"Cynically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Friends?" he laughed cynically. "Friends? in that uniform, and you attired in a Rebel cavalry jacket? Friends? that fellow over there?" and he pointed derisively at me with his pistol barrel. "Damn you, but I believe you are all a ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... probably neglecting to check in on time," he rationalized cynically to the operator. He rubbed his long nose and hoped the operator would agree that's ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... us. I spend as much time as I can with her, however, during the day, and make up for it by working at night after she has gone to sleep; and when I question her, she only laughs, and answers that she loves to have me all to herself. (Here you will smile cynically, I know, and say, 'Humph, I wonder will she say the same when they have been married six years instead of six months.') At the rate I am working now I shall have finished my first volume by the spring, and then, my dear fellow, you must try and come ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... Why, goddamn it, we sat in that coffee shop for half an hour while I leveled with you. No chance! You held out on me." King laughed cynically. "I guess that's human nature. With a couple of bucks at stake even ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... like the road to Alfredston now. It stared him cynically in the face. The wayside objects reminded him so much of his courtship of his wife that, to keep them out of his eyes, he read whenever he could as he walked to and from his work. Yet he sometimes felt that by caring for books he was not escaping common-place ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... election by the Republicans who had promised to reduce it. To those of us who for many years regarded the tariff as the dividing line between the parties, his stand was most disappointing. And when the head of one of the chief Trusts in America cynically blurted out, "The Tariff is the mother of Trusts," we hoped that Roosevelt, who had then begun his stupendous battle with the Trusts, would deal them a staggering blow by shattering the tariff. But, greatly to our chagrin, he ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... of the scramble," he kept breaking out Of silence to say. "I don't blame the boys, but it's plain to me they see that my going will let them move up one. Mason cynically voiced the whole thing today: 'I can say, "Sorry to see you go, Bloom," because your going doesn't concern me. I'm not in line of succession, but some of the other boys don't feel so. There's no divinity doth ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... authors— Fashion and dress—our neighbours and ourselves. But even as the senseless changes rang, And I help'd ring them, in my secret soul Grew weariness, disgust, and self-contempt; And more disturb'd in spirit, I retraced, More cynically ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... reason for supposing that people not unfrequently deceive themselves on this matter. It is, perhaps, hardly an exaggeration to say that most of us are capable of imagining that we are having enjoyment when we conform to the temporary fashion of social amusement. It has been cynically observed that people go into society less in order to be happy than to seem so, and one may add that in this semblance of enjoyment they may, provided they are not blase, deceive themselves as well ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... Arbuthnot' we recognize in Pope ideals of independence, of devotion to his art, of simple living, of loyal friendship, and of filial piety which shine in splendid contrast with the gross, servile, and cynically immoral tone of the age and society in ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... interest and a new title by which to win soft words, admiring looks, and sympathetic pressings from pretty hands. Who could blame Lady Richard for murmuring, "There, my dear, now you see!"? Who could wonder that Aunt Maria looked cynically indifferent? Was it strange that a good many people, without going to the length of declaring that the orator had suffered nothing at all, yet were inclined to think that he knew better than to waste, and quite well how to improve, ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... of France fallen so low that it sends its women to intercede for the lives of its men? But, perhaps," he added cynically, "it had not ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... and watched him cynically as he wrote out the quit-claim and check. "Oh! Actually!" she mocked as he put the check in her hands. "I just wanted to see if you ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... in your honor," sneered Pine cynically. "It is a selfish quality in this case, which can only be gratified by preserving silence. If Agnes knew that I was a true Romany tramp, she might run away with Lambert, and as you want him to be your husband, ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... so angry when he read this book that he said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman. But he must have approved of the picture of the Petersburg group, who under a thin veneer of polished manners are utterly inane and cynically vicious. One of them had "an expression of constant irritability on his face, as though he could not forgive himself for ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... screams with harsh collision. True, the essence of finer motive, becoming intermixed with baser and coarser ingredients, often clogs, obstructs, jars, and deranges the free and noble action of social life. But he is neither grateful nor wise, who looks cynically on all this, and loses the fine sense of social good in its perversions. That I can be a friend, that I can have a friend, though it were but one in the world; that fact, that wondrous good ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... to congratulate the Hon. W.M. TWEED upon his inestimable boon to the public—the Free Baths. With regard to a certain class—and a very large class—of the public of New York City, it has sometimes been cynically asked, "Will it wash?" Since the establishment of Free Baths under the Department of Public Works, that question has been satisfactorily replied to in the affirmative. Hardworked mechanics at once recognized the chance for a wash, and went at it with ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... Thus cynically writes Schmidt of the woman who for a score of years occupied Haydn's affections. And all of the biographers are inclined to heap upon her more or less contempt; but as you shall see a little later, the genial master ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... amongst us by the name of Toad-in-the-hole. He was so called from his gloomy misanthropical disposition, which led him into constant disparagements of all modern murders as vicious abortions, belonging to no authentic school of art. The finest performances of our own age he snarled at cynically; and at length this querulous humor grew upon him so much, and he became so notorious as a laudator tentporis acti, that few people cared to seek his society. This made him still more fierce and truculent. He went ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... get out of it. Max, if you persist in going with me to the wharf, you're a fool. When your friends are doing well, you should stick to them; when they have got into a mess, you should have appointments elsewhere." Although he spoke cynically, there was underneath his scoffing tone a strain of tenderness. He turned quickly to the girl at this point, as if afraid of betraying more feeling than he had intended to do. "You've delivered your message," said he, sharply, "now you ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... a pit for others and falling into it yourself," Millar remarked cynically. "However," he went on, "things are not so bad. I have reliable information that the later crop will ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... Mr. Gordon, as soon as that astute managing editor arrived, as to the handling of the difficult situation. The Ledger, always cynically intolerant of any effort to better the city government, as savoring of "goo-gooism," which was its special bete noire, could not well make the shooting a basis for a general attack upon police laxity, though it was in this that lay the special news possibility ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... displaced and Louisiana thereby ruined. The steaming ones were a goodly fraction of the family—the timid, the apathetic, the "conservative." The conservatives found ease better than exactitude, the trouble of thinking great, the agony of deciding harrowing, and the alternative of smiling cynically and being liberal so much easier—and the warm weather coming on with a rapidity-wearying ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... conferred upon society and humanity by a large proportion of our population," he would have cynically observed to any caviller, "is by dying and ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... on earth should I go back the moment I've got home? Oh, I see!" He smiled cynically. "You mean town won't be very pleasant for a bit? Well, I daresay it won't, but thank God no one will dare to say much to me!" His jaw squared itself rather aggressively. "But I don't intend to quit. On the contrary, my firm intention is to remain here, ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... in middle life: "One of the finest—looking men in the world. A great shock of rough, dusky dark hair; bright, laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face—most massive yet most delicate; of sallow brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musically metallic—fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous; I do not meet in these late ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... always accompanied her to choir meeting, and when they had a dance out in the country, she invariably went with Fred. "Well, I don't know what Fred Badger has got over Steve Mullane, or Jack Winters, or even Joel Jackman," said another voice, rather cynically, as though the speaker did not wholly subscribe to Mollie's view that Fred stood out as a shining mark above the rest of the ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... Among the real exceptions to the otherwise fair record of the farming class in this respect is the tax on oleomargarine and the special favor accorded to farmers' associations in the Clayton Act. It might be cynically said that the farmer has not been "sharp" enough to get his share of the "good" things" that the business classes were passing around in protective legislation. But farmers have, as has every economic group, interests which may ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... else if you permit yourself to sink without an effort?' said the doctor, rather cynically; 'but if you cannot gain strength from Christianity, then be a Stoic, ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... and glanced at his sister-in-law, smiling cynically. The devil! In all this silly excitement they might have sacrificed the last night before their long separation, if the very person they were deceiving had not ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... dreams. He arrives there overnight, and, when he rises and goes forth in the morning, there sure enough are the blue hills, only now they have changed places with him, and smile across to him, distant as ever, from the old home whence he has come. Such a story might have been very cynically treated; but it is not so done, the whole tone is kindly and consolatory, and the disenchanted man submissively takes the lesson, and understands that things far away are to be loved for their own sake, and that the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the era of materialism. Force was the prime minister, self -gratification the supreme legislator. Exaggerated superstition was balanced by decaying faith. It was a time of coordinately high mental activity, an intellectuality that cynically rejoiced at its own failure to solve the riddle of the universe, maliciously suggested new difficulties, raised barriers against its own research, and prostrating itself in the name of mere brutism, worshipped nature as the ready panderer to its worst passions, while owning ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... pink or yellow sirop which they infinitely preferred to tea, while a vivid note of colour was added to the scene by the picturesque uniforms of a couple of officers of an Algerian regiment who were consuming unlimited cigarettes and Turkish coffee, and commenting cynically in fluent French on the paucity of pretty women to be observed in the streets of ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... to smile rather cynically to himself. He had got up from the breakfast table, where everything was so bad, and had gone to look out of one of the windows of his pleasant sitting-room. It was in one of the wider ways of the Temple, and looked out upon various houses ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... exception of the duellists themselves, settled down to watch the conflict between Lady Torridon and Beatrice Atherton. Its prolongation was possible because for days together the hostess retired into a fortress of silence, whence she looked out cynically, shrugged her shoulders, smiled almost imperceptibly, and only sallied when she found she could not provoke an attack. Beatrice never made an assault; was always ready for the least hint of peace; but guarded deftly and struck hard when she was directly ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... and held every piece which was not turned into tragedy up to ridicule. It fostered all the nonsense which fretted in idle women's hearts, and touched many sore spots in others; and made men smile cynically as if saying, "That's got it to the life." This play kept Marie Kerr enchained; it set her wondering why the Marriage Service had ever been written and consecrated; it blew to and fro the winds of the storm ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... start railing at the culprit, while the crowd listened as silently and attentively as though he had been saying something worthy to be heard and heeded, rather than foully and cynically ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... command hundreds and thousands of dedicated foreign communists, people in nearly every free country who will serve Moscow's ends. Thus the masters of the Kremlin are provided with deluded followers all through the free world whom they can manipulate, cynically and quite ruthlessly, to serve the purposes of the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... and consents to marry him, notwithstanding the poverty that awaits her. Then the pilgrim discloses to her that he it is who is the King of Gaul, and Cordelia marries him. Instead of this scene, Lear, according to Shakespeare, offers Cordelia's two suitors to take her without dowry, and one cynically refuses, while the other, one does not know why, accepts her. After this, in the old drama, as in Shakespeare's, Leir undergoes the insults of Goneril, into whose house he has removed, but he bears these insults in a very different way from that represented by Shakespeare: he feels that by his ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... your own way, then," said Mick, cynically; "it's nothin' to me if you've a mind to thry a ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... the extent of his learning, Pierre gloated in a freedom of speech, the which no man dared deny him. He turned to eye his companion cynically for a second time, and contempt was patent in his gaze. Willard appeared slender and pallid in his furs, though his clear-cut features spoke a ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... feeling hurt and bewildered. He could not understand her mood. He had come up expecting to be soothed and comforted and she was like a petulant iceberg. Cynically, he recalled some lines of poetry which he had had to write out a hundred times on one occasion at school as a punishment for having introduced a ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... did. Woodburn, with his idiotic talk about patriarchal slavery, is the man on horseback to Dryfoos's muddy imagination. He'd listen to him abjectly, and he'd do whatever Woodburn told him to do." Beaton smiled cynically. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Harry cynically. "I have heard enough praise of Miss Georgy for one evening. Ted Hutchinson was talking about her." And with a burst of wrath he went on, retailing the gossip of the night: Ted knew nothing of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... theatres here—huge extravagant places! Algernon went over to an entrance of one, to amuse his mind, cynically criticizing the bill. A play was going forward within, that enjoyed great popular esteem, "The Holly Berries." Seeing that the pit was crammed, Algernon made application to learn the state of the boxes, but hearing that one ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mapped out his plan of campaign. He reviewed every detail of the interview that had taken place on New Year's Eve—more than a week ago—and it pleased him to re-construct the scene, but without the slightest indignation or excitement, only smiling cynically both at Elena and himself. Why had she come?—Simply because this impromptu tete-a-tete with a former lover, in the well-known place, after a lapse of two years, had tempted a spirit always on the look-out for fresh emotions, had inflamed her imagination and her curiosity. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... nook which I occupy in it, and whence I and a fellow-lodger and friend of mine cynically observe it, presents a strange motley scene. We are in a state of transition. We are not as yet in the town, and we have left the country, where we were when I came to lodge with Mrs. Cammysole, my excellent landlady. I then took second-floor apartments at No. 17, Waddilove ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... beings so highly engrossed in their own affairs, would presently come to an end. Sitting beside her on a shelving rock in the sun, Hollister would think of that and feel a pang. He would say to himself also, a trifle cynically, that if she could see him as he was, perhaps she would be like the rest: he would never have had the chance to know her, to sit beside her hearing the musical ripple of her voice when she laughed, seeing the sweetness of her face as she turned to him, ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... knows or cares," said another cynically. "It'll just be a case of 'Found drowned' and the regular twenty-five dollars to HIM, and five to the man who found the body. That's ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... with the blow that fell upon him, and nothing could ever heal it thoroughly again. He read the letter in silence; read it twice over; and when his wife broke out into a series of rapt congratulations, and reproached him mildly for not appearing to think it true, he rather cynically inquired what then, if ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... hall-office in great spirits and showed the letter to Callahan, the general superintendent, for congratulations. "That is right," commented Callahan cynically. "You saved them a hundred thousand dollars last month—they are going to blow ten a week on you. By the way, your ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... Pont-Aux-Biches, the Rue des Marais, the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the Rue Notre Dame des-Victoires, the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange-Bateliere, in the Champs-Elysees, the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon, the ancient gothic sewer still cynically displayed its maw. It consisted of enormous voids of stone catch-basins sometimes surrounded by stone posts, with ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... nothing. Had they been newly imported from the moon they could scarcely have less acquaintance with terrestrial conditions; but afterwards, when ruthlessly, with the grinning assistance of the onlookers, the facts of the social scheme were cynically revealed, and the role imperiously allotted—with much admonition and moving appeals to conscience and religion, and all the other aides-de-camp at command—after all that, how in the name of heaven could they continue to "babble of green fields"? Was it conceivable that among the thousands ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... certainly a space between the visible depths of the interior and the back wall. He rapped loudly, but the wood and the stuff with which it was covered were too thick; there was no answering ring. He recalled the night when he had cynically examined the fragments of the broken cabinet at Rhyd-Alwyn. He felt anything but cynical now; indeed, he was conscious of a restless eagerness and a dogged determination with which curiosity had little to do. He would find those papers if ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... mean, and that's the A and Z of it, whether in talk or in writing. 'Is there—can there be—such a thing as a natural born lady?' that's your question, hey?" The Collector peeled his walnut and smiled to himself. In other company—Batty Langton's, for example—he would have answered cynically that to him the phenomenon of a natural born lady would first of all suggest a doubt of her mother's virtue. "Well, no," he answered after a while; "if you met such a person, and could trace back her family history, ten to one you'd discover good ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... contemporary history. Yet it occurred to him now, sitting at Damaris' bedside, those intervening years of strenuous public activity, of soldiering and of administration, along with the honours reaped in them, had procured cynically less substantial result, cynically less ostensible remainder, than the brief and hidden intrigue which preceded them. They sank away as water spilt on sand—thus in his present pain he pictured it—leaving barely a trace. While that fugitive and unlawful indulgence ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... days he was lamentably addicted to intoxicants. On more than one public occasion he was the worse for his cups; and when, after his death, a subscription was started to place his statue in Westminster Abbey, Samuel Rogers, the poet, cynically said, "Yes, I will gladly give twenty pounds any day to see dear old Tom Campbell stand steady on his legs." It is a matter of congratulation that the most eminent men of the Victorian era have not fallen into some of the unhappy habits of ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... already, Stephen asked himself cynically, that it was not her foot but her ankle? His suspicions returned while he looked at her blooming face, and he hoped earnestly that she would not feel impelled to relate any irrelevant details of the adventure. Like Gideon Vetch on the platform she seemed incapable ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... twice. To have had small quarrels followed by reconciliations would have been impossible to her. Very few things were worth quarrelling about at all, still fewer worth forgiving! Mrs. Ogilvie was cynically indifferent to transgressions against herself; but when she sat in judgment she ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... Mollie. "I guess in a good many cases it wouldn't do to be too curious," she said cynically. "If you believe the stories you read and the movies you see everybody who has committed a crime anywhere from petty larceny to murder skips out ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... recollection of those queer confused days, my colleagues were cynically anarchical in their political views, unconvinced and unconvincing Socialists, and indifferent Agnostics. I am not quite sure that we believed in anything very thoroughly—except that things were in a pretty bad way. Earnest belief in anything was not a feature of the period. I recall one occasion ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... other advantages. The pack, as he cynically thought of them, would have started at the Clark ranch and the cabin. He would get to them, of course, but he meant to start on the outside of the circle ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... 'Well, well,' he murmured cynically; 'I won't say it is your fault: it is my ill-luck, I suppose. I had no real right to question you—everybody would say it was presuming. But when we have misunderstood, we feel injured by the subject ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... robbery?" I asked cynically. "Lawyers may feel their way amid the intricacies, but no one else can hope to. I'm stealing now ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... try to analyse man's love for woman, to explain it, or explain it away, belittle it, nay, even resent and befoul it, it remains an unaccountable phenomenon, a "mystery we make darker with a name." Biology, cynically pointing at certain of its processes, makes the miracle rather more miraculous than otherwise. Musical instruments are no explanation of music. "Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?" says Benedick, in Much Ado About Nothing, commenting ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... Cynically assured, therefore, at bottom of his own power with this ebullient nature, the squire was quite prepared to make external concessions, or, as we have said, to pay his price. It annoyed him that when Elsmere ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... great enthusiasm at the trend of events, and Mr. Calhoun smiled at me cynically as he went on. "I see you don't care for this sort of commission. At least, this is no midnight interview. You shall call in broad daylight on the Senora Yturrio. If you and my daughter will take my coach and four to-morrow, I think she will gladly receive your cards. ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... a little cynically as he laid his letters down on his desk and proceeded to open them—in which occupation he was presently interrupted by the opening of the side-door and the entrance ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... is believing," Joe muttered cynically. "It looks as though we have a reception committee." He looked at Nadine. "Are we ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... him and he told her somewhat doggedly, but not unkindly, to cease. "Do you know what the bells are ringing for?" he asked cynically, after a short pause. ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... writes her. Perhaps, as the novels tell us, love is a wonderful thing——" She looked at Micky with a comical expression in her queer eyes. "I should say it must be if it's reformed that man," she added cynically. ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... Mern surveyed him cynically. "Say, Latisan, I hope you're not the kind who would bite a gold coin stolen from a dead man's eye. You woods fellows have too much time for joint debates with your own selves. Go find that girl and square yourself. I want her to have what she wants, if she is in love with ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... police agents, who were arresting her in a marketplace of old time, in a strangely costumed crowd, which was clamouring violently. The poor bridegroom was being held back by his friends; a handsome young man in knee-breeches and a cocked hat watched the proceedings cynically in the right-hand corner, whilst on the left a big fat man frantically endeavoured to recover his wig, that had been lost in the melee. The advertisement was headed, 'Morton and Cox's Operatic Company,' and concluded ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... every sinner would like to believe. "I have done that, says my memory. I cannot have done that, says my pride, and remains obdurate. In the end, my memory gives in." So wrote Nietzsche, keenly and cynically observant of his kind. As a matter of fact, men would give almost anything to be able to convince themselves that they "have not done that"—not necessarily from pride, but in order to be rid of shame, of remorse, of self-contempt; will not many of them only too eagerly accept this ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... they'll have to gallop," Porter was saying. They were close up, and Crane could see that Lucretia had got to the bay colt's head, and he was dying away. He smiled cynically as he watched Westley go to the whip on The Dutchman, with Lucretia half a length in the lead. Most certainly Langdon was an excellent trainer; The Dutchman was just good enough to last into second place, and Lucretia had won handily. What a win ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... the leopard's kill. We lay here looking the place over inch by inch through our glasses, when an ejaculation of disgust from Kongoni called our attention. There at another spot that confounded beast sat like a house cat watching us cynically. Either we had come too soon, or she had heard us and retired to what she considered a safe distance. There was of course no chance of getting nearer; so I sat down, for a steadier hold, and tried her anyway. At the shot she leaped high in ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... bestriding prancing steeds, but bestriding them as if "'twas not their habit often of an afternoon." All which,—the bad teeth, pallid skins, and rustic toilets of the fair, and the very moderate horsemanship of the brave,—privates, standing at ease in the ranks, take note of, not cynically, but as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... learned from Barton why Brace had been over to England. It was to take his young wife, to whom he had only been married a year, in the hope of saving her life; and if I had felt any repugnance to the lieutenant before, it was redoubled now by the cynically brutal way in ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... With this cynically corrupt corps of jockeys and their hangers-on, it may easily be seen that the plutocrats who manipulate the Turf wires have an admirable time of it, while the great gaping mob of zanies who go to races, and zanies who stay at ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... a little cynically. Would she have refused Rodney's offer of help, she wondered, if she had known an hour ago, that the two hundred dollars she'd relied on so confidently to pull her out of this rut and give her a fresh start whenever ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the young man, cynically. "You have the pleasure, then, which your dear friend Joanna there never enjoyed, of seeing your own prophecy accomplished; and I, for my part, have three hundred pounds to solace myself with for what has certainly been ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... fellow!"—thus Percival mentally apostrophised the missing Brian Luttrell. "One would think that she was glad of what I told her." He was thoroughly put out by this reflection, and munched his breakfast in sulky silence, listening cynically to his step-mother's idle utterances and Kitty's vivacious replies. He was conscious of some disinclination to meet Elizabeth's tranquil glance, of which he bitterly resented the tranquillity. And she scarcely ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... who committed this crime of confiscating property, and who set the example of arrests of this sort, is named Eynard. He is a general. On December 18, he placed under sequestration the property of a number of citizens of Moulins, "because," as he cynically observed, "the beginning of the insurrection leaves no doubt as to the part they took in the insurrection, and in the pillaging in ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... end of Flanton," she said with half a sigh. "I knew that fellow was a brute. I might have expected something like that. But it looked so—so—" She hesitated for a word, and did not finish her sentence, but bit her lip and sniffed cynically. ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... the city looking rather worn, for the weather had been trying. He has blue, honest, direct-gazing eyes with small humour wrinkles at the corners. I never knew a man with fewer theories, or with a simpler devotion to the thing at hand, whatever it may be. At everything else he smiles, not cynically, for he is too modest in his regard for his own knowledge; he smiles at everything else because it doesn't seem quite ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... which rise of temperature and pressure must be prevented as far as possible. Accordingly there is no fundamental or indispensable portion of an acetylene apparatus which lends itself to the protection of the patent laws; and even the details (it may be said truthfully, if somewhat cynically) stand in patentability in inverse ratio to their simplicity ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... word. "Wonderful"; that was, it, she was "wonderful." His stale spirit soared in ecstasy, and left him tongue-tied. In vulgar parlance he was rattled to death, this commonplace little lawyer who for a score of years had dealt cynically with the loves and lives of the flock of female butterflies who fluttered annually in and out of the office. Throughout that period he had sat unemotionally behind his desk and listened in an aloof, cold, professional manner to the stories of their wrongs as they sobbed or hissed ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... in English history of the great Oliver; for Oliver, as will be presently seen, and all his tribe were fed upon no other food than the possessions of the Church. Cromwell, in his business of suppressing the great houses, embezzled quite cynically—if we can fairly call that "embezzlement" which was probably countenanced by the King, to whom account was due. Indeed, it is plainly evident from the whole story of that vast economic catastrophe which so completely separates the England we know from the England of a thousand years—the ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... was treated without harshness even by the soulless planter to whom he had been sold. He owed it all to gout and megrims. He had won the esteem of Governor Steed, and—what is even more important—of Governor Steed's lady, whom he shamelessly and cynically flattered and humoured. ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... this too. My manner was earnest and nervous, I know, and I think he enjoyed playing with me. I told him frankly that his reputation belied his protestations of good faith. At this he laughed and cynically admitted that this was quite ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... piece of russet probity and sound sense that she delights to own and honor. His talk shall be suggestive, subtile, and sincere, under as many masks and mimicries as the shows he passes, and as significant,—Nature choosing to speak through her chosen mouth-piece,—cynically, perhaps, sometimes, and searching into the marrows of men and times he chances to speak of, to his discomfort mostly, and avoidance. Nature, poetry, life,—not politics, not strict science, not society as it is,—are his preferred themes: the new Pantheon, probably, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... redistribution of property, and declaring England a republic. "You would never have burned your capital," he said to O'Meara at St. Helena; "you are too rich and fond of money." The London mob, he believed, would have joined him, for, as he cynically argued, "the canaille of all nations ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... point out that his mistakes resulted mainly from his unquenchable hopefulness. A singular proof of this admirable but dangerous quality is seen in his effort during the months of February and March 1795 to frame one more plan of co-operation with the Court of Berlin, which had so cynically deceived him. To this proposal Grenville offered unflinching opposition, coupled with a conditional threat to resign. Pitt persuaded him to defer action until the troubles in Ireland were less acute. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Halleck laughed cynically. "My dear friend, my steamer arrived this morning, and I'm just off the New York train. I've hurried to your office in all the impatience of friendship. I'm very lucky to find you here so late in ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... I smiled cynically, and was justified ten minutes later, when Herbert's conscience, troubled and apologetic, reminded him about that guinea he ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... should be too late. For the time being the spoils could be divided equally. Later on each might find an opportunity to force rearrangements. Such an alliance might temporarily suspend, but it would not end, the individual ambitions of each governing clique. The idea may not have presented itself so cynically to the man who first conceived it, but that was the spirit in which it was later on acceded to by the Governments of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... people more kindly when I am away from them"; adding cynically, "God knows; perhaps we will shake down together some day, for weariness; thousands ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... brother, in a biography, completely frank up to this point, now grows reticent, except to release the wife of all blame. So you must satisfy your curiosity by imagining some abnormal state of mind, which you will regard cynically or pityingly, as ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... compiled so laboriously. Stopping from time to time to shape a quill pen to his liking, he would write a few lines carefully, kill a number of flies, take a peep at Alban from beneath his shaggy brows and then resume the cycle of his labors. Alban pitied him cynically. This labor of docketing scarred backs seemed wretchedly monotonous. He was really glad when the fellow spoke to him, in as amazing a combination of tongues as ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... left her in the morning, she had naturally returned in the evening to regain them, very confident, doubtless, that even if surprised a second time, she would get off scot-free. Unfortunately for her, this fellow Anisty had interfered. Maitland presumed cynically that he ought to be grateful to Anisty.... The unaccountable scoundrel! ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... approach her, and yet no penalty against herself. And in 1809, after thirty-four years of marriage, and when she must have been nearing fifty, an island Chastelard, of the name of Kanihonui, was found to be her lover, and paid the penalty of life; she cynically surviving. Some twenty years later, one of the missionaries had written home denouncing the misconduct of an English whaler. The whaler got word of the denunciation and, with the complicity of the English consul, sought to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and profound contempt were reserved for Mr. Crawford, partly, it may be suspected by the cynically minded, because Crawford for a long time seemed to be by far the most formidable rival, but partly also because Crawford was in fact unable to resist the temptation to use ignoble means for attaining ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... departure. A perusal of them is sufficient to leave no doubt concerning the character of this young woman—who, apparently, neglected by the fellow, Berkley, pleaded piteously with him for an interview, and was, as you see, cynically rebuffed. ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... they arrived at the MacDonalds' they were welcomed with a quiet warmth and friendliness that Philon cynically assumed to be ...
— The House from Nowhere • Arthur G. Stangland
... aware of the arrival of her husband until he opened the door with a loud kick. The alferez appeared pale and gloomy, and when he saw what was going on he threw a terrible glance at his wife, who did not move from her place but stood smiling at him cynically. ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal |
