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Hankering   /hˈæŋkərɪŋ/   Listen
Hankering

noun
1.
A yearning for something or to do something.  Synonym: yen.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Hankering" Quotes from Famous Books



... North Italians; sometimes one comes upon a young Italian who wants to learn German, but not often. Priggism, or whatever the substantive is, is as essentially a Teutonic vice as holiness is a Semitic characteristic; and if an Italian happens to be a prig, he will, like Tacitus, invariably show a hankering after German institutions. The idea, however, that the Italians were ever a finer people than they are now, will not pass muster with those ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler

... excessive affluence and honours, was, nevertheless, in their district, conceded to be a clan of well-to-do standing. As this Chen Shih-yin was of a contented and unambitious frame of mind, and entertained no hankering after any official distinction, but day after day of his life took delight in gazing at flowers, planting bamboos, sipping his wine and conning poetical works, he was in fact, in the indulgence of these pursuits, as ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... an emergency. The gloomy woods surrounding the old quarry did not possess any attraction in the eyes of Thad Stevens. Though he had not shown the same degree of alarm as Horatio and Julius at the time they heard those remarkable sounds, so like human shrieks, nevertheless, Thad felt no hankering after ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson

... talked mule with. His brother officer is delighted to hear this, as he has been uneasy about the mules' appetites; they would devour all the hay and coarse feed they could get hold of, but didn't seem to have that constant hankering after grain that he had always understood to be part and parcel of a horse's, and, consequently, a mule's, nature. He knows something about horses, he says, for his wife keeps a pony in Scotland, and the pony would leave hay at any time to eat ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... I made it clear to you at noon that they wouldn't be milked by me," she answered, "and there didn't seem to be anybody else hankering for ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... could find a fault," says Mr. Browne mischievously. "I should think there will be a good deal of hankering going on to-night." ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

... he growled, eying her keenly. "Got your father on the Bourbons, so took the chance to come and find you. He'll not miss me for an hour. That man has a natural hankering after treason against the people. Lord, Margaret! what a stiff old head he'd have carried to the guillotine! How he'd have looked at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... was not himself free from a certain melancholy hankering after "categorical imperatives," and beneath the cap and bells of his theological fooling, Shaw is, of course, as gravely moralistic as any ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... kitchen and presently reappeared bearing a soup tureen, which she set down before her husband. "I don't dare ask Mary to wait on the table," said she. "If I did, she's just in the humor to up and light out, too; and your mother's got no hankering for hanging over a hot stove in ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips

... dared not say. Sophy had said there would be murder if she told who the father was, but she guessed. She was only eleven months older than Sophy, who must have been in the family way just before she was fourteen, had had her courses when thirteen years old, and was "hankering after the chaps" quite early. "Mother used to slap her for it." Nelly's courses had only recently come ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous

... the great brute as it placed both forefeet upon the volume, but she sighed as she leant for a moment on the rail, then suddenly drew back as she heard her name mentioned by someone who, hankering after a cigarette, had wandered out to the canvas rocking ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest

... "they all get the blue-water fever—after they've left blue water. I never knew a sailor yet who wouldn't tell you sailoring was a dog's life; but I never knew one who quit and quite recovered from the hankering to go back. I think you're right, Skinner. This yacht is just a symptom of Matt's disease. He realizes his business interests tie him to the beach; but if he has a sailing yacht that he can fuss round with on week-ends ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... business as follows: Obstinate old millstone of a shipbuilder, Bransby, who simply will not give up shipbuilding for aeroplane making (and no wonder in these days!); nephew Stephen, with an unwholesome hankering after power and a complete inability to see the obvious; nephew Hugh, lieutenant lately gazetted, with much more wholesome and intelligent hankering after Helen Bransby; Clerk, mouldy, faithful, one who discovers ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various

... this town, all inclination to do any kind of work;—and left in lieu thereof, an impudent appearance, a strong and continued thirst for high wages, a gossiping disposition for all sorts of amusement, a leering and hankering after persons of the other sex, a desire of finery and fashion, a never ceasing trot after new places more advantageous for stealing—with number of contingent accomplishments that do not suit the wearers. Now if any person ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks

... instigation of the King of Spain was notorious to the whole world, and certainly no secret to King James. Yet his Britannic Majesty had made haste to exonerate the great criminal from all complicity in the crime; and had ever since been fawning upon the Catholic king, and hankering for a family alliance with him. Conduct like this the prince denounced in plain terms as cringing and cowardly, and expressed the opinion that guarantees of Dutch independence from such a monarch could ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... better, at any rate more manly, that he should tell her so honestly, than go on groping about with half-expressed words when he saw her, thinking of her and yet hardly daring to go near her, bidding himself to forget her although he knew that such forgetting was impossible, hankering after the sound of her voice and the touch of her hand, and something of the tenderness of returned affection,—and yet regarding her as a prize altogether out of his reach! Why should she be out of his reach? She ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... said—that you look down on us because we're countrified, that you're still hankering after that precious artistic crew ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... out with a prejudice against prejudice, and wanted to be a smart modern thinker." To a reader of our day the History of St. Kilda appears to be innocent of any trace of such pretension; unless it be that the author speaks slightingly of second-sight, a subject for which Johnson always had a strong hankering. In 1773 Johnson paid a visit to Mr. Macaulay, who by that time had removed to Calder, and began the interview by congratulating him on having produced "a very pretty piece of topography,"—a compliment ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... Yet in dramatic music, as in dramatic literature, the tradition of versification clings with the same pernicious results; and the opera, like the tragedy, is conventionally made like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to be in all things the last refuge of the hankering ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw

... considering the fool thing seriously. Of course, I didn't want to discover a lost gold-mine, that is, unless I just happened to stumble over it; I wanted to keep away from such things; they're bad; they get into a man's blood like drugs; but I've always had a hankering for a new country, and those hills, shining in the heat, were compelling—very compelling. Besides, I reflected, a trip like that might help to straighten Whitney up a little. I hadn't much hope, to be sure, but drowning men clutch at straws. It's curious what sophistry you use to convince yourself, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... his head. "Well, as for a wife, I have no hankering after such; they're but bothersome bodies, and I have women folk at home as 'll mend my clouts; and for gold that's as may be, but for work, there, I can't abide work, and if thou 'lt give me a helpin' hand in ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various

... which, coupled with a dogged perseverance and a determination to overcome every obstacle in his path, ensured success in the long run. He had one fixed and constant aim, namely, advancement in the career upon which he had entered, and in furtherance of this object, he was determined to let no hankering after the past stand in his way. In his own opinion there were but two hindrances to his progress, two shadows from the past to darken his path, and these were his obscure birth and his love for Morva, for this he had not ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine

... that you and I want to have this meeting all to ourselves. Then the servant that shows Merriwell up, if one does, may see us, and I calculate that I ain't hankering to meet up with any of your servants on this ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish

... obstructiveness. Festina, but festina lente—perhaps as involving so completely the contradiction in terms which must underlie all modification—is the motto they would assign to organism, and Chi va piano va lontano, they hold to be a maxim as old, if not as the hills (and they have a hankering even after these), at ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... at Lisbon towards the convent of Saints; walking gravely and firmly, with a dignified demeanour, with his best clothes on, and glad, for the moment, to be free of his sea acquaintances, and to be walking in the direction of that upper-class world after which he has a secret hankering in his heart. There are a great many churches in Lisbon nearer his house where he might hear Mass on Sundays; but he prefers to walk up to the rich and fashionable convent of Saints, where everybody is well dressed, and where those kindling ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... was Cribbage. But all, except myself (I was rather afraid of the Cranford ladies at cards, for it was the most earnest and serious business they ever engaged in), were anxious to be of the "pool." Even Miss Barker, while declaring she did not know Spadille from Manille, was evidently hankering to take a hand. The dilemma was soon put an end to by a singular kind of noise. If a baron's daughter-in-law could ever be supposed to snore, I should have said Mrs Jamieson did so then; for, overcome by the heat of the ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... glass tables piled high with filmy and costly underwear, such underwear as Sylvia had never dreamed could exist, and Aunt Victoria looked casually at the cobweb tissues which the saleswoman held up, herself hankering in a hungry adoration of the luxury she would never touch in any other way. Without apology or explanation, other than Aunt Victoria's gracious nod of dismissal, they moved on to the enchanted cave ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... sir. I'll try not to care for the outward and visible signs of these hidden virtues; but I'm afraid I still shall have a hankering for the worldly honors that are so valued by ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott

... "It implies that I was in one hell of a fix, to put it elegant. I was sixty miles from anywhere, and them sixty half the time standing on end and lapping over on themselves. That there is down where old mama Nature gave full swing to a morbid hankering after doing things unconventional. Result is, that it's about as ungodly a mixture of nightmare scenery as this old world can show up; and I've ambled around considerable and am in a position ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower

... vineyards, and, best of all, the people were cleansed 'from all their idols' by the furnace of affliction. Nothing is more remarkable than the transformation effected by the captivity, in regard to the idolatrous propensities of the people. Whereas before it they were always hankering after the gods of the nations, they came back from Babylon the resolute champions of monotheism, and never thereafter showed the smallest inclination for what had before been ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... another world and yet with all her absurd unworldliness be so eminently a woman of this one? She was twenty-six, but she knew what many women of fifty never learn; she was twenty-six, yet she was more innocent than many a child of thirteen. What a contrast to Molly's crude ignorance and hankering after success! ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

... I believe this latent hankering after mathematics has been a little fanned in me by reading De Quincey's letters to a young man upon the subject of a late education, which have fallen into my hands just now, and which so earnestly recommend the zealous cultivation of this ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... Alexander is said to have wept because he found no more worlds to conquer. The man who bemoans the loss of a world and the man who bemoans the loss of coffee are to my mind equally unbalanced and equally in need of forgiveness. The desire for a cup of coffee and the desire for a crown, the hankering after the flavor or even the fragrance of the drink and the hankering after fame, are ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... honest, kindly, round face ablaze with wrath, who would have been ridiculous had he not been so superbly heroic, proceeded to open fire, peppering away at the Bavarians at the bottom of the street. It was in his blood, he said; he had been hankering for something of the kind ever since the days of his boyhood, down there in Alsace, when he had been told all those tales of 1814. "Ah! you dirty loafers! you dirty loafers!" And he kept firing away with ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... a little more about how I'm doing my hair, and argue with myself that it's a woman's own fault if she runs to seed before she's seen thirty. I may be the mother of three children, but I still have a hankering after personal power—and that comes to women through personal attractiveness, disquieting as it may be to have to admit it. We can't be big strong men and conquer through force, but our frivolous little bodies can house the triumphant weaknesses which make men ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... work and drive a straight furrow and is past the age for gaping after his fellows, but will keep his mind on his work. No younger man will be better than he at scattering the seed and avoiding double-sowing; for a man less staid gets disturbed, hankering after his fellows. ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... I mean, Gregory. The Mortons have dropped you, for any use they were to you, long ago, and you may as well make up your mind to drop them. You'll go on hankering after gentlefolks till ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... his voice. "Well—it is. You sat in front of her in church the other day, and she noticed how exactly your hair matched her own. Ever since then she's been hankering for it, and at last decided to get it. As she won't wear it till she goes off abroad, she knows nobody will recognize the change. I'm commissioned to get it for her, and then it is to be made up. I shouldn't have vamped ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... work of Philip Augustus was well nigh completed; but his wars were not over. John Lackland, when worsted, kicked against the pricks, and was incessantly hankering, in his antagonism to the King of France, after hostile alliances and local conspiracies easy to hatch amongst certain feudal lords discontented with their suzerain. John was on intimate terms with his nephew, Otho IV., Emperor of Germany and the foe of Philip ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... in with the peaceable times that followed, somehow I managed to get in bad with some of them. They had no more use for me or my guns. I was like a fish out of water. I decided to pull out, for a strange hankering to see England and my old home again came over me. So I resigned my office and headed back to the ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall

... drawback—at least, for Henry Burns and Harvey, who were hankering for the grip of a tiller and the thrill of a boat under sail. There wasn't a sailboat to be hired on the pond. There were not many, and they were all engaged. Coombs, who owned the slip and the boats, said he hadn't done such ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith

... when the lecturing which had been the joy of his prime became his loathing, loathing unutterable, and when he renounced it with indescribable violence. Yet he was always hankering for those fleshpots whose savor lingered on his palate and filled his nostrils after his withdrawal from the platform. The Authors' Readings when they had won their brief popularity abounded in suggestion for him. Reading ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... about truth and honesty with which they desire to shackle others, thinking that freedom from such trammels may be good for themselves. And in that matter of love,—though love is very potent,—treachery will sometimes seem to be prudence, and a hankering after new delights will often ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... out, and father sed are you saif J. Albert where you are and J. Albert sed yes he cant get me up here but i dont want to stay here the rest of my life, and father sed if you are saif you will have to stay there till i can send down for old Mike to come up. i dont have eny grate hankering to have a bull dog hanging to me for the rest of my life eether. so maik yourself to home and reed a few chapters of the bible for this is sunday and i gess towerds supper time old Mike will come up. then J. Albert sed cant you get a gun ...
— Brite and Fair • Henry A. Shute

... is an heiress, and this Captain Lestrange you spoke of, who saved them out of Paris, is not likely to lose the chance of getting a wife and his family estates back into the bargain. Don't be a fool, Barry. You and I are only sailor lads. It does not become us to be hankering after heiresses. But the freedom of Ireland we may and must strive for; and, Barry, brother," (and what a whack he caught me on my back), "we'll ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed

... career, and with all the goodness of his disposition, he has not shewn "so small a drop of pity as a wren's eye." He seems to be on his guard against every thing liberal and humane as his weak side. Others relax in their obsequiousness either from satiety or disgust, or a hankering after popularity, or a wish to be thought above narrow prejudices. The Chancellor alone is fixed and immoveable. Is it want of understanding or of principle? No—it is want of imagination, a phlegmatic habit, an excess of false complaisance and good-nature ... Common humanity and justice are little ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... detail of evidence was laid before the jury to-day. Scoville has been known for some time to have a great hankering after a repeating watch. He had once seen that of Algernon Etheridge, and was never tired of talking about it. Several witnesses testified to his various remarks on this subject. Thus the motive for his dastardly assault upon an unoffending citizen, which to many minds ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... contrary, they want very much to wallow in all the costly vulgarities from which the elect souls among the rich turn away with loathing. It is by surfeit and not by abstinence that they will be cured of their hankering after unwholesome sweets. What they do dislike and despise and are ashamed of is poverty. To ask them to fight for the difference between the Christmas number of the Illustrated London News and the Kelmscott Chaucer ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... plastic hand Fell back before his prophet-soul, and left A fragment, a maimed Brutus,—but more grand Than this, so named at Rome, was! Let thy weft Present one woof and warp, Mazzini! Stand With no man hankering for a dagger's heft, No, not for Italy!—nor stand apart, No, not for the Republic!—from those pure Brave men who hold the level of thy heart In patriot truth, as lover and as doer, Albeit they will not follow where thou art As extreme theorist. ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... His hankering for a pet owl had nevertheless brought him here more than once. It was only yesterday evening—before he had heard of the ghost's appearance, however—that he had made ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... "I'm not hankering after the vote, believe ME," said Miss Cornelia scornfully. "I know what it is to clean up after the men. But some of these days, when the men realize they've got the world into a mess they can't get it out of, they'll be glad to ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... the charm," said Daddy, who is the most scrupulously polite man, as you know, "but just now the delight of something to eat is what I'm hankering for." ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick

... Nora, who loathed history, was obliged to take ancient history to complete her history group, the other girls having wisely completed theirs the previous year. Jessica wanted to take physical geography, Anne rhetoric, and Grace boldly announced a hankering for zooelogy. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower

... if it means hankering after the process by which that blissful state is attained. But you are wrong. I care most infernally ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... place if you want to see drunks, ma'am," the traveller said, forgetting in his warmth his "begging your pardon, ma'am," just when it would have been most opportune, seeing I had little hankering ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... a villain," replied Mrs. Brobson. "I don't forget the day he kissed baby in Arden Park. I never see any good come of a single gentleman kissing a lady's baby, voluntary. It isn't their nature to do it, unless they've a hankering after ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... was infinite, I would tell you about the shifty priest whom I met on the platform of the church where a cliff overhangs the valley, and of the anarchist whom I met when I recovered the highroad—- he was a sad, good man, who had committed some sudden crime and so had left France, and his hankering for France all those years had soured his temper, and he said he wished there were no property, no armies, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... his motive was. Torture in a public school is as much licensed as the knout in Russia. It would be ungentlemanlike (in a manner) to resist it. Perhaps Dobbin's foolish soul revolted against that exercise of tyranny; or perhaps he had a hankering feeling of revenge in his mind, and longed to measure himself against that splendid bully and tyrant, who had all the glory, pride, pomp, circumstance, banners flying, drums beating, guards saluting, in the place. Whatever may ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... begs his good friend Jack will read over the enclosed list, and take the trouble of choosing for himself;" a request with which Jack was always ready to comply. And, further, as Jack had always a great hankering after little-goes and penny subscriptions of every kind, and was eternally trumpeting forth some new nostrum or scheme of this kind, as he used to call it, the Squire had been prevailed upon to purchase from him a good many ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various

... destined to be dispossessed, not by the Dutch, but by their own countrymen. The people of Massachusetts were now fully aroused, and the news that came to Boston in the summer of 1634 that the small-pox had practically destroyed the Indians on the river increased "the hankering" after the coveted territory.[41] The people of Watertown, Dorchester, and Newtown (Cambridge) had long been restless under the Massachusetts authority, and were anxious for a change. Dorchester was the residence of Captain Israel Stoughton, ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler

... Navy and not to the garrison gunners that the original credit has gone, was simply because we were here and they were at home at the start. One is, as regards their gunnery powers, as good as the other, and the garrison gunners earned their laurels later on. Still, I have a great hankering after a gun's crew of "handy men" to beat any crew in this world for all-round service and quick shooting, and I am ready to ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne

... be inappropriate here: 'A young physician, commencing practice, determined to keep an account of each case he had to do with, stating the mode of treatment and the result. His first patient was a blacksmith, sick of a fever. After the crisis of the disease had passed, the man expressed a hankering for pork and cabbage. The doctor humored him in this, and it seemed to do him good; which was duly noted in the record. Next a tailor sent for him, whom he found suffering from the same malady. To him he prescribed pork and cabbage; and the ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... that, if we came near Pentecost again on our cruise, we would spend another idle day in the pretty bay. Two months passed and then we kept our word. As we rounded the lofty headland the Correspondent said: "Say, I'm hankering after that baby!" But the Captain at the moment hoarsely cried: "God's love! but where are ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... happiness which results from righteousness. He that fondly followeth the lead of his senses, and is desirous of obtaining happiness and avoiding misery, betaketh himself to action which in its essence is nothing but misery. He that hankers after pleasure causeth his body to suffer; one free from such hankering knoweth not what misery is. As an enkindled fire, if more fuel be put upon it, blazeth forth again with augmented force, so desire is never satiated with the acquisition of its object but gaineth force like unkindled fire when clarified butter is poured upon ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... "which, believe me, never lay in the displacement of an arrow-point; no, nor in the head of a boil. Bazzi is a sensualist: as his palate grows stale he whets it by stronger meat; thinks to provoke appetite by disgust; would draw you on by a nasty inference, as a dog by his hankering after faecal odours. What nearness to Art in his plumpy boy stuck with arrows like a skewered capon? Causes nuns to weep, hey? and to dream dreams, hey? Nature would do that cleanlier; and waxwork more ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... Divine sanction; and they are tempted to ward off a just verdict of unsuitableness and of incompetency by bringing many and grievous charges against their flocks. "A mania for church-extending"; "a hankering for architectural splendor"; "or for discursive and satirical preaching"; "or for something florid or profound": these and the like imputations have been put forward, as a screen, by many an unsuccessful preacher, who failed,—simply failed,—not in selling horns ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... and is that it?' muttered Dennis, half aloud, as he surveyed the bright coin which the boy had placed in his hand—'I begin to smell a rat, faith; this gossoon was sent here by Mr. Sydney's blackguard wife, who has such a hankering after the black divil—not contented with her own lawful husband, and a decent man he is, but she must take up wid that dirty nager, bad luck to her and him! My master gave me no orders to prevint any person from seeing the black spalpeen; and as a goold yankee sovereign can't be picked up every ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn

... more awkward, is something like that of Miss Yonge's Young Stepmother: but M. Rod makes it more tragic by Annie's death, partly in consequence of a love-marriage failing, through the lover's father's objection to the state of her family. The other subject is the gradual hankering of Michel after a return to political life, and his (consequentially inevitable) ratting from Right to Left. M. Rod brought into the matter direct reminiscences of the Parnell and Dilke cases, and possibly owed the conception of the whole book to them; but he has, as is sometimes ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... lowlander who, down in the depth of his nature, has a prenatal hankering for rocks, because he is apt to build an undigested rockery! These sort of rockeries are wholly separate from the rock gardens, often majestic, that nowadays supplement a bit of natural rocky woodland, bringing it within the garden pale. The awful rockery of the flat garden is like unto ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright

... in the business, and have a hankering for it yet," returned the young man, frankly. "Nor do I care so much for charts. They are well enough when a vessel is on her road; but, as for whales or seals, the man who wishes to find either, in these times, has to look for them, as I tell my owner. According ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... his mouth, hankering to blurt out what he had been treasuring as dreams whose realization would serve as an inducement to her. He had been picturing to himself their honeymoon at the state capital, away from the captious tongues of Egypt—how he would ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day

... sojourn becomes so accustomed to the solitude of the valley that he not unwillingly stays and simply lives on there. At least, it has not happened in the memory of man that the priest of the village had been a man hankering to get away or unworthy ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... to look at it in proper perspective, it wasn't at all a bad life. When had he been worried to death, as he was now? And there were his friends: the humorous, genial, deboshed, yet ever-kindly Phineas; dear old Mo Shendish, whose material feet were hankering after the vulgar pavement of Mare Street, Hackney, but whose spiritual tread rang on golden floors dimly imagined by the Seer of Patmos; Barrett, the D. C. M., the miniature Hercules, who, according to legend, though, modestly, he would ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... of 1870, the Honduras Government, still hankering after its railway and the wealth that it was to open up, determined to try again with another loan. Something had to be done to encourage investors to take it. A few days before the prospectus appeared a ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers

... He found him out in a blackberry patch and mauled him to death. Oh, he was a snorter. That's about the biggest piece of news I've got. Let me see. Lige met a pole-cat somewhere in the woods and socity ain't been hankering after Lige since then. I seen him this mornin' as I was comin' in, and I yelled at him to keep his distance, and he did or I would have hit him. Yes, sir, I can't stand a pole-cat. You ricollect Mab Basey, I reckon. She run away with a feller that come to help cut wheat ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read

... Courtier had all the time an uneasy sense of shame. What business had he to come amongst these people so strange to him, just for the sake of seeing her! What business had he to be hankering after this girl at all, knowing in his heart that he could not stand the atmosphere she lived in for a week, and that she was utterly unsuited for any atmosphere that he could give her; to say nothing of the unlikelihood that he could flutter the pulses ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... marriage. There's the widow Babbage, down to Dock: she always had a hankering for you. You're ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... did not particularly like, for she had a strong hankering for the ride back to the bushes. She dropped the bridle upon her horse's neck, and began to exercise her patience and skill ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner

... myself; know how to bid; understand trap; always go shabby; no making a bargain in a good coat. Look sharp at the goods; say they won't do; come away; send somebody else for 'em. Never go twice myself; nothing got cheap if one seems to have a hankering." ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... you should leave us altogether than mock at us. I thought it was your Jewish heart that drove you back home to us; but if you are still hankering after ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill

... all. The young cuss, I've grown fond of him. What do you think his latest is? He's kept hammering at me till he's made me stop buying pies and things! Good for the pocket-book, but particularly good for my little insides. The last three days I haven't even had a hankering for something sweet. Tell Nelly she needn't bother to make chocolate layer cake when I come home, like ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French

... Dryden. I had a hankering after Threnodia Augustalis; but I find it long and with very prosaic holes: though, O! what fine ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... "She's in the kitchen now. And if I was you, pardner, and had a real hankering for grub I'd mosey right along in there while there's something left." His eye roved to the bottle on the chimneypiece and dropped to the fire. "I'll trail you ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory

... some few things wherein the wickedness of the heart of man shews itself?—A. Yes; by its secret hankering after sin, although the Word forbids it; by its deferring of repentance; by its being weary of holy duties; by its aptness to forget God, by its studying to lessen and hide sin; by its feigning itself to be better than it is; by being glad when it can sin without being seen of men; by its hardening ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... places were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and . . . well, we won't talk about that. But there was one yet—the biggest, the most blank, so to speak—that I had a hankering after. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... and, felled, it stains with its blood the knives perhaps before seen by it in the limpid water. Immediately, they examine the entrails snatched from its throbbing breast, and in them they seek out the intentions of the Deities. Whence comes it that men have so great a hankering for forbidden food? Do you presume to feed {on flesh}, O race of mortals? Do it not, I beseech you; and give attention to my exhortations. And when you shall be presenting the limbs of slaughtered oxen to your palates, know and consider that you are devouring ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... than he would have done in the ordinary course of things. He did not care to think whether this arose from a friendly wish to close the gap that had slowly been widening between himself and his earliest acquaintance, or from a hankering desire to hear the meaning of the dark oracles Stephen had hastily pronounced, betokening that he knew something more of Elfride than ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... happily placed that he had no need to bother over wealth, he was not so aloof to the glamour of politics. He had always felt the irk of his retirement after the Raid, and the hankering after a leading political position became more pronounced as the episode which shut the Parliamentary door behind him after he had passed through its portals faded in ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill

... more baleful than any sounds he could have uttered; it was a sort of ominous, canine silence, covering a hankering to get in a good bite if the opportunity was ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day

... your blood's getting up, is it? Then you're in the humour to be told what you have been hankering to know so long—where Mackaye and I go at night. We'll strike while the iron's hot, and go down to the Chartist meeting at ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... thousand pagan observances soon to be introduced. As time passed on, so far from the state of things improving, it became worse. Not only among the frivolous class, but even among historic personages, there was a hankering after the ceremonies of the departed creed, a lingering attachment to the old rites, and, perhaps, a religious indifference to the new. To the age of Justinian these remarks strikingly apply. Boethius was, at the best, only a pagan philosopher; Tribonian, the great lawyer, the author of the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... exploded, careful that he spoke in English. "All you think of, all you've talked about since we left the vessel, is your hankering for a cigarette. For God's sake, get out of here and go smoke yourself ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent

... persecuted by the Hasidim, disappeared, and whose mother died in abject misery, is received into the house of his uncle, the same brother of his father who had caused the father's ruin. Abused by a wicked aunt and driven by an irresistible hankering after a vagabond life, he runs away from his foster home. First he is picked up by a band of rascally mendicants, then he becomes an inmate in the house of a Baal-Shem, a charlatan wonder-worker, and thus a ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... much if the boy himself asks me to come up with him, does it, sir?' 'And you want to go.' 'Well if you look over Moses' Moabitish mountain long enough, at a promised land, so to speak, you may get a hankering to go in,' he said. 'It's not a better country. It's not a heavenly; I don't make any mistake about that. But it's a country that people have thought big things about, if they have carried them out badly. I seem to have ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... upon himself with regard to liquor. Whenever his friends were met together, whether at fair, or market, wedding, christening, or during the usual festivals, it is certain that a glass of punch or whiskey never crossed his nose that he did not feel a secret hankering after it, and would often have snuffed in the odor, or licked his lips at it, were it not that he would have considered the act as a kind of misprision of perjury. Now, however, that he was free, and about to have a christening in his house, it was at least only reasonable that ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton

... me in the drawing-room of her desire to coax Mulvaney into letting his beard grow. "Twas so civilian-like," said poor Dinah, who hated her husband's hankering for his old life. ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... heartily tired. His spirits began to fall lower than they had ever before done. He saw no hope of escape; for he was certain that should the English threaten to attack the town, that instant he would put be to death, even should he escape the long knives of some of the Spaniards who had evidently a hankering for his blood. At last he fell asleep. Midshipmen have a knack of sleeping under the most adverse circumstances. His powers in that way were very considerable. It was daylight when he awoke; but there were no sounds to indicate that the ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston

... hankering to pay a visit to this scene of my boyhood; and to get a peep at the odd kind of life that was passing within the mansion of my maternal ancestors. I determined to do so in disguise. My booby cousin had never seen enough of me to be very familiar with my countenance, ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... educated and familiar with the principles on which their rights and liberties rested. Usually they were law-abiding, liberty-loving citizens, with a profound veneration for religious institutions, and contentment with their lot. There was no hankering for privileges or luxuries which were never enjoyed, and of which they never heard. As we read the histories of cities or states, in antiquity or in modern times, we are struck with their similarity, in all ages and countries, in everything which pertains to domestic pleasures, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... her nostrums and charms; but there remained a hankering wish to try something else—some other sort of cure altogether. She had never revisited Trendle since she had been conducted to the house of the solitary by Rhoda against her will; but it now suddenly occurred to Gertrude that she would, in a last desperate effort at deliverance from this ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy

... working rules designed to protect the job by offering a quid pro quo in a guarantee of employment for a stated number of weeks during the year; and likewise, a union might hope to counteract the employer's natural hankering for being "boss in his own business," free of any union working rules, only provided it guaranteed him a sufficient output per unit of ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman

... white has never had much of a hankering after "book larning." He's better than the "nigger" and that's all he cares to know. To be white means license to trample upon the rights of others. The cat's paw—the tool of the aristocrat, he stands ready always, to do the dirty work of lynching, ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton

... rather to the spinners of romance: with his morality—a trifle buccaneerish on occasion—once discreetly palliated, history affords few heroes more instantly taking to the fancy....One casts a hankering eye toward this Cazaio's rumored parentage, his hopeless and life-long adoration of Claire de Puysange, his dealings with d'Argenson and King Louis le Bien-Aime, the obscure and mischievous imbroglios in Spain, and finally his aggrandizement and his flame-lit death, as du Maillot, say, records ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... regret leaving it unexplored. Our object was commercial, and not scientific; our motive was pounds, shillings, and pence: and where this failed us, we lost all excitement and curiosity. I fear that we were yet weak enough to have a little hankering after the view from the top of the pass, but we treated such puerility with the contempt that it deserved, and sat down to rest ourselves at the foot of a small glacier. We then descended, and reached the horses at nightfall, fully satisfied that, beyond the flat ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler

... day, after a stuttering preamble that lasted a full half hour, he finally blurted out his heart-hankering, she wept a little while on his shoulder—it being luckily a time when there was no one passing—and then sobbingly declared it ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day

... with anger and hate; and one evening when the wind came richly laden with ram smell it was like a bygone life returned. He had been living on roots and berries for weeks and now began to experience that hankering for flesh that comes on every candid vegetarian with dangerous force from time to time. The ram smell seemed an answer to it. So down he went by night (no sensible Bear travels by day), and the smell brought him from the pines on the hillside ...
— Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac • Ernest Thompson Seton

... him very well! There, now, is somebody that a sentence to hard labour is hankering after ... Some ten times he fell into my hands; and always, the skunk, gave me the slip somehow. Slippery, just like an eel-pout ... We will have to slip him a little present. Well, now! And then the anatomical theatre ... When do you ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... determined my father to make me a printer, though he had already one son (James) of that profession. In 1717 my brother James returned from England with a press and letters to set up his business in Boston. I liked it much better than that of my father, but still had a hankering for the sea. To prevent the apprehended effect of such an inclination, my father was impatient to have me bound to my brother. I stood out some time, but at last was persuaded, and signed the indentures when I was yet but twelve ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin

... Folks have corners. They're queer-like and pleasant by spells, and you can't see everything about them at a glance. We must have candles, but I have a hankering for folks as well." ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... words after his task was completed are often very full of weariness—sometimes pious, sometimes hankering after fleshly lusts, occasionally quite too dreadful to repeat. "May Christ recompense for ever him who caused this book to be written." At the end of a Life of St. Sebastian: "Illustrious martyr, remember the monk Gondacus who in this ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... the series the chief note is joyousness, high spirits, the pleasure of being alive. There is no Weltschmerz in his happy world, where all is for the best—no hankering after the moon, no discontent with the present order of things. Only one little lady discovers that the world is hollow, and her doll is stuffed with bran; only one gorgeous swell has exhausted the possibilities of this life, and finds out that he is at loss ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier

... associations. The awful fascination of early belief still exercises influence. The chains are not wholly broken off. Every mission field shows examples of this. Every man knows that habits are not so suddenly overcome, that there is no hankering after them or liability to relapse. It would be a dangerous thing for a weak believer to risk sharing in an idol feast; for he would be very likely to slide down to his old level of belief, and Zeus or Pallas to seem to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... human heart in the exciting tumult of battle, none, we must admit, are so powerful and constant as the soul's thirst for honour and renown, which the German language treats so unfairly and tends to depreciate by the unworthy associations in the words Ehrgeiz (greed of honour) and Ruhmsucht (hankering after glory). No doubt it is just in War that the abuse of these proud aspirations of the soul must bring upon the human race the most shocking outrages, but by their origin they are certainly to be counted amongst the noblest feelings which belong to human nature, and in War they are the vivifying ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz

... annual income of which a whole family of office-holders in the country, or even in Paris, live with ease. This brought on him protests, bailiffs, constables, incredible complications, continual uneasiness, a hankering after pecuniary success, eternal complaints against publishers, magazine-editors, theatre-managers, anxious negotiations, an immense loss of time, an incredible wear-and-tear of brain, annoyances and cares enough to put every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... their neighbours in y^e Bay, hereing of y^e fame of Conightecute River, had a hankering mind after it, (as was before noted,) and now understanding that y^e Indeans were swepte away with y^e late great mortalitie, the fear of whom was an obstacle unto them before, which being now taken away, they begane now to prosecute it with great egernes. The greatest ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford

... cried Barkins. "I say, Gnat, isn't he a humbug? Ha, ha! Study the manners and customs! Stuffing himself with Chinese sweets and hankering after puppy-pie, like ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn

... society are superficial. The wound is not yet probed to the bottom. But, renounce animal food, restore us to our proper condition, and feed us on milk and farinaceous articles, and our fondness for excitement and our hankering for exciting drinks and condiments will, in a few generations, die away. Animal food is a root of all evil, so far as temperance is concerned, in its most ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... years old my father punished me—the only time I was ever punished—by shutting me in a room alone for a whole day. I came out of it a full-blown linguist. I have never spoken any other language to him, or to my mother, who always speaks to me in Hindustani. I don't think I had any special hankering to write poetry as a little child, though I was of a very fanciful and dreamy nature. My training under my father's eye was of a sternly scientific character. He was determined that I should be a great mathematician or a scientist, but the poetic instinct, ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu

... room for women's social events, and an emergency hospital ward. I think we should hire a trained nurse who would not be too dignified to cook and serve meals when there's no business doing in the hospital. You know how everyone gets hankering now and then for a meal from home,—not that it's any better, but it's different. I suppose there are farmer's wives who don't get a meal away from home once a year. I'm going to change all that, if I have ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead

... mine, fellows," laughed Walter. "I tell you, there's nothing like falling off a mountain to give a chap a full-grown hankering for real food." ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin

... him hesitate, was that the boy might be thrown with low associates later on if he were to be encouraged in his taste for music—a taste which Theobald had always disliked. He had observed with regret that Ernest had ere now shown rather a hankering after low company, and he might make acquaintance with those who would corrupt his innocence. Christina shuddered at this, but when they had aired their scruples sufficiently they felt (and when people begin ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... hurried off to her own room, not waiting to hear the lady's angry words: "I wish, proud maiden, that I had had the giving of the answer, for, by my troth, I would have turned a deaf ear to thy request. Buried in Scotland, forsooth! Thou hast a lover in Scotland, and it is he thou art hankering after, ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson

... seat outside the cottage door enjoying the soft sleepy inaction of the afternoon, a question of mine concerning the folk-lore of the district, after which, hardened materialist though I called myself, I was conscious of a secret hankering, had drawn the foregoing remark ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... their being taken up by another ship in company; and this was but mere possibility indeed, for I saw not the least sign or appearance of any such thing. I cannot explain, by any possible energy of words, what a strange longing or hankering of desires I felt in my soul upon this sight, breaking out sometimes thus: "O that there had been but one or two, nay, or but one soul, saved out of this ship, to have escaped to me, that I might but have had one ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe

... Some of the questions discussed might no doubt become interesting again at any moment; but for the present they belong to the empire of Dryasdust. Historians will have to form judgments of the merits of Lord Lytton's policy in regard to Afghanistan; but I cannot assume that my readers will be hankering for information as to the special views taken at the time by a man who was, after all, a spectator at some distance. I therefore give fair warning to historical inquirers that they will get no ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... course, Curly," says he, solemn. "Seeing what he has done for us, I'm just hankering for some chance of doing him ...
— The Man Next Door • Emerson Hough

... about history, or art, or foreign tongues, or any other learned matters. But I am not a fool, either, and I shall undertake to know something about Europe by the time I have done with it. I feel something under my ribs here," he added in a moment, "that I can't explain—a sort of a mighty hankering, a desire to stretch out ...
— The American • Henry James

... found true by Experience, and I was so far from hankering after Flesh, that even the Thoughts of it were shocking and nauseous ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt

... inclination or hankering, a propensity in the mind to this or that: this naturally is evil, and to evil; he that follows his inclination goes wrong, the whole frame of a man's disposition being continually ill-disposed. It is called in scripture the speech or saying of the heart, ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various



Words linked to "Hankering" :   longing, yearning, hungriness, hanker, yen



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