"Shrewish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you must excuse vs all, My wife is shrewish when I keepe not howres; Say that I lingerd with you at your shop To see the making of her Carkanet, And that to morrow you will bring it home. But here's a villaine that would face me downe He met me on the Mart, and that I beat him, And charg'd him with a thousand markes in gold, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... never called her mother. Belle would not have it. She refused to become a motherly, middle-aged person, and her boys were growing altogether too big and too masterful to look upon a golden-curled, pink-cheeked, honey-throated Amazon as other Black Rim sons looked upon their faded, too often shrewish maternal parent. She was just Belle. They knew no other like her, no one with whom they might compare her. We do not compare the sun and the moon with other suns and moons. Like Tom, they worshipped ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... check his fluency. If the right word did not fall to his hand he made shift with another of somewhat similar sound, the result frequently taxing to the uttermost the self-control of the better educated among his hearers. He was ill-mated to a shrewish wife, and one was sensible of a thrill of sympathy when, without a thought of irreverence, and in all simplicity, he rolled out, instead of "Woe is me, that I am constrained to dwell with Mesech!" "Woe is me, that I am constrained ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... returns every night at nine to his old woman, who shrewish by age, cannot bear his infidelities since she herself is unable to pay him in the same coin and has become awfully jealous. Come to-night at half-past nine. I'll receive you. My house is at the corner of the Rue du Bac. You'll recognise ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... rolled himself like a ball to your heels and snapped his teeth—Wauw! At the bark, out rushed the old lady, his housekeeper, shouting in the shrillest key to the dog to lie still, and to you that the bailiff would be there in a minute. At the sound of her shrewish 'yang-yang' down came the old man from the bank, and so one dog fetched out the lot. The three were exactly alike somehow. Beside these diamond sculls he had a big gun, with which he used to shoot ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... complexion (maintained by a Spartan regimen), the fresh, bright color in her face, which spoke of an engaging modesty, became overspread with blotches and pimples; her figure, which had seemed so straight, grew crooked, the angel became a suspicious and shrewish creature who drove Castanier frantic. Then the fortune took to itself wings. At length the dragoon, no longer recognizing the woman whom he had wedded, left her to live on a little property at Strasbourg, until the time when it should please God to remove her to adorn Paradise. She ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... said she. "Fourteen guineas be more than eight—fourteen guineas, a florin, one groat and three pennies! Aha, 't is more than she be worth, I think, by reason of her shrewish tongue and unkindly ways, and if only a hindity mengro and no true Camlo yet she be's a rinkinni fakement to look at, but then a bargain is a bargain—an' I wishes ye j'y o' her, my young rye!" Which said, she reached out her staff and touched first me and then the girl lightly on head ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... followed by a brief defence of the taste and passion of book-collecting, and of the class of men known invidiously as book-worms and book-hunters. They and their simple pleasures are the butts of a cheap and shrewish set of critics, who cannot endure in others a taste which is absent in themselves. Important new books have actually been condemned of late years because they were printed on good paper, and a valuable historical treatise was attacked by reviewers quite angrily ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... family. For our present purpose, all turns on the distinction between the matripotestal and the patripotestal family. If the man and the woman were left to fight it out alone, the latter, despite the "shrewish sanction" that she possesses in her tongue, must inevitably bow to the principle that might is right. But, as long as marriage is matrilocal—that is to say, allows the wife to remain at home amongst male defenders of ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... mounte! Then mounte! brave gallants all, And don your helms amain; Deathe's couriers, Fame and Honour, call Up to the field againe; No shrewish tear shall fill our eye When the sword hilt's in our hand; Heart-whole we'll parte and no whit sighe For the fayrest of the land. Let piping swaine and craven wight, Thus weepe and puling aye; Our business is like to men to fighte ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... a raised trap-door in the flooring above the shrewish face of old Mrs. Higgs, and the very same candle in the very same tin candlestick that he had seen in use in the ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... independent community that attended to its own affairs with great thoroughness. The corporation, itself the outgrowth of a medieval religious guild, regulated the affairs of every one with little regard for personal liberty. It was especially severe on rebellious servants, idle apprentices, shrewish women, the pigs that ran loose in the streets, and (after 1605) persons guilty of profanity. Regular church attendance and fixed hours of work were required. The corporation frequently punished with fines (the ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... equestrian troupe opened a circus in the town about the same time, and rose on my ruins. My house was deserted; my actors grew discontented because they were ill paid; my door became a hammering-place for every bailiff in the county; and my wife became more and more shrewish and tormenting, the ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... Around her pursed-up mouth lurked the knowledge of the number of available slices in a sirloin,—the judgment of the lump of butter that should leave no margin for prodigality. Warfare with market-men, shrewish watchfulness over servants, economy scarcely removed from meanness at the table, all were clearly indicated in her flushed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... his shrewish wife had reaped her benefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists on twentieth-century farm implements and medieval household equipment. He had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an ice house, a ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... uncomfortable, and by that power is able to carry many points which she ought, and many which she ought not, to prevail in. But this instrument of self-protection—which may be called the power of the scold, or the shrewish sanction—has the fatal defect, that it avails most against the least tyrannical superiors, and in favour of the least deserving dependents. It is the weapon of irritable and self-willed women; of those who would make the worst use of power if they themselves had it, and who generally turn ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... set are taken up with the adoration of the shepherds; and the twelfth is worthy of special notice as being a piece of broad comedy approaching to downright farce, with dashes of rude wit and humour. The three shepherds, after talking awhile about their shrewish wives, are on the point of striking up a song, when an old acquaintance of theirs named Mak, whose character is none of the best, comes among them. They suspect him of meditating some sly trick; so, on going to bed, they take care ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... the prairie-dogs stand upon their burrows, chip-chip defiance until fear overtook their impertinence, and then dive headlong deep into the earth. "I do think a prairie-dog is the most impudent creature alive and the most shrewish. I never pass but I am scolded by these little scoundrels till my ears burn. What ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... mounte! then mounte, brave gallants, all, And don your helmes amaine: Deathe's couriers, Fame and Honor, call Us to the field againe. No shrewish teares shall fill our eye When the sword-hilt's in our hand; Heart-whole we'll part and no whit sighe For the fayrest of the land; Let piping swaine, and craven wight, Thus weepe and puling crye, Our business is like men to ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... patience and unremitting toil, her nimble fingers and bent back, her shapeless figure and unbounded and unexpressed (verbally, that is) love for her children. Pa Werner—sullen, lazy, brooding, tyrannical—she soothed and mollified for the children's sake, or shouted down with a shrewish outburst, as the occasion required. An expert stone-mason by trade, Pa Werner could be depended on only when he was not drinking, or when he was not on strike, or when he had not quarrelled with the foreman. An anarchist, Pa—dissatisfied ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... original character. He had a shrewish wife who was always scolding him; and he seems to have deserved all the cross things she said to him, for he had "an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor—in other words, he was as lazy a fellow as you could find ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... to the other sex, gave him an uncertain appearance, which was made even more ambiguous by his beardless face, marred only by a faint suggestion of a moustache, and his sexless features to which passion and ill-temper imparted all the evil quality of a shrewish woman's face. But in Germinie's eyes all these airs and this Jupillon style were ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt |
