"Priggish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to his faults," urged Lady Mary, "only I can laugh at them better than you can, because I know all the while that at the very bottom of his heart he's only my baby Peter after all. He's not—God bless him—he's not the dreary, cold-blooded, priggish boy he sometimes pretends to be. Don't remember him like that now, Timothy. Think of that morning in June—that glorious, sunny morning in June, when you knelt by the open window in my room and thanked God because you had a son. Think of that other summer day when we couldn't bear even to ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... there was really nothing questionable in that, but he was just slightly prejudiced against a man who made such a quotation; it sounded a little priggish. ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... Mignon La Salle with cool impudence. "You look like that priggish Miss Stevens. I hope for your sake you are not a ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... listen. I'll get into fine form presently. Look!" he said, pointing to the helmet he was holding. "Here is a Cromwellian morion. It was picked up by an ancestor at Naseby. It has a clean cut in it. That's where an honest gentleman's sword found its way into the knave's skull—the puritanical, priggish, canting knave." ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... faithful, brave, and true in deed and word"; and I indulged in waking dreams of heroic adventures in quest of fair renown, and to succor the oppressed. All this he encouraged and abetted, though always, too, with a sort of twinkle of the eye, lest I should take myself too seriously and wax priggish. He permitted me to have a breastplate and a helmet with a golden dragon crest (made by our nurse out of pasteboard covered with tinsel-paper), and he bought me a real steel sword with a brass hilt wrought in open-work; I used to spend hours ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... queer, Pat, but now that I know him he doesn't seem interesting in the least. He's priggish and conceited; he's a poser, too. It is too bad, Pat, for you to tire yourself out and get such a—a dry stick ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... darknesses of Time, that will presently crush and consume him again. Why not flounder with the rest, why not eat, drink, fight, scream, weep and pray, forget Hugh, stop brooding upon Hugh, banish all these priggish dreams of "The Better Government of the World," and turn to the brighter aspects, the funny and adventurous aspects of the war, the Chestertonian jolliness, Punch side of things? Think you because your sons ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... it means!" snapped the Senator, pricked in his pride and in his sense of responsibility as a go-between. He pushed a button in the row on his study table. "This new job as mayor seems to be playing some sort of a devil's trick with Stewart. I'll admit, Daunt, that I didn't relish some of the priggish preachment on politics mouthed by him in his office when we were there. But I didn't pay much attention—any more than I did to his exaggerated flourish in the way he attended to city business. The new ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... cheeks or lips or eyes,' if they were not combined with 'A smooth and steadfast mind, Gentle thoughts, and calm desires.' A rosy cheek, a coral lip, and even star-like eyes, as he sagely said, would waste away. And in this somewhat priggish, and perhaps not wholly sincere, vein, he finds a rival in the anonymous bard who declared that he ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... Wimblehurst world into which I had fallen. I wrote with some frequency to Ewart, self-conscious, but, as I remember them, not intelligent letters, dated in Latin and with lapses into Latin quotation that roused Ewart to parody. There was something about me in those days more than a little priggish. But it was, to do myself justice, something more than the petty pride of learning. I had a very grave sense of discipline and preparation that I am not ashamed at all to remember. I was serious. More serious than I am at the present time. More serious, indeed, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... was so fine and frosty a kind of devil seemed to creep into me. I have been so good since Saturday, so when Malcolm said, in his usual prim, priggish voice, "Miss Travers, may I have the pleasure of taking you for a little exercise," I jumped up without consulting Lady Katherine, and went and put my things on, ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... . I forbear: my American vocabulary is limited. Outre mer, outres moeurs, as Mr. Walkley might say in some guarded allusion to Paul Bourget. . . . I shall be sorry to see poker take the place of roulette, and the Christ Church meadows turned into a ranch for priggish cowboys, or Addison's Walk re-named the Cake Walk. But no, I believe Mr. Rhodes, if there was just a touch of malice in his testament, realised that Oxford manners were stronger than the American want of them. Oxford may be wounded, but I have complete confidence ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... morality mocking exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you, attracting you, tempting you, inexplicably forcing you to range the hero with his enemy the statue on a transcendant plane, leaving the prudish daughter and her priggish lover on a crockery shelf below ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... our friend; that it is we who seem most frequently undeserving of the love that unites us; and that it is by our friend's conduct that we are continually rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh endeavour. Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is profit he is after in these intimacies; moral profit, certainly; but still profit to himself. If you will be the sort of friend I want, he remarks naively, "my education cannot dispense with your society." His ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pass a strange man in the woods or fields with as finished an air of being unaware of him (particularly if he be a rather shabby painter no longer young) as if the encounter took place on a city sidewalk; but this woman was not of that priggish kind. Her straightforward glance recognised my existence as a fellow-being; and she further acknowledged it by a faint smile, which was of courtesy only, however, and admitted no reference to the ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... junior of the youngest of them, keeping at the head of every class with unostentatious ease. I am afraid that I may have done my orphaned cousin seeming injustice in former chapters of this autobiography. Her temper was even, and her nature was finer than her prim, priggish ways would have led the casual acquaintance to suppose. She was ultra-conscientious, and naturally so exemplary that her good behavior was a snare. She could not sympathize with my temptations to naughtiness and many falls from good-girlhood. I mention this to introduce ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... sympathising with the efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacies of high-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristram, and ultimately discovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there was no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the whole artificial and bombastic schemes which bred these moral evils. It might be that in spite of this new view of the case, it would ultimately appear that Ulysses was ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... literary distinction in other ways, who was at the time of more than middle age, published The Fool of Quality or The Adventures of Henry Earl of Morland. The hero is a sort of Grandison-Buncle, as proper though scarcely as priggish as the one, and as eccentric and discursive as the other; the story is chaos: the book is stuffed with disquisitions on all sorts of moral, social, and political problems. It is excellently written; it is clear ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... her monotonous mourning, she was an image of intelligent purpose, of the passion of duty; but I asked myself whether any girl had ever had so charming an instinct as that which permitted her to laugh out, as for the joy of her difficulty, into the priggish old room. This remarkable young woman could be earnest without being solemn, and at moments when I ought doubtless to have cursed her obstinacy I found myself watching the unstudied play of her eyebrows or the ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... he might perhaps be able to assist his mother to come out from her narrowness, and discover too how warm and glorious the sun shone outside, where people loved and helped each other. Then he rejected that as priggish. ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... vigorous body. To them, straight thought ought to be as lovable as a firm and supple body. In this matter our young people are less exacting. The ordinary conversation of people gathered together for social purposes is not particularly intellectual, and any attempt to make it so at present seems priggish. With a broader education, will come keener demand for intelligence. We may hope the time is not too far distant when a question of governmental policy, a new book or play, or a new discovery in science will stimulate as much conversational zest as now seems to ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... into a great laugh, and Saffy into silent tears, for she thought she had made a fool of herself. She was not a priggish child, and did not deserve the mockery with which her barbarian brother invaded her little temple. She was such a true child that her mother was her neighbor, and present to all her being—not her eyes only or her brain, but her ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... nettled her, his attitude seemed to her priggish and dictatorial, and as the sun disappearing behind a sudden cloud, so her childish merriment quickly gave place to a feeling ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... everybody and everything in sight, even to the point of changing her mind on the instant, if circumstances seemed to make it advisable. Her instinctive point of view, when she went so far as to hold one, was somewhat cut and dried; in a word, priggish. She kept a young man strictly on his good behavior, that much could be said in her favor; the only criticism that could be made on this estimable trait was that no bold youth was ever tempted to overstep the bounds of discretion when in her presence. No unruly words of love ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a rare type of heroine. But also of the quiet domesticated wife we have a description from the same writer. Unfortunately the letter is one of the most priggish of all the rather self-complacent epistles written by that thoroughly respectable and estimable man; but that fact takes nothing from the information for which we are looking. Pliny is writing to his ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... the history of literature which has become, more justly than some other traditional expressions, rather odious to the modern mind. For in the first place it is an irritatingly conventional phrase, and in the second the paternity is usually questionable. But "the priggish little clerk of the Council," as Thackeray (who nevertheless loved his letters) calls Howell, does really seem to deserve the fathership of all such as in English write unofficial letters "for publication."[96] He wrote a great deal else: and would no doubt in more recent ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... reading. There they all were! Little Henry and his Bearer, Anna Ross the Orphan of Waterloo, Agathos, and many, many more, including a well-remembered American book, Melbourne House. The heroine of the last-named work, an odiously priggish child called Daisy Randolph, refused to sing on a Sunday when desired to do so by her mother. For this, most properly, she was whipped. A devoted black maid who shared Daisy's religious views, comforted her little mistress by bringing her a supper ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... with the tale as its title seems to imply. The love affairs of a young officer who, while blind from wounds, fell in love with his nurse to the extent of becoming engaged to her and didn't recognise her when they met again, are Mr. RILEY'S real concern. Eric, who is quite as priggish as his name suggests, falls in love with his sweetheart, as a lady of leisure, all over again, and goes through agonies of remorse on account of his own faithlessness to her as a nurse. Marion or Constance, for she uses two names to help the confusion, lets him suffer a while for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... full of color, with a consistently developed plot, constructed with a fine sense of proportion and vivid characterization, except in one respect, which constitutes the weak point of the story—that is to say, the character of Dick Lawton, who is somewhat priggish and altogether disappointing. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... sinking both at the same moment—a terrible solecism in political economy. Even this, however, I believe she would have endured, rather than have quitted the house where she was born, and to which all her ways and notions were adapted, had not a priggish steward, as much addicted to improvement and reform as she was to precedent and established usages, insisted on binding her by lease to spread a certain number of loads of chalk on every field. This tremendous innovation, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... turn. Had good Dr. Bayly been at home—but he was away on some important mission from his lordship to the king: and indeed she could scarcely have looked for refuge from such misery as hers in the judgment of the rather priggish old-bachelor ecclesiastic. Gladly would she have forsaken the castle, and returned to all the dangers and fears of her lonely home; but that would be to yield to a lie, to flee from the devil instead of facing him, and with her own hand to fix the imputed ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... in unfeigned astonishment. The grave, studious, young pupil-teacher was no favorite with the other boys, who thought him priggish and rather arbitrary; but at least he was always courteous in his dealings with them, and, indeed, rather prided ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... they were not to practise the musical art that they might have a soul-developing aesthetic training, a means of solace, delight, and self-expression—but that they might "play their piece" to the casual visitor to the school-room with priggish pride, expectant of praise; they were not to be Christian for any other reason than that it was the recommended way to Eternal Bliss and a Good Time Hereafter—the whole duty of canny and respectable man being to "save his ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... I have!" he accepted her somewhat sadly humorous statement; "and that's why I don't believe I'll ever make a mistake. I'd rather never marry than make a mistake. I know I sound priggish; but I've thought a good deal about it: I've had to." He paused for a moment, and then, in the tone of quiet, unconfused confidence that always filled her with a sense of mingled pride and humility, he added:—"I have strong passions, ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... continued Trenchard in his English voice. (He told me afterwards that he was conscious at the time of a horrible priggish superiority.) "Here in Russia you go up and down so. You've no restraint. Now if you ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... priggish or surly Thou didst not enthuse or beguile; But tilted a little and curly Of brim—how seductive thy style! And never was pride that is proper Sartorially better expressed Than when an immaculate topper Sat light ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... against the normal man. Quite apart from the danger of unsympathetic and fatally irritating government there can be little or no doubt that the method of making men officials for life is quite the worst way of getting official duties done. Officialdom is a species of incompetence. This rather priggish, teachable, and well-behaved sort of boy, who is attracted by the prospect of assured income and a pension to win his way into the Civil Service, and who then by varied assiduities rises to a sort of timidly vindictive importance, is the last person to whom we would willingly entrust the vital interests ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... the points of his little moustache went up again in the habitual barometrical smile. Rather a priggish, supercilious smile, she thought, taking a glance at ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... great deal. From the first to the last the book overflows with the strange knowledge of child-nature which so rarely survives childhood; and moreover, with inexhaustible quiet humor, which is never anything but innocent and well-bred, never priggish, and never clumsy."—Academy. ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... into Polly Brewster's ears, and she had thought them vapid or priggish or affected, according as they had chosen this or that medium. This man was different. For all his outer grotesquery, the noble simplicity of the verse matched some veiled and hitherto but half-expressed quality within him, and dignified him. Miss Brewster suffered the strange but ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Master Harry Sandford of England, the priggish little boy in the story of "Sandford and Merton," has a worthy American cousin in one Elsie Dinsmore, who sedately pirouettes through a seemingly endless succession of girls' books. I came across a nest of fifteen of them the other day. This impossible ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich |
