't got. You have cussedness instead and cussedness is a thing you can never be sure of. You see," she went on, flushing a little, and suddenly tossing her head proudly, "you don't understand this, and it may sound most appalling snobbishness to you. But my father's people have always been rulers—little kings—fighters, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... breath of the burnin' boat Jim Bludso's voice was heard, And they all had trust in his cussedness, And knowed he would keep his word. And, sure's you're born, they all got off Afore the smokestacks fell, - And Bludso's ghost went up alone In the smoke of ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... Jo. "Not a darned one. I wasn't ever in love with your ma, like the guy on the stage; and I never owed your pa a cent. So it ain't a guilty conscience. I guess it's just pure cussedness, and a hankerin' for a new investment. I'm curious to know how'll you turn out. You've got the makin's of what the newspapers call a Leading Citizen, even if you did fall down once. If I'd ever had time to get married, ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... guests on the poop; "see that little devil! See him show his teeth! That is Mr. Sinful Peck. I've had him in irons with a broken head five times, and the log is full of him. I towed him over the stern running down the trades to take the cussedness out of him, and if he had not been born for higher things, he'd have drowned. He was absolutely unconquerable until I found him telling his beads one time in irons and took them away from him. Now to get an occasional chance at them he is ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... wealth and art and life is the German defense of it. War is always hell and most of the awful things in this war have had their counterparts in other conflicts, though the Teutonic element has brought some peculiar refinements of cussedness and has given a thoroughness and "pep" and "kick" ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... next proceeding. I knew there was to be some more of it, and there was. Hunt's brother offered back half the money; offered it! why, he tried to force it on the fellow, and couldn't. His master wouldn't let him buy himself and his wife,—I suspect, out of sheer cussedness,—and he hadn't any other use for money, he said. Besides, he didn't want to take, and wouldn't take, anything that looked like pay for doing aught for a 'Linkum sojer,' alive ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... Testament, about as an immoral, dissolute, and bestial a set as one could well imagine. Their religions were nothing but a gross mixture of stupid superstition and blind idolatry, pederasty, fornication, and general cussedness. In the then state of the Jewish nation, to have allowed them to mingle freely with these people would have ended in having the Jews adopt all their customs and habits. The aim of the Jewish leaders was to prevent any too free intercourse of their people with these nations, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... good deal of pleasure, and I often thought that the atonement would have to be very broad in its provisions to cover the case of a man that would I write such a book for boys. Then I would look to see how the sun was getting on, and sometimes I thought it had stuck from pure cussedness. Then I would go back and try Jenkyn's again. Well, but it had to go down, and when the last rim of light sank below the horizon, off would go our hats and we would give three ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... accustomed to think of the external world around us as a nasty tiresome old thing of which all we can say for certain is that it works by a "law of cussedness"—so that, whichever way we want to go, that way seems always barred, and we only bump against blind walls without making any progress. But that uncomfortable state of affairs arises from ourselves. Once we have passed a certain barrier, which ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... gave them a talk for what he called their long-eared cussedness, and laid down a little law and wound up with a number of reasonable explanations for the same. Every man who went out hunting trouble was a camp liability, and would be fired. He did not propose to give the town authorities a chance to jail workmen and impair the dam work, ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd |
