"Cross-grained" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and Valgard the Guileful, set off to woo Unna, and she gave herself away to Valgard without the advice of any of her kinsfolk. But Gunnar and Njal, and many others thought ill of that, for he was a cross-grained man and had few friends. They begot between them a son, whose name was Mord, and he is long in this story. When he was grown to man's estate, he worked ill to his kinsfolk but worst of all to Gunnar. He was a crafty man in his ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... but there were some who enjoyed them the more in consequence; and Mervyn, who had been loudest in vituperation of his first, found the present perfectly delightful, although the chief of his time was spent in preventing Mrs. Holmby's cross-grained donkey from lying down to roll, and administering to the lady the chocolate drops that he carried for Bertha's sustenance; Cecily, meantime, being far before with his sisters, where Mrs. Holmby would gladly have sent him if bodily terror would have ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... forth for a walk to the Park, the irrelevant idea of going round to see his sister kept coming into his mind. He seated himself and fastened his attention upon the paper,—but off it slipped again to the old book-shop, and to that curious, cross-grained figure, its mistress. He abandoned himself to thinking about her—and discovered that a certain unique quality in her challenged his admiration. She was the only absolutely disinterested person he knew—the only creature in the world, apparently, who did not desire to make ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... take his leave, but in doing so, had nearly met with a fatal accident. It had been the pleasure of Raoul, who was in his own disposition cross-grained, and in person rheumatic, to accommodate himself with an old Arab horse, which had been kept for the sake of the breed, as lean, and almost as lame as himself, and with a temper as vicious as that of a fiend. Betwixt the rider and the horse was a constant misunderstanding, testified on Raoul's ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... laxity of discipline and carelessness of culture have reigned in that family? I know many who seem to be excellent men in society, but who are any thing but amiable men at home. In one they are pleasant, affable, kind, and charitable; in the other, cross-grained, hard, unkind, and unjust. I declare with all positiveness, that when a family or a neighborhood of children is bad, there is a reason for it outside of the children. There are bad influences which descend upon them, and work out their ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
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