"Cussedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when you could find a place elsewhere. Are you so deaf and blind as not to hear and see the change which has come over the country of late? White men formerly punished a Kafir who had done some wrong, now they worry him from sheer cussedness. You must be mad, Auta Gert, to try and leave us. What is going to become of your family and your beautiful cattle. No wonder that Anna is so upset. I have been thinking that some rondlooper (vagabond) from the towns had been trying to ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... too belligerent in tone for so grave a matter. There is a heap of 'cussedness' mixed up with your usual amiability, and you are at times too fond of a fight. If I were you, I would simply state the facts as they were. I would give the statement as you have here, without the pepper and salt. Let me try my hand ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... bit later the waggons started, and as I expected they would, went up a side valley instead of going on by the caravan route. The fellow had riz my dander, and after sitting for a bit I made up my mind I would go after 'em. I had no particular motive, it wur just out of cussedness. I was not going to be bluffed from going whar I chose. This air a free country, and I had as much right to go up that valley as ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... performing are too numerous to be remembered. He had a supreme contempt for money, but he spoiled the best sides of his strange, eccentric character by enjoying a display of its worst facets with a "cussedness" as amusing as it was sometimes unpleasant. Is it remarkable, then, that many people who only saw him in the disagreeable moods should judge him from an entirely false ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... with them to my satisfaction, I get some one to systematically drop stones and drive them up stream, where, perhaps out of pure unadulterated cussedness, they seem to readily take a fly. A great advantage of this spot up stream is that the baby bass and sun fish give but little trouble. The principal nuisances are the large eels. If the line touches the bottom for an instant an eel seems certain to be ...
— Black Bass - Where to catch them in quantity within an hour's ride from New York • Charles Barker Bradford
... 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 cheers for ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... been destroyed, and another where a number of houses had been burned. A nice-looking young chap told us that there had been a fight there the day before and that the Germans had set fire to the place as they retreated—just from cussedness, so far as he could see. There, and at another place along the road, peasants told us that they had been made to march in front of the German troops when they marched against the Belgians. I don't ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... night, pitching his little tent in the trail for pure cussedness, and defying aloud a traveling world to make him move until he got good and ready. He might have saved his vocabulary, for the road was impassable before him and behind; and had Casey managed to start the car, he could not have driven a mile in ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... Burns' intolerable fussing with those potatoes was not calculated to make me forget the part which I had played. He looked upon it as a purely commercial transaction of a particularly foolish kind, and his devotion—if it was devotion and not mere cussedness as I came to regard it before long—inspired him with a zeal to minimise my loss as much as possible. Oh, yes! He took care of those infamous potatoes with a vengeance, as ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... Malahide was it?, was, he was bound to admit, an exceedingly plucky deed which he could not too highly praise, so that frankly he was utterly at a loss to fathom what earthly reason could be at the back of it except he put it down to sheer cussedness or ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... who were now 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
... or stability of Jack McMillan's reformation predicted trouble because of his presence. As a leader he had twice utterly demoralized teams in previous races, and it was "not unlikely," declared the prophets of evil, "that he would blow up on the Trail out of pure cussedness." ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... with the team of mules and a heavy plough, working the road in that deep cut between their place and mine. The gasoline motor-truck came along, making more noise than usual, maybe. But those mules know a motor truck, and what they did was pure cussedness. They begun to rear and plunge in that deep cut. I was working my corn over in the field and shouted to the gasoline man to stop, but he didn't hear me. Claude jumped for the critters' heads and got 'em by the bits, but by that time he was all tangled up in the lines. Those ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... old-timers, and nothing of the sort occurred. At first it made him catch his breath to see the apparent chances they took; but after a little he perceived that seeming luck was in reality a coolness of judgment and a long experience in the peculiar ways of that most erratic of inanimate cussedness—the pine log. The banks grew daily. Everybody was ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White |
