"Querulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at last got some tidings of Charles, and as they must have reached you, I need not tell you what sincere satisfaction they afforded me. I have also heard from James; he too, talks of success, but in a querulous strain. What are you doing? Where is Eliza? You have perhaps answered these questions in answer to the letters I gave in charge to Mr. I.; but fearing that some fatality might have prevented their reaching ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... eye, the air of placid resignation about her presence, seemed so lovely, for she bore no outward token of the grief within; she had never wailed or cried her sorrow away; but though her gay smile had passed away forever, she had not become the gloomy misanthrope or the fretful querulous invalid. She had complained to no one. Her old grandfather knew her griefs, but he also knew that it was a subject he could not offer her consolation upon. To aid the suffering as far as her slender means would allow, to tend the couch of sickness, to cheer the desponding heart in its ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... the mountains afar are dim 'Neath the tremulous tread of the seraphim, Shall not our querulous hearts prevail, That have prayed for the peace of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... once the slattern lolled about the little salon, now moved an attractively garbed and tidy woman. Instead of the sloven, he found a housewife who made up in zeal for lack of experience. The patriotic soldier's mate replaced the indifferent and oft-times querulous partner of Les Petit Patou. It is true that, when, in answer to the question, "A battle—what is that like?" he tried to interest her in a scientific exposition, she would interrupt him, a love-bird on her finger and its beak at her lips, with: ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... then alighting among some wild grape vines, plays several variations on his clear, ringing flute. From an elm tree, an oriole answers his bold challenge in his rich voice, while a band of chickadees indulge in their querulous calls as they inspect each leaf and twig for larva and eggs. Up in a linden tree, a blue jay is crying "Salute me, salute me." Like a second lieutenant just commissioned. He wears his close-fitting uniform and overseas cap with a dignity that becomes one of that most enviable rank. ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... class. On the one hand, one will find the old aristocratic British tradition in an instructively distorted state. All the assumptions of an essential lordliness remain—and none of the duties. All the pride is there still, but it is cramped, querulous, and undignified. That lordliness is so ample that for even a small family the income I have named will be no more than biting poverty, there will be a pervading quality of struggle in this home to avoid work, to frame arrangements, to discover cheap, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... threats against Samuel sounded from the other side of the room with each separate garment that she laid on the chair at the foot of her bed. In sheer desperation at last I pulled the cover over my ears in an effort to shut out her thin, querulous tones. At the instant I felt that I was wicked enough to wish that I had been born without any mother, and I asked myself how she would like it if I raised as great a fuss about baby Jessy's crying as she did about Samuel's—who didn't make ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... he came on his uncle, General Pendyce. He came on him from behind, but knew him at once by that look of feeble activity about the back of his knees, by his sloping yet upright shoulders, and the sound of his voice, with its dry and querulous precision, as of a man whose occupation has been ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... voice was querulous. "Don't I tell you everything? Mrs. Swink has friends here, strivers like herself—the only kind of people you won't have anything to do with. But I'm going to ask you to ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... keenly felt the justice of this remark, querulous as it was, to care to defend herself. It was hopeless to attempt to explain to her mother that the oscillations of her mind might arise as naturally from the perfection of its balance, like those of a logan-stone, as from inherent lightness; and such an explanation, however comforting ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... only to console it. She was young. It was not probable that the death which she had once sighed for would be accorded to her. Was she always to lead this life? Was her father to pass the still long career which probably awaited him in ministering to the wearisome caprices of a querulous invalid? This was a sad return for all his goodness: a gloomy catastrophe to all his bright hopes. And if she could ever consent to blend her life with another's, what individual could offer pretensions which might ensure her tranquillity, or even happiness, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... altered now," continued she, in a querulous tone. "I always prophesied, that you would cease to ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... girl Mrs. Sands sent the other day," said a querulous voice from a mass of lace-ruffled pillows ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... adverse, baffling, contrary, perverse; petulant, peevish, cynical, surly, unamiable, inaffable, crabbed, crusty, captious, fractious, churlish, vixenish, querulous, fretful, choleric, touchy, waspish, morose, sullen, ill-natured, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... fiendlike brilliancy of his eyes. "Who are you, and whence come you?" said Stanton, in a tone that was meant to be interrogatory and imperative, but which, from his habits of squalid debility, was at once feeble and querulous. His intellect had become affected by the gloom of his miserable habitation, as the wretched inmate of a similar mansion, when produced before a medical examiner, was reported to be a complete Albino.—His ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Dominion's name, Virginia, and its first colony, Jamestown, bear attestation to this loyalty of which mention is made, though the State's name was given by that lover of Queen Elizabeth and lover of America, Sir Walter Raleigh. Berkeley recalls that querulous old loyalistic governor of Virginia, that fast believer in the divine right of kings and of himself; Westmoreland, Middlesex, New Kent, Sussex, Southampton, Surrey, Isle of Wight, King and Queen, Anne, Hanover, Caroline, King William, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... ashes stern and pale, Ye martyred thousands! and with dreadful ire, A voice of doom, a front of gloomy fire, Rebuke those faithless souls, whose querulous wail Disturbs your sacred sleep!—"The withering hail Of battle, hunger, pestilence, despair, Whatever of mortal anguish man may bear, We bore unmurmuring! strengthened by the mail Of a most holy purpose!—then we died!— Vex not our rest by cries of selfish pain, But to the noblest measure of ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... life she had lived so many years had seriously undermined the stamina of her constitution; and, after the birth of her third child, her health failed altogether. Lillie thus became in time a chronic invalid, exacting, querulous, full of troubles and wants which tasked the patience of all around her. During all these trying years, her husband's faithfulness never faltered. As he gradually retrieved his circumstances, she was first in every calculation. Because he knew that here lay his greatest temptation, here he ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... soul, she lay upon her bed through the whole round of changes of the seasons. She lay upon her bed through fifteen months. In all that time, her old cheerfulness never quitted her. In all that time, not an impatient or a querulous ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... melodious voice of Elinor Wildegrave. She sang a sweet plaintive ditty, and the tones of her voice had power to soften and subdue the rugged nature of Mark Hurdlestone. His knees trembled, his heart beat faintly, and tears, for the first time since his querulous infancy, moistened his eyes. He softly unclosed the gate, and traversed the little garden with noiseless steps, carefully avoiding the path that led directly ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... the pines. A querulous coyote complained. Strange noises were everywhere around us. Scampering sounds echoed back and forth in the cabin. My cot was hard and springless as a rock, and when I stretched into a more comfortable position the end bar fell off and the whole ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... article that night and, in the morning, took it to Mr Greeley. He was at his desk writing and at the same time giving orders in a querulous tone to some workman who sat beside him. He did not look up as he spoke. He wrote rapidly, his nose down so close to the straggling, wet lines that I felt a fear of its touching them. I stood by, waiting my opportunity. A full-bearded ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... outstretched pinions over mountain and valley, with head pointing downwards, looking for the refuse on which they feed. To mistake a kite is impossible. Throughout the day it makes the welkin ring with its querulous chee-hee-hee-hee-hee. Some kites are larger than others, consequently ornithologists, who are never so happy as when splitting up species, have made a separate species of the larger race. This latter is called Milvus melanotis, ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... destitute of humor; and if the idea that inspires them be great and noble, they are impervious to it. But through the perversity of human affairs it not infrequently happens that men are possessed by a single idea, and that a small and rickety one—some seven months' child of thought—that maintains a querulous struggle for life, sometimes to the disquieting of a whole neighborhood. These last commonly need no satirist, but, to use a common phrase, make themselves absurd, as if Nature intended them for parodies on some of her graver productions. For example, how could the attempt to make application ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... to him was the fretful, querulous voice of an old, bedridden woman as he lifted the latch and opened the door of a poor house upon the ramparts, which had no entrance into the street; and where he lived alone with his mother, cut off from all ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... "Ah, Signore! Ah, Cristo!"—exclamations which, perhaps, had some reference to my illness, but which did not cease when I recovered. Whether she had any private reason for depression I could not learn; I fancy not; it was only the whimpering and querulous habit due to low health. A female servant, who occasionally brought me food (I found that she also cooked it), bore herself in much the same way. This domestic was the most primitive figure of the household. Picture a woman of middle age, wrapped at all times in dirty rags ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... enjoyment of gala dresses and friendly greetings, very different from the silence, immobility, and noli me tangere aspect of an English congregation. Over all drones, rattles, snores, and shrieks the organ; wailing, querulous, asthmatic, incomplete, its everlasting nasal chant—always beginning, never ending, through a range of two or three notes ground into one monotony. The voices of the congregation rise and sink above it. These southern people, like the Arabs, the Apulians, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... "an allegory of an impossible ideal of love, accepted conventionally." How impossible he has shown not only here but everywhere—how conventionally accepted. This is not woman's mission! And in the lover's querulous outbreak—the "true slave's" outbreak—we may read the innermost meaning of the allegory. If women will set up "the pert pretence to match the male achievement," they must consent to take the world as men are forced to take it. There must be no unfairness, no claim on the chivalry which ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... trying," ever in a fume and fuss, who, for sheer goodness, rouse in others the spirit of contradiction. These characters are at their best in adversity, trouble stimulates them to their best efforts, whereas in easy circumstances and surrounded with affection they are apt to drop into querulous and exacting habits. If they are endowed with more than ordinary energy it is in the direction of diplomacy, and not always frank. On the whole this is the character whose features are least clearly defined, over which a certain mystery ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... small book, but intrinsically it is indeed a very great book, such as could only be produced by a great mind, and it comprises more wisdom and wit than a score of old English folios could together yield to the most devoted reader. Some querulous persons there are who affect to consider the present as a shallow age, because, forsooth, huge volumes of learning—each the labour of a lifetime—are not now produced. But the flood-gates of knowledge are ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... ministered; but to allow a power of visitation to any one outside the close corporation of the convent was fraught with infinite peril to the community. Confessing their faults one to another, and asking pardon of the Lord Abbot or his representative, the prior, was one thing; but to have a querulous or inquisitive or even hostile bishop coming and intruding into their secrets, blurting them out to the world and actually pronouncing sentence upon them—that seemed to the monks an absolutely intolerable and shocking condition of affairs. Hence it seemed supremely desirable to a convent to get ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... softly and clearly into the air, and a querulous voice answered me from afar—the voice of ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... detected a faint muttering in one of the lodges and a reply to it; but both voices were those of querulous age. A moment later the tottering figure of an old man emerged from the lodge, and crouching beside a dying fire threw on a few sticks with shaking hands and drew his blanket more ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... weary day for me. Phelps was still weak after his long illness, and his misfortune made him querulous and nervous. In vain I endeavored to interest him in Afghanistan, in India, in social questions, in anything which might take his mind out of the groove. He would always come back to his lost treaty, wondering, guessing, speculating, as to what Holmes was doing, what steps Lord Holdhurst was ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the diseases of the liver and spleen to which the natives, and particularly the children, are much subject in the jungly parts of Central India. From these affections children pine away and die, without showing any external marks of disease. Their death is attributed to witchcraft, and any querulous old woman, who has been in the habit of murmuring at slights and ill treatment in the neighbourhood, is immediately set down as the cause. Men who practise medicine among them are very commonly supposed ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... 'Ere yet I could speak, I am sure, O my father, that I heard that voice. Have not I often said that I remembered a sweet voice? O my father! this is it': and Cain trembled exceedingly. The voice was sweet indeed, but it was thin and querulous, 105 like that of a feeble slave in misery, who despairs altogether, yet can not refrain himself from weeping and lamentation. And, behold! Enos glided forward, and creeping softly round the base of the rock, stood before ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... came, half querulous, a whisper old, Feeble and hollow as if shut in a chest: "Take my face on your bosom; I am cold." She bared her holy bosom's truth-white nest, And forth her two hands instant went, love-bold, And took the face, and close against ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... the wisdom of the proposal, and Emily went to her room. Before long the bell of the chapel-of-ease opposite began its summoning, a single querulous bell, jerked with irregular rapidity. The bells of Pendal church sent forth a more kindly bidding, but their music was marred by the harsh clanging so near at hand, Emily heard and did not hear. When she had done housemaid's office ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... drew forth a large trunk from the closet, and set to work with querulous and fretful haste to pack her wardrobe. She tore her best dress in taking it from the hook on which it hung: she scratched her soft hands twice with an ambushed pin. All the while, she kept up an indignant commentary on the events of the past few moments. She ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... fled. The watchful Hamish was the first to notice that his master began to take less and less interest in the shooting and boating and fishing; and at times the old man was surprised and disturbed by an exhibition of querulous impatience that had certainly never before been one of Macleod's failings. Then his cousin Janet saw that he was silent and absorbed; and his mother inquired once or twice why he did not ask one or other of his neighbors to come over to Dare to have ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... a curious sense of his coming back from unknown distances and not belonging to her or to any state of things she understood. Then habit reasserted itself, and she began to think of him again with a querulous familiarity. But she had learned to hide her feelings, and as he came in she put up her face ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... moment for Thaddeus McIlvaine. He sat down among his friends almost portentously, adjusted his spectacles, and peered over them in his usual manner, half way between a querulous oldster ...
— McIlvaine's Star • August Derleth
... its glare. Her lips moved as she talked over to herself the events made known by Zack, or the excuses she was building up for Dale. She was passing Hewlet's house now, when a woman's voice, high, whiney and querulous, floated out ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... became a part of life; the day was measured by the three regular visits of the doctor. To the younger members of the family it seemed already that their father had always been sick, and that he always would be; indeed, to Cora and Hedrick he had become only a weak and querulous voice beyond a closed door. Doctor Sloane was serious but reassuring, his daily announcement being that his patient was in ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... be no need for the most querulous appraiser to find fault with Mr. Holliday on the score of over-eulogy. He does not try to push sound carpentry or ready wit into genius. Fortune and his own impetuous onslaught upon life cast Kilmer into the role of hack journalist: he would have claimed no other title. Yet he adorned ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... packed up?" he asked in a querulous voice. Then his eyes fell on Teddy the elf. He scowled until his little pin-pricks of eyes almost disappeared. "Ugh! there's one of those nasty gamblesome elves," he said. ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle
... so much philosophy if, as I ever feared, the closing years of my life had passed in helpless indigence? Should I not have sunk into lowest depths of querulous self-pity, grovelling there with eyes obstinately averted ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... brown fellow would hop with a low chirp from one bush to another as though he had been lost up there for years and had grown quite hopeless about seeing his kind again. When there was a gap in the mountains, he could hear the querulous, senseless love-quarrel of flickers going on below him; passing a deep ravine, the note of the wood-thrush—that shy lyrist of the hills—might rise to him from a dense covert of maple and beech: or, with a startling ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... of his ship when the shot were flying; and now he saw in him another Doughty sent by the friends of Spain to hang on his arm. "In persisting," he told Lord Burleigh, "he committed a double offence, not only against me, but it toucheth further." To his embittered sense the querulous protest was a treasonable attack on his own authority, and in his fury he brutally dismissed the old admiral from his command and placed him under arrest on his flag-ship. In vain the astonished veteran protested his innocence, apologized, and made submission. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... they knew not where, like one that hath a dream of sinking; and outside the shell a rushing, gurgling noise, and a noise as of shouting multitudes, and muffled multitudes muttering complaints and yells and querulous cries, told them they were yet speeding through the body of the depths in the belly of the fish. Then there came a shock, and the shell was struck with light, and they were sensible of stillness without motion. Then a blow on the shell shivered it to fragments, and they were blinded with seas ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... were always at her command, and she had ever a few ready to drop upon her dainty embroidered handkerchief when the occasion commanded it; and her visitors, when they agreed among themselves, what a soft gentle woman that poor Mrs. Sankey was, but sadly delicate you know—had no idea of the querulous complaining and fretfulness whose display was reserved for ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... the tea, and the tobacco seemed to have brought him back to life, and he gripped tighter hold of the idea behind his age-bleared eyes. He straightened up somewhat. His voice lost its querulous and whimpering note, and became strong and positive. He turned upon me with dignity, and addressed me ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... took it good-naturedly enough. There were whistles and catcalls from one end of the car and a noisy imitation of a kiss. Girls giggled nervously. A man grew querulous: "Where are we? That's all I want to know. Where are we? If we're near a station, we can get out and ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... After Malcolm's burial I took possession of her; she escaped to the wretched house, but as her mistress was off to Kingussie, and the door shut, she gave a pitiful howl or two, and was forthwith back at my door, with an impatient, querulous bark. And so this is our second of the four; and is she not deserving of as many names as any other Duchess, from her of Medina ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... street, when Delmia thought she heard a slight noise in the bedroom. She bent her head and listened attentively. "It is nothing; my ears often deceive me now," she mumbled as she laboriously seated herself on a maimed rocking-chair, which creaked dismally as she rocked herself to and fro. Its querulous protestations prevented her hearing the sound of a falling window which came from the ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... Fane's Rosebud, or the ghostly White Old Maid. One of the most carefully wrought sketches in Twice-Told Tales is the weird story of The Hollow of the Three Hills. By means of a witch's spell, a lady hears the far-away voices of her aged parents—her mother querulous and tearful, her father calmly despondent—and amid the fearful mirth of a madhouse distinguishes the accents and footstep of the husband she has wronged. At last she listens to the death-knell tolled for the child she has left to die. The solemn rhythm of Hawthorne's ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Querulous, complaining sounds come from the lodge room. The tenor horns are crooning, and the bass horn blatting gently, while the clarionet players are chasing each other up and down the scale, like squirrels running round and round in a cage. The ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... fantasy overbalanced her reason, impeding its development and thus relegating it to a secondary role. "She is possibly the only French writer who possessed no esprit (in the sense that it is used in French society)—that playful, epigrammatic, querulous wit of conversation." ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... though it was, Janet could not avoid being struck by Lady Chillington's stately dignity of manner. Her tone and style were those of a high-bred gentlewoman. It seemed scarcely possible that she and the querulous, shrivelled-up old woman in the cashmere dressing-robe could be one and ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... I can say to you Whatever be the things men do; Let one love make May to you, Hold one love true. Who but hears the querulous Sigh and the heavy groan,— Yet stand for the one love ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... brilliant, had taken their places in the sky; the owl was whooping from the ivied tower; the corn-craik was calling drowsily; now and then the distant baying of a watch-dog startled the silence, otherwise undisturbed, save by the plaintive murmuring of the stream, which, as it flowed past, uttered such querulous sounds, that, as some one has happily expressed it, "one was almost tempted to ask what ailed it." A traveller was moving slowly up the side of the river, and ever and anon stopping, as if to muse over some particular object. It was Elliot. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... himself coolly to the losing game before him. The Duchess, more cheerful than she had been, assumed the care of Piney. Only Mother Shipton—once the strongest of the party—seemed to sicken and fade. At midnight on the tenth day she called Oakhurst to her side. "I'm going," she said, in a voice of querulous weakness, "but don't say anything about it. Don't waken the kids. Take the bundle from under my head, and open it." Mr. Oakhurst did so. It contained Mother Shipton's rations for the last week, untouched. "Give 'em to the child," she said, pointing ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... Mr. Sutherland's canoe within half an hour of Louis' discovery, and Eric wheeled about with a querulous demand. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... anything. I am exceedingly glad that you approve of my self-restraint in the case of Appius, and of my independence even in the case of Brutus: and I had thought that it might be somewhat otherwise. For Appius, in the course of his journey, had sent me two or three rather querulous letters, because I rescinded some of his decisions. It is exactly as if a doctor, upon a patient having been placed under another doctor, should choose to be angry with the latter if he changed some of his prescriptions. Thus Appius, having treated the province ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... rang out sharp and querulous. A servant, resplendent in the palace livery of green and orange, was instantly before him ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... peevishly at his food or quite forgot to eat at all until she coaxed him. She always smiled at dinner; one should smile at dinner even though one feels very, very sad. And after dinner one must make an attempt to give a querulous old man his game of chess. And let his cold lips caress one's hand when Bele comes to put him ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... hampered by genteel traditions, and, as it was near quarter-day, managed to get taken on at a furniture warehouse. He moved people from the suburbs to London, from London to the suburbs, from one suburb to another. His companions were hurried and querulous. In particular, he loathed the foreman, a pious humbug who allowed no swearing, but indulged in something far more degraded—the Cockney repartee. The London intellect, so pert and shallow, like a stream that never reaches the ocean, disgusted ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... educational and religious life of the colony. Their moral standards were high and inflexible; they extolled, and practised, the virtues of thrift and industry. It may be well for women in America today, who were querulous at the restrictions upon sugar and electric lights, to consider the good sense, and good cheer, with which these women of Plymouth ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble
... the Flagship stepped into the empty ring and raised his hand for silence. The hum of voices died away instantly, and in the stillness the thin, querulous crying of the gulls somewhere ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... compelled to decline the mission, as his wife, whom he loved with devotion rarely equalled, and perhaps never surpassed, was sick and dying. Arthur Lee, then in Europe, was elected in his stead. He was a querulous, ill-natured man, ever in a broil. A more unsuitable man for the office could scarcely have ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... honest inquiry rather than querulous criticism in the question, often asked, Why does not religion produce a higher and stronger type of moral character? Enthusiasm for the teachings of Christ often is cooled by contact with some flabby-willed, narrow-minded professed follower of ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... bethought them of their various grievances, a leak here, a broken door-bell there, a certain bad smell that was supposed to have some connection with a rash upon the children's faces. They waited for Geary's appearance by ones and twos, timid, very respectful, but querulous for all that, filling the air ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... Miss Joan had been querulous and bitter with her, and it made me love and reverence her more than ever to hear ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... eyes, and bronzed skin, a strong, kind, fearless face. He looked a thorough man, one to be trusted. He greeted me very kindly as his little sister, and took me home with him. Goldmead Park was the loveliest place I had ever seen. His Aunt Evangeline, whom I also called 'aunt,' was a frail, querulous old lady, whom he treated as his mother. He did not marry till after her death, five years later. I was planted in entirely new surroundings, with everything pleasant about me, everything that I could ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... was already come; and so was her mother—a little querulous chip of an old lady with a peevish face, who, in right of having preserved a waist like a bedpost, was supposed to be a most transcendent figure; and who, in consequence of having once been better off, or of labouring under an impression that she might ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... think of," said petite maman in a feeble, querulous way, "and I won't have all my neighbours in this house made unhappy because of me. They have all been kind neighbours. Will you promise not to molest them and to clear the house of soldiers if I ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... press and in rhetorical bombast, opprobrious epithets, fit only for the pot-house or the shambles? Shall we men and citizens, each of us a pillar upholding the crowning dome of our nationality, be taught, like vexed and querulous children, the impotence of personal abuse? Why seek to lay upon the head of this Cabinet officer or that, this Senator or that, the responsibility of temporary military defeats, when we are no more able to command and prevent reverses than ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sufferings (more from oppression and annoyance than acute pain) with astonishing fortitude and composure. Nothing ruffled his temper or disturbed his serenity. His faculties were unclouded, his memory retentive, his perceptions clear to the last; no murmur of impatience ever escaped him, no querulous word, no ebullition of anger or peevishness; he was uniformly patient, mild, indulgent, deeply sensible of kindness and attention, exacting nothing, considerate of others and apparently regardless of self, overflowing with affection and kindness of manner and ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... if he scented the corpses underneath the surge. Below them from the Gull-rock rose a thousand birds, and filled the air with sound; the choughs cackled, the hacklets wailed, the great blackbacks laughed querulous defiance at the intruders, and a single falcon, with an angry bark, dashed out from beneath their feet, and hung poised high aloft, watching the sea-fowl which swung ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Imperceptibly filling the loop Of its shade at a slant of sun. The pipes under pent of the crag, Where the goatherds in piping recline, Have whimsical stops, burst and flag Uncorrected as outstretched swine: For the fingers are slack and unsure, And the wind issues querulous:- thorns And snakes!—but she listened demure, Comparing day's music with morn's. Of the gentle spirit that slips From the bark of the tree she discoursed, And of her of the wells, whose lips Are coolness enchanting, rock-sourced. And much of the sacred loon, The frolic, the Goatfoot ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... looking at them a moment, while he raised his hand to his head, behind, and stood rubbing it a little, with a movement that displaced his hat. (I may remark in parenthesis that I never saw a hat more easily displaced than Mr. Ruck's.) I supposed he was going to say something querulous, but I was mistaken. Mr. Ruck was unhappy, but he was very good-natured. "Well, they want to pick up something," he said. "That's ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... the blind man did not know that it was Mary's thoughtfulness alone which now provided for his comfort. And yet he had a strange idea; he began to fancy that Harriet's voice was growing shrill and querulous! How singular it was, for no one else had observed it; but it is one of the merciful dispensations of the Almighty, by which we are guarded, that when man is deprived of one faculty, the others are almost always sharpened, to make ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... "sirrupping" some brandy-and-water, and Esther sat at the table at work. They both came forward to greet the new arrival; and the girl, relieving him of his monstrous burthen, proceeded to display her offerings to her father. Van Tromp's countenance fell several degrees; he became quite querulous. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me that the victim had recovered. The sun had sunk beneath the horizon, and all was grey, save a red feather in the cap of Pennigent. Secure in the failing light, I approached near and strained my ears to catch what was passing. I could hear the high, querulous voice of the elder man and the deep, rough monotone of his assailant, mixed with a strange metallic jangling and clanking. Presently the surgeon came out, locked the door behind him and stamped up and down in the twilight, pulling at his hair and brandishing his arms, like a man demented. Then ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the beginning, and afterwards he was often in her home, bringing gifts for the querulous invalid, and, better still, hope for the future of her husband, about whom he interested a friend of his, who was doing well out in New Zealand, and looking out for a partner with some knowledge ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... tried by the same poverty. It beats the one down, makes him squalid, querulous, faithless, irreligious, drives him to drink, crushes him; and the other man it steadies and quiets and hardens, and teaches him to look beyond the things seen and temporal to the exceeding riches at ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... far more dangerous. These make their appearance daily in the morning press, thrusting their pessimisms across our breakfast tables, beleaguering our faith with ill-natured judgements and querulous warnings. One of our London Dailies, for instance, specializes in annoying America; it works as effectively to breed distrust as if its policy were dictated ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... years, still constant in fun and kindness, in quaint erudition and hearty friendship, though he is all this in a slightly deadened and sicklied degree. But there are strange breaks-down and unfamiliar touches, now of almost querulous self-concern (the thing most foreign to his earlier nature), as where he complains that his companions, his son and daughter, 'are neither desirous to follow his amusements nor anxious that he should adopt ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... he paints as he goes along a most graphic picture of the life of an actor. We shall follow his own desultory method; and proceed without farther prelude to select here and there a 'bit' from his well-filled 'budget of fun.' Let us open it with this common portrait of a vain querulous, complaining Thespian, who is ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... extensive misery, which are found in books, rather than in the world, and which, as they are horrid, are ordained to be rare. Let us not imagine evils which we do not feel, nor injure life by misrepresentations; I cannot bear that querulous eloquence, which threatens every city with a siege, like that of Jerusalem, that makes famine attend on every flight of locusts, and suspends pestilence on the wing of every blast that issues from ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... were far too busy to look up. I watched the cleanly finished hoist and shove-home of the full-weight shell from a safe distance, when I became aware of a change among the scattered boys on the common, who disappeared among the hillocks to an accompaniment of querulous whistles. A boy or two on bicycles dashed from corps to corps, and on their arrival each ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... out an easy-chair and a cushion, and was followed by two figures—his mother, leaning heavily on the arm of—Betty, her poor head shaking tremulously, and her querulous voice raised in some complaint about the position of ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... with bands of wet-looking clouds, the leaves of the forest stirred noiselessly on their stems. Along the river willows quivered and aspens turned their leaves white side to the sky. In the querulous notes of the birds there was a prophecy of storms, the river muttered among its hollows ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... almost querulous tone, and looked inquiringly in his nurse's face. It did not occur to the youth, as he looked at her, that the weak-bodied, soft, and gentle creature herself had been, and still was, doing more good to the world than a hundred young ...
— Jeff Benson, or the Young Coastguardsman • R.M. Ballantyne
... when the festivities were interrupted. "Hush," said Dick Bullen, holding up his hand. It was the querulous voice of Johnny from his adjacent closet: ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... s'attend a voir un auteur et on trouve un homme." Authors then, as now, were often thought to be fantastical, namby-pamby persons, living in dreams, sharing none of the plain man's interests, eager and querulous about trifles and unrealities, indifferent and incapable in the broad world of life. Nobody ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... will be supportable; a few months and it will have become no more than a tender melancholy. At last it will disappear, and in the society of his friends, in the skill of his cook, the profits of avarice, the study of how to be querulous and in the pursuit of loquacity, he will again experience the joys of age. Why for a present grief should he deprive himself of all ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... was a bit querulous that evening. The Heads of Training Schools get that way now and then, although they generally reveal it only to the First Assistant. They have to do so many irreconcilable things, such as keeping down expenses ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a volume of Tennyson in my pocket, which somehow settled that question, and ended the querulous dispute between me and Conscience, under the shape of the neglected and irritated Greek muse, which had been going on ever since I had commenced my walk about Athens. The old spinster saw me wince at the idea of the author of Dora and Ulysses, and ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Queerly Questioned a Quibbling and Querulous Quidnunc, And asked Quizzingly if he had ever seen the inside ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... black in colour, with the exception of a reddish-brown streak down the middle of the back. When first taken, or when kept tied up, it is very timid and irritable. It will not allow itself to be approached, but keeps retreating backwards when any one attempts to coax it. It is always in a querulous humour, uttering a twittering, complaining noise; its dark, watchful eyes are expressive of distrust, and observant of every movement which takes place near it. When treated kindly, however, as it generally is in the ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates |
