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More "Chaffer" Quotes from Famous Books



... stuffy room with its guttering candles and its Chameleon-colored ark-curtain was the pivot of their barren lives. Joy came to bear to it the offering of its thanksgiving and to vow sixpenny bits to the Lord, prosperity came in a high hat to chaffer for the holy privileges, and grief came with rent garments to lament the beloved dead and glorify the name ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... Baccio Valori alone!" thundered Fra Giuseppe. "Down with all those bastard growths that flourish in the capital of Christendom. Down with all that hell-spawn, which is the denial of Christ; down with the Pardoner! God is no tradesman that he should chaffer for the forgiveness of sins. Still less—oh blasphemy!—of sins undone. Our Lady wants none of your wax candles. It is a white heart, it is the flame of a pure soul that the Virgin Mother asks for. Away with your beads and mummeries, your paternosters and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... bright patterns. The faces of the women were brown and wrinkled; there were no pretty ones among them, but their black eyes were full of life and quickness, and their fingers one and all clicked with knitting-needles, as their tongues flew equally fast in the chatter and the chaffer, which went on without stop or stay, though customers did not seem to be many and ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge

... detestable relic of barbarism, it is this custom of bargaining over every breath one draws in life. It creates a sort of incessant internal seething, which is very wearing to the temper and destructive of pleasure in traveling. One feels that he must chaffer desperately in the dark, or pay the sum demanded and be regarded as a goose fit for further plucking. So he forces himself to chaffer, tries to conceal his abhorrence of the practice and his inexperience, and ends, generally, by being cheated and considered a grass-green ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... cake run a race from the church to the bridegroom's house, the victor winning a silk neckerchief embroidered by the bride. Then comes the rhymed dialogue, in which the representatives of the bride and of the groom chaffer with each other over the bride, but always with the result that the bridegroom's deputy gets the better of his opponent—yet only after the bridegroom himself has promised to be father and brother to his young wife, and ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai

... advantage or disadvantage is often wearisome, and may be pushed to pettifogging; but these quoted are general and fundamental. To mention them is not to chaffer over details, but to state principles. There is one other which should be noted, although its value may be differently estimated. Of the great long-gun superiority of the Americans more than one half was in the unprotected schooners; distributed, ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... and, with a feeling of pride, called my study, by carefully securing from it all access of air, as far as was in my power; then, attaching a cord to the door and window, so contrived that the slightest pull would throw them wide open, I placed a chair in the centre of the room, and a chaffer of burning charcoal by its side. With a feeling of exultation, I sat down to complete my experiment. The cords were fixed to my arms, so that, when I fell from my seat unconscious, the door and window would open, and restore animation by the access ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various

... housewives to bring out their old rags and bottles and bones. Mark felt the thrill of trade and traffick, and he longed to be big enough to open the window and call out that he had several rags and bottles and bones to sell; but instead he had to be content with watching two self-important little girls chaffer on behalf of their mothers, and go off counting their pennies. The voice of the rag-and-bone man, grew fainter and fainter round corners out of sight; Lima Street became as empty and uninteresting as the nursery. Mark wished that a knife-grinder would come along and ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... furiously over the gallery railing, flourishing shirts, stockings, and garments of every kind, mentionable and unmentionable, in the faces of the gaping loafers below. Sometimes a particular "lot" will attract the attention of a spectator, and he will chaffer about it for a while; but the sales do not often appear to be very brisk. The people one sees in these places are very characteristic of the Bowery. Many of them are what the police call "hard cases,"—men, with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... may trust Herodotus, was careful to avoid debt. He had a keen sense of the difficulty with which a debtor escapes subterfuge and equivocation—forms, slightly disguised, of lying. To buy and sell wares in a market place, to chaffer and haggle over prices, was distasteful to him, as apt to involve falsity and unfairness. He was free and open in speech, bold in act, generous, warm-hearted, hospitable. His chief faults were an addiction to self-indulgence and luxury, a passionate abandon to the feeling of the hour, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson

... spake he looked anxiously, nay, it may be said greedily, at the young man. But Ralph said nought; for in his heart he was determined not to chaffer away his gossip's gift for any shaveling's token. Yet he knew not how to set his youthful words against the father's wisdom; so he stood up, and got his shirt into his hand, and as he did it over his head he fell to singing to himself a song of eventide of the High House of Upmeads, the ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris

... with its guttering candles and its Chameleon-colored ark-curtain was the pivot of their barren lives. Joy came to bear to it the offering of its thanksgiving and to vow sixpenny bits to the Lord, prosperity came in a high hat to chaffer for the holy privileges, and grief came with rent garments to lament the beloved dead and glorify the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... not for the great emperor to chaffer with his friends," said Pulcheria, the princess. "Bid that the stipend be fixed at three hundred and fifty pounds of gold, good Anthemius, and let our guests bear to Ruas the king pledges and tokens of ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks

... the Prelate, "whose stripes should be received as benefits. You think of pay, Sir Constable, and of guerdon, as if you still stood in the market, free to chaffer on the terms of your service. I tell you, you are no longer your own master—you are, by the blessed badge you have voluntarily assumed, the soldier of God himself; nor can you fly from your standard without such infamy as even coistrels or grooms ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... of American ship-master. The older type—and the more romantic—was the man who took his ship from Boston or New York, not knowing how many ports he might enter nor in how many markets he might have to chaffer before his return. But in time there came to be regular trade routes, over which ships went and came with almost the regularity of the great steamships on the Atlantic ferry to-day. Early in the nineteenth century the movement of both freight and ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... blood, men die as of yore; oxen graze, sheep bleat, babies bawl, asses bray—loud and lusty as the day before the flood. Men fight and make up; repent and go at it; feast and starve; laugh and weep; pray and curse; cheat, chaffer, trick, truckle, cozen, defraud, fib, lie, beg, borrow, steal, hang, drown—as in the laughing and weeping, tricking and truckling, hanging and drowning times that have been. Nothing changes, though much be new-fashioned: new fashions ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... any one's head to chaffer about five shillings; on the contrary, getting it for half-a-sovereign might be considered dirt-cheap, considering the ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun

... if we may trust Herodotus, was careful to avoid debt. He had a keen sense of the difficulty with which a debtor escapes subterfuge and equivocation—forms, slightly disguised, of lying. To buy and sell wares in a market place, to chaffer and haggle over prices, was distasteful to him, as apt to involve falsity and unfairness. He was free and open in speech, bold in act, generous, warm-hearted, hospitable. His chief faults were an addiction ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson









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