"Sullen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so as to rhyme with not), a shepherd in love with Am'oret; but the shepherdess Amaryllis also loves him, and, by the aid of the Sullen Shepherd, gets transformed into the exact likeness of the modest Amoret. By her wanton conduct she disgusts Perigot, who casts her off; and by and by, meeting Amoret, whom he believes to be the same person, rejects her with scorn, and even wounds her ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the part of all that the huge trapper, whom young Brainerd had met at night, would make his appearance. Should he do so, it would be certain to precipitate a difficulty of the worst kind, as he was morose, sullen, treacherous, ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... he, springing up from his seat, "where is to-day the cheer that is wont to abide in the Norseman's breast? Methinks I see but sullen airs and ill-boding glances. Ha, fiddler, now move your strings lustily! None of your funeral airs, my lad, but a merry tune that shall sing through marrow and bone, and make the heart leap in ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... assistance of Step Hen and Davy, both lusty fellows. And so they had not bothered trying to fill the gap at the last hour. The chances were that they might have had to take some fellow along who would turn out to be sullen, or else a shirk; thus spoiling much of their ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... a street-lamp in at the window fell for a passing moment on Angie's face as she sat half-turned from her cousin and Willa caught her breath to stifle a sudden startled exclamation. She had seen Angie in many fits of temper, sullen and raging, but never had the girl's expression been so fiendish! The doll-like beauty was gone in a distortion of anger, but there was a suggestion of malignant triumph, too, which ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... not sullen, or contemptuous. He had said enough. His silence was prudent—perhaps necessary. He had come into the world to suffer—"to make his soul an offering for sin." Had he said more, perhaps Pilate had not dared ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... money, he left the office with the promise to come around again. While this interview with the men was going on, James would occasionally look up from his work "grim and sullen," as Benjamin said, evidently as unreconciled to his brother as ever. The next day James said to his father ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... nearly a mile in circumference; the enclosure, they say, held sixty thousand people) there runs a level space. This is my promenade, at all hours of the day. Falcons are fluttering with wild cries overhead; down below, a long unimpeded vista of velvety green, flecked by a few trees and sullen streamlets and white farmhouses—the whole vision framed in a ring of distant Apennines. The volcanic cone of Mount Vulture, land of Horace, can be detected on clear days; it tempts me to explore those ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... out that deficiency of experience, which on former occasions had been supplied by the counsels of the banner-man, with whom he was ashamed to seek a reconciliation. But Genvil was not of a nature absolutely sullen, though a habitual grumbler. He rode up to the page, and having made his obeisance, respectfully asked him whether it were not well that some one or two of their number pricked forward upon good horses to learn how it stood with Wenlock, and whether they should be able to come up in time ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... heads the sullen clouds Scud black and swift across the sky; Like silent ghosts in misty shrouds Stand out the white lighthouses high. Almost as far as eye can reach I see the close-reefed vessels fly, As fast we flit along the beach,— One little sandpiper ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... axle grease grows sullen an' feels neglected that a-way; mebby it's the heats of two summers an' the frosts of two winters which sp'iles its disp'sition; shore it is at any rate that at the time I'm thar, that onguent seems ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... of the afternoon, when Waukko, who was the leader of the little group, suddenly showed great excitement, which speedily communicated itself to his companions. All three of these scamps were sullen and reticent, frequently riding for hours at a time without exchanging a word, so that this excitement meant something. The three halted simultaneously, and talked loudly and excitedly, so that Fred suspected that some cause for a quarrel ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... Sullen and silent he brooded on the changes in his fortunes with no very satisfied mind. While he could not, as a brave man, refuse his respect and homage to the monarch who had quietly made himself complete master of the 'Revolutionary' organisation, and who had succeeded in turning ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... mast our brown sail flapped; Our keel plowed bitter salt, and everywhere The ominous sky in sullen mystery wrapped, What side we looked on, either here or there, The welcome sight of land long sadly sought; And that Atlantis, hid within the sea, The land with all our hope and promise fraught, We saw not yet, nor wist ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... bones meant any characteristics of race—scarcely more than a savage by nature, and rendered even more decadent by the ravages of drink. He was sober enough now, but this only left him the more morose and sullen, his bloodshot eyes ugly and malignant. The girl shrank from him as a full realisation of what the man truly was came to her ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... born to the scarlet, and everything she said and did, her way of walking, the use she made already of her black eyes, proclaimed it. To-night, though she wore the red she loved—a wonderful, flaring frock of chiffon frills and flounces—she looked ill, and her dark face was sullen. ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... sorrowful day at the Upfold Farm in spite of the children's unconscious mirthfulness. Old Marlowe locked himself into his workshop, and would see none of them, taking his meals there in sullen anger. Phebe's heart was almost broken with listening to Madame's earnest asseverations of her son's perfect innocence, and her eager hopes to find him when she reached home. It was nearly impossible to her ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... his head as Redcap had told him to do, and stood listening with all his might. A strange sullen muttering came from the chest, of which he could only distinguish these mysterious words, "Beware of a coming tree," and then the lid shut as slowly as it had opened, and the locks were locked with a jerk, as if by ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... would venture to brave such a majority was thought impossible. No prince of the Hanoverian line had ever, under any provocation, ventured to appeal from the representative body to the constituent body. The ministers, therefore, notwithstanding the sullen looks and muttered words of displeasure with which their suggestions were received in the closet, notwithstanding the roar of obloquy which was rising louder and louder every day from every corner of the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with nothing to entertain one's thoughts but the steady roar of the line under the wheels, the blinking and dripping of the oil lantern, and the more or less ungainly wretchedness, and variously sullen compromises and encroachments of posture, among the five other passengers preparing themselves for sleep: the last arrangement for the night being to shut up both windows, in order to effect, with our six breaths, a salutary ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... annually. The present inhabitants of the house are part of the Neerchokioo tribe of the same (Shahala) nation. On entering one of the apartments of the house, Captain Clark offered several articles to the Indians in exchange for wappatoo; but they appeared sullen and ill-humored, and refused to give him any. He therefore sat down by the fire opposite the men, and taking a port-fire match from his pocket, threw a small piece of it into the flame; at the same time he took his pocket-compass, and by means of a magnet, which happened to be in his inkhorn, made ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... conciliatory and least offensive way. Though the rulers of Massachusetts Bay did not, as did the other New England as well as Southern colonies, recognize and proclaim the King on the announcement of his restoration, but observed a sullen silence until they saw that the monarchy was firmly established; yet the King took no offence at this, but addressed them in terms the most conciliatory, assuring them that he would overlook the past and secure to them the privileges ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... likewise to Overbury; and while he was thus subdued by the charms of a wicked woman, he seemed to change his nature, and from the gentle, easy, accessible, good-natured man he formerly appeared, he degenerated into the sullen, vindictive, and implacable. One thing with respect to the countess ought not to be omitted. She was wife of the famous Earl of Essex, who afterwards headed the army of the parliament against the King, and to whom the imputation of impotence was laid. The Countess, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... humiliatingly unusual avenues. The Rodney family came down the back stairs. Brock was solemnly ushered through the public office by Mr. Odell-Carney and Freddie Ulstervelt. It is not stretching the truth to say that they were sour and sullen, but, as may be suspected, from peculiarly different causes. At last all were congregated in the stuffy office, very much subdued and very much at odds with each other. Mr. Githens was there. Likewise the gentleman from ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... the wise woman she was she knew that in most cases it is the woman who makes marriage sing like a perpetual song or become a sullen silence. All the way to her home she kept ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... summoning to prayer, and that one was a watch-tower only [Footnote: Thus literally was fulfilled the promise to St. Mark,—Pax e.] from first to last, while the palaces of the other cities of Italy were lifted into sullen fortitudes of rampart, and fringed with forked battlements for the javelin and the bow, the sands of Venice never sank under the weight of a war tower, and her roof terraces were wreathed with Arabian imagery, of golden globes suspended on the leaves of lilies. [Footnote: The inconsiderable ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... boy gazed long; Unheeded and unmarked a throng Might there have met, so fixed his soul On Memory's unfolding scroll. He knew not that the hours crept by, And sullen grew the deepening night; Again he met his mother's eye, As erst in joyous days and bright, And heard the accents clear and mild, Now hushed in death, breathe o'er her child A fervent blessing and a prayer; Again his father's silver hair Gleamed on his ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... you wanted to know," began Mrs. Bolton, with a sullen defiance mixed with pleasure in Annie's reproach. "He was out there in my settin'-room ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... crusty, hateful, ill-tempered, surly, churlish, disagreeable, ill-conditioned, morose, unamiable, crabbed, dogged, ill-humored, sour, unlovely, cruel, gruff, ill-natured, sullen, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... the sun rise over the Maritza," he said, "kindling the sullen waters, but my faith is still gray and dead. Nay, rather there came into my mind the sublime poem of Moses Ibn Ezra of Granada: 'Thy days are delusive dreams and thy life as yon cloud of morning: whilst it tarries over thy tabernacle ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... shocked and warning look from his mother, and so did not reply. He saw that he was "in for it," as he would express himself, and surmised that the less he said the sooner the ordeal would be over. He therefore took refuge in a silence that was both sullen and resentful. He was too young and uncurbed to maintain a cold and impassive face, and his dark eyes occasionally shot vindictive gleams at both his mother and her ally, who had so unexpectedly caged ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... scheme of the universe provided by his official pastors has somehow broken down with him, he forms some audacious theory of his own, and is perhaps plunged into an unhallowed revolt against the Divine order. Septimius, under such circumstances, develops into a kind of morbid and sullen Hawthorne. He considers—as other people have done—that death is a disagreeable fact, but refuses to admit that it is inevitable. The romance tends to show that such a state of mind is unhealthy ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... of rain, something poisonous seemed to have been washed out of Hugh's mind. All that afternoon, in the sullen heat, he had brooded stupidly and miserably enough, picking up, as it were, dart after dart from his little bundle of cares and miseries, and pricking his ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... bear to think of a successor, and seemed to hate every one who entertained any expectation of following her. Essex suppressed all outward expressions of violence and anger; became thoughtful, moody, and sullen; held secret consultations with desperate intriguers, and finally formed a scheme to organize a rebellion, to bring King James's troops to England to support it, to take possession of the Tower and of the strong-holds about London, to seize the palace of the queen, overturn her ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... took place, and many a thesis was discussed, in order to enable the unhappy men to pass away the tedious monotony of their imprisonment in this strange lurking-place. The only man who kept aloof and took no part in these amusing recreations was Hennessy, who seemed moody and sullen, but who, nevertheless, was frequently detected in making ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... was not in the least impaired by his resolve not to spend a single penny of his pocket money. With a tact unusual at his age, or indeed at any other, he bore his misfortunes simply and proudly, without any of the servile humility or sullen envy which so often accompanies poverty. For three years in succession the highest prizes at the competitions rewarded him for his efforts; but these successes, far from elating him unduly, seemed to afford him but little satisfaction. "This is only glory," he thought; ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... names of degenerated establishments only new motives to discontent. Those bodies which, when full of life and beauty, lay in their arms, and were their joy and comfort, when dead and putrid, become but the more loathsome from remembrance of former endearments. A sullen gloom and furious disorder prevail by fits: the nation loses its relish for peace and prosperity; as it did in that season of fulness which opened our troubles in the time of Charles the First. A species of men to whom a state ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... powers of his soul. Hence flowed that constant tranquillity and serenity of his mind, which was the best proof of a perfect mastery of his passions. St. Athanasius observes of him, that after thirty years spent in the closest solitude, "he appeared not to others with a sullen or savage, but with a most obliging sociable air."[30] A heart that is filled with inward peace, simplicity, goodness, and charity, is a stranger to a lowering or contracted look. The main point in Christian mortification is the humiliation of the heart, one of its principal ends being the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... and be publick. The voters of the Borough are too proud and too little dependant to be solicited by deputies; they expect the gratification of seeing the candidate bowing or curtseying before them. If you are proud, they can be sullen. Mr. Thrale certainly shall not come, and yet somebody must appear whom the people think it worth the while to look ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... rather hesitatingly,—the young woman with the sullen grey face disconcerted her—but when she looked at Liz she smiled quite brightly, and came forward with a ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... in a bare room with seven or eight men standing in a circle round him, regarding him with sullen and angry looks, yet with curiosity and some respect; and on more than one face there were marks of the struggle, savage flushes that would blacken to-morrow, and blood on lips. He looked from one to the other, but saw no face he recognized, ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... relationship with the Island Queen. We were proud to speak her tongue, to reenact her laws, to read her sages, to sing her songs, to claim her ancient glory as partly our own. England, the stormy cradle of our nation, the sullen mistress of the angry western seas, our hearts went out to her, across the ocean, across the years, across war, across injustice, and went out still in love and reverence. We never dreamed that our ideal ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... suitable effects, and Laetitia is as insipid a companion as Daphne is an agreeable one. Laetitia, confident of favour, has studied no arts to please: Daphne, despairing of any inclination towards her person, has depended only on her merit. Laetitia has always something in her air that is sullen, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... was building between me and the crew, until at last I felt that I could never get past it. I was very unhappy, very lonely, very homesick; and suddenly the thought came to me that these men, notwithstanding their sullen eyes and forbidding faces, might be lonely and homesick, too. I decided to talk to them as a woman and not as a minister, and I came down from the pulpit and faced them on their own level, looking them over and mentally ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... like the look of this river down there," said Jesse, stepping to the point of the bar, and gazing down the stream up which came the sullen roar of ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Trail • Emerson Hough
... Nothing could look stranger than this latter: a column of Marseillese, slight, swarthy, party-coloured, in patched clothes, came tripping on;—as if King Edwin had opened the Dwarf Hill, and sent out his nimble Host of Dwarfs. Next followed regular troops; serious, sullen; not as if downcast or ashamed. But the remarkablest appearance, which struck every one, was that of the Chasers (Chasseurs) coming out mounted: they had advanced quite silent to where we stood, when their Band struck up ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... in the gate and in the jaws of hell, Revengeful cares and sullen sorrows dwell. And pale diseases and repining age, Want, fear, and famine's unresisted rage: Here toils and Death and Death's half-brother, Sleep— Forms, terrible to ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... ground, free from shrubs, to the south of the Cano Curamuni, in a spot where we saw some capuchin monkeys.* (* Simia chiropotes.) They were recognizable by their black beards and their gloomy and sullen air, and were walking slowly on the horizontal branches of a genipa. During the five following nights our passage was the more troublesome in proportion as we approached the bifurcation of the Orinoco. The luxuriance of the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... longer regarded her as an Indian, but referred to her now as "that Russian governess," nevertheless she could retreat behind a baffling air of stolidity—almost of sullenness—when she chose, and that was precisely the mask she wore for Bill. In reality she was far from stolid and anything but sullen. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... between them, during which the old gentleman repeatedly pressed the young man's hand, and sometimes reached up and softly patted him on the shoulder. The young man appeared to receive the words and caresses of the old gentleman with a sullen indifference. Several times he pettishly drew his hand away, and at last shook his head fiercely, folded his arms, and seemed (though the spectators could only conjecture that) to stamp the floor with ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... stream shall spring up from behind, and flow out from beneath, the temple doors, and then with rapid increase and depth and width, but with no tributaries coming into it, shall run fertilising and life-giving everywhere, till it pours itself into the noisome waters of the sullen sea of death and heals ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... sullen creature that Rem Van Ariens is!" thought Hyde, "and with all the good temper in the world I affirm it. I wonder what he is on the street for at this hour! Shall I watch him? No, that would be vile work. I will let him alone; he ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... part of a Rosicrucian, because there was something in his appearance which inspired, if not respect, at least awe and a certain feeling of fear. In point of fact, this was only a natural presentiment that the man must be either a clever rogue or a morose and sullen scholar. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... life, something that has happened, not in a book, but in your own soul, and see how ragged and beggarly your vocabulary is! The fact is, you don't often speak of these things in any language, let alone a foreign one. Rosa was never talkative. She could be silent without being sullen. Ours, you may say, was for the ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Nor did he understand the poet. He could read his daughter's flowing verse with pleasure, but there was to his ear a mere jumble of sound and sense in much of the work of the author of "The Tomb at St. Praxed's" and "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis." Of a selfishly genial but also of a violent and often sullen nature, he resented more and more any friendship which threatened to loosen the chain of affection and association binding his daughter ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... day night pushed aside; On Tschatir Dagh the sullen sun and low Paints phantom purple upon ancient snow; While forest ways within, the wanderers hide. Night veils the mountains and the valleys wide; The thunderous brooks are dream-held, dulled, and slow; Beneath the blackness fragrant flowers blow ...
— Sonnets from the Crimea • Adam Mickiewicz
... goes shaking his gray hair In meekest censuring, and turns his eye Earthward in grief, and heavenward in pray'r, And sighs, and clasps his hands, and passes by, Good-hearted man! what sullen soul would wear Thy sorrow for a garb, and constantly Put on thy censure, that might win the praise Of one so gray in goodness and ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... calculated to render the slaves sullen, discontented, unhappy and refractory—and the masters suspicious, fearful of consequences, and disposed to enhance the rigor of the condition of their slaves, in order to avert the dangers that appear to ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... answer, and Mrs. Hamilton's newly raised hopes vanished; she waited full two or three minutes, then gently disengaged her hand and dress from Ellen's still convulsive grasp; the door closed, with a sullen, seemingly unwilling sound, and Ellen was alone. She remained in the same posture, the same spot, till a vague, cold terror so took possession of her, that the room seemed filled with ghostly shapes, and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... aside by an invisible hand as are drawn back the curtains at a window. As you have seen from a hill the winking lights of a city disappear at daybreak, so, one by one, the stars went out. Masses of angry clouds reared themselves in ominous, fantastic forms against a sullen sky. The hot land breeze changed to a cold wind which made me shiver. Suddenly the mounting rampart of clouds, which seemed about to burst in a tempest, was pierced by a hundred flaming lances coming from beyond the ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... started to walk with the oil man and his sullen Indians toward various shacks which they saw through the trees, and lower on the mountain side, they heard a hail and looked up to see Professor Henderson, Jack Darrow, and the negro, Washington White, descending the mountain in ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... Mr. Cameron, standing in front of the sullen boy, with his legs wide apart and a smile upon his ruddy face, "now, young man, let's get to the bottom of this. You confide in me, and I will not betray your confidence. Why don't you want to live ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... surrounded the stake were made of javelins and spears collected by Cortes with intrepid audacity and far-seeing prudence, from the public armory. Vast numbers of them were used. The populace looked on in sullen and gloomy silence. Montezuma was not merely the ruler of the country, but in some senses he was a deity, and his capture, together with the capture of the great lords of his family, who, under ordinary circumstances would have succeeded to his throne, paralyzed the national, ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... and fro. Sulkily men were saddling and preparing for the road. It was far to Challans, farther to Lege—more than one day, and many a weary league to Ponts de Ce and the Loire. The men who had ridden gaily southwards on the scent of spoil and revenge turned their backs on the castle with many a sullen oath and word. They burned a hovel or two, and stripped such as they spared, after the fashion of the day; and it had gone ill with the peasant woman who fell into their hands. Fortunately, under cover ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... cage of the jolly bird in question; and, headed by Madame Grambeau leaning on her cane, we followed simultaneously, with the exception of Major Favraud, who continued at the table with his cigar and cognac-flask, in sullen ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... with a look of sullen, dogged determination on his countenance, and stood before his father and brother with folded arms, and an air of injured innocence. He was careful, however, not to meet his ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... afraid were they of his displeasure, and so fearful that they might be starved, since the only food they received was dried and salted fish, that these boys worked like bees in a hive, only it was a sullen, painful sort of working, for they never sang or shouted, whistled or talked, and they were thin and wretched, and more ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... could neither account for such sullen intemperance nor the secrecy of this haste. I again urgently intreated I might acquaint Mr. Mowbray, and his committee: but he peremptorily refused, and repeated his desire that I would accompany him immediately. No arguments, no prayers, could move him: ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... to the house. There was no sign-post before it, nor any of the usual invitations to the traveller, though I saw by the road that many went and came there, but the owner's name only was fastened to the outside; a sort of implied and sullen invitation, as I thought. I passed from room to room without meeting any one, till I came to what seemed the guests' apartment, which was neat, and even had an air of refinement about it, and I was glad to find a map against the wall which would direct ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... pressed into the service. The doctor, arising with a strange kind of guttural sound, which was half a yawn and half a groan, was handed by the officious squire to Miss Philomela, who received him with sullen dignity: she had not yet forgotten his falling asleep during the first chapter of her novel, while she was condescending to detail to him the outlines of four superlative volumes. The doctor, on his part, had most completely forgotten it; and though he ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... river, too, there was a strange hush, a tragic submission—it was so leaden and sullen in its color, and it flowed so soundlessly ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... the north branch of the Patapsco, the firing slackened. Now and then a sullen and spiteful gun shot its flame from the side of a British vessel. Key, pacing the deck of the cartel ship, to which he had been transferred, could not guess the cause of this. The slackened fire might mean the success ...
— The Star-Spangled Banner • John A. Carpenter
... this state of things continued. There was no longer any sound of shouting and laughter in the playground. The boys walked about moody and sullen, working at their lessons. They were fast becoming desperate. No clue had been obtained as to the destroyer of the cat, and the schoolmaster declared that if it took him months to break their spirits ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... angry and sullen. How could he doubt that she knew more about it than he did! On the other hand, he was not in a position to be as rude as he ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... afraid that's the truth, Frank; he is the son of his father; violent, and irritable, with a tongue like a lash. As soon as the means of life were straitened, he became sullen and began reproaching me; why didn't I write? Why didn't I earn money? What was the good of me? As if I could write under such conditions. No man, Frank, has ever suffered ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... midst of all these considerations, instead of exercising a manly confidence in their country, by whose confidence they had been so peculiarly distinguished, and of pointing out a system capable, in their judgment, of securing its happiness, taken the cold and sullen resolution of disappointing its ardent hopes, of sacrificing substance to forms, of committing the dearest interests of their country to the uncertainties of delay and the hazard of events, let me ask the man who can raise his mind ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... events of the war. While the senators anxiously deliberated among themselves what fit colleague for Nero could be nominated at the coming comitia, and sorrowfully recalled the names of Marcellus, Gracchus, and other plebeian generals who were no more, one taciturn and moody old man sat in sullen apathy among the conscript fathers. This was Marcus Livius, who had been consul in the year before the beginning of this war, and had then gained a victory over the Illyrians. After his consulship he had been impeached before the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... struck at the motives that actuated the self-sacrifice, veiled by the sullen manner which she almost began to respect. "What is done for such reasons must make you happy," she said; "though there may ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... them from morning till night. Mr. Mitchell had not returned, and Alexander was obliged to take charge of his estates. When he was not galloping from village to village and mill to mill, driving the sullen blacks before him, or routing them out of ruins and hollows, where they huddled in a demoralized stupor, he was consoling his aunt for the possible sacrifice of Mr. Mitchell to the storm. Alexander was quite confident that the hurricane had spared ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... pellets. But a sudden activity in the road made us pause. The crowd of little people were hostile to Polter. A sullen hostility. They milled about him as he stood there, gazing down at ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... have a right to come in here out of the rain," she said, advancing to the fire and seating herself with a sullen ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... months moved on in unseasonable, torrid heat, all the sores of the social system swelled and began to break. The bleak winter had seen mute starvation and misery, and the blasts of summer had brought no revival of industry. Capital was sullen, and labor violent. There were meetings and counter-meetings; agitators, panaceas, university lecturers, sociologizing preachers, philanthropists, politicians—discontent and discord. The laborer ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... which of late was crowned Flinched from a knight's determined bound, And in sullen ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... wretched slaves who groaned long ago under old Lancaster merchants. And Mr. Goodchild adds that the stones of Lancaster do sometimes whisper, even yet, of rich men passed away—upon whose great prosperity some of these old doorways frowned sullen in the brightest weather—that their slave- gain turned to curses, as the Arabian Wizard's money turned to leaves, and that no good ever came of it, even unto the third and fourth generations, until ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... occasion, she looked out into the street—with her handkerchief (was it used as a signal?) exhibited in her hand. Iris, on her side, advanced to Mountjoy. Easily moved to anger, her nature was incapable of sullen perseverance in a state of enmity. To see Hugh still patiently waiting—still risking the chances of insult—devoted to her, and forgiving her—was at once a reproach that punished Iris, and a mute appeal that no true woman's ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... from the clutches of Gabinius, and the latter was sullen and foiled. But none the less the Vestal was in a tremor of fear for the consequences of her meeting with the libertine. She knew that Gabinius was determined, dexterous, and indefatigable; that he was baffled, but not necessarily driven to throw over his illicit quest. And Fabia realized keenly ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... Henri's readiness, once he had made up his mind that Frank was going alone, to help him with his greater knowledge of the countryside. Some boys would have been sullen, and would not have volunteered that information, ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... towards Epimetheus, as she spoke, perhaps expecting that he would commend her for her wisdom. But the sullen boy only muttered that she was ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... what Charlie was saying, but he fancied from his manner that he was telling his wrongs, and a sullen, angry ...
— Charlie Scott - or, There's Time Enough • Unknown
... deepsleep. For aberration redrew the sky, crowding stars toward the bows, so that the ships plunged toward a cloud of Doppler hell-blue. The constellations lay thinly abeam, you looked out upon the dark. Aft, Sol was still the brightest object in heaven, but it had gained a sullen red tinge, as if already grown old, as if the prodigal would return from far places to find his ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... young Englishman came to Etretat and bought a little but hidden under great trees. It was said that he lived there, always alone, in a strange manner; and he aroused the inimical surprise of the natives, for the inhabitants were sullen and foolishly malicious, as they always ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... sculptor's model for a young Greek god; for, if any beauty of feature was hers, it was boyish in its character. As for beauty of expression, she assuredly did not cultivate that. The curved red mouth was sullen and the eyes antagonistic. ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... he said anxiously, "I am most distressed that this should have occurred. I thought that the woman would probably be sullen, but I had no idea that she would dare to ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... stand out. Adj. obstinate, tenacious, stubborn, obdurate, casehardened; inflexible &c (hard) 323; balky; immovable, unshakable, not to be moved; inert &c 172; unchangeable &c 150; inexorable &c (determined) 604; mulish, obstinate as a mule, pig-headed. dogged; sullen, sulky; unmoved, uninfluenced unaffected. willful, self-willed, perverse; resty^, restive, restiff^; pervicacious^, wayward, refractory, unruly; heady, headstrong; entete [Fr.]; contumacious; crossgrained^. arbitrary, dogmatic, positive, bigoted; prejudiced ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... acacias, and festoons of lilac convolvuli; whilst here and there, where the land had slipped above the rapids, bared places of red earth could be seen, like that of Devonshire; there, too, the waters, impeded by a natural dam, looked like a huge mill-pond, sullen and dark, in which two crocodiles, laving about, were looking out for prey. From the high banks we looked down upon a line of sloping wooded islets lying across the stream, which divide its waters, and, by interrupting them, cause ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... disreputable enough gang of unkempt, unshaven, half-clothed wretches: Gauls and Germans with fair hair and giant physiques; dark-haired Syrians; black-skinned Africans,—all panting and groaning, clanking their chains, and cursing softly at the two sullen overseers, who, with heavy-loaded whips, were literally driving them ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... escape this fate. Cato was not the man to feel any compunctions of conscience in the performance of what he considered a rigorous public task. He boasted of having destroyed more towns in Spain than he had spent days in that country. When he had reduced the whole of Hither Spain to a hollow, sullen, and temporary submission, he returned to Rome, and was ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... amid the firing of cannon; the streets were all illuminated, and the mob and the multitude maddened with brandy. Yet the scene was unlike that of the night before. There was something in the extravagances of Versailles wholly different from the sullen and frowning aspect of Paris. The one had the look of a melodrame; the other the look of an execution. All was funereal. We marched with the king to the Place du Carrousel, and when the gates of the palace closed on him, I felt as if they were the gates of the tomb. Perhaps it would be best that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... nearly all the beneficent work of the Middle Ages and made the peasant class practically outlaw, while breaking down its character, degrading its morals, increasing its ignorance, and building up a sullen rage and an invincible hatred of all that stood visible as law and order in the persons of the ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... A sullen and gloomy spirit seemed to prevail among our boatmen, which by no means diminished as the evening drew on, and "the rapids were near." The sun had set, and the moon and stars rose brilliantly over the still waters, which gave back the reflections of their glorious multitude ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... and sullen man; and though his temper was anything but tractable, there was so much to please, almost to dazzle him, in the event, that he accepted the terms which Dwyer imposed upon him without any further token of disapprobation than a shake of the ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... practice. The elders of the settlement communed with him freely and in charity; but the voice of conciliation and alliance came too late. He listened to the reasonings of the ministers, who were assembled from all the adjoining parishes, in sullen respect: and he joined in the petitions for light and instruction, that were offered up on the occasion, with the deep reverence with which he ever drew near to the footstool of the Almighty; but he did both in a temper into which too much positiveness of spiritual pride had entered, to open ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... into the driving storm, dragging the rain from his eyes with his fingers. Then nature held a torch for him. A vivid shaft of lightning crinkled overhead and spread a broad flare of illumination across the sea. His suspicions, which had been stirred by that sullen roar, were now verified. He saw a low wall of white water, rolling and frothing. It was a ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day |
