"Nagging" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conceited, we so often are! Conceit comes out in all sorts of ways. We think we know best, we want our way and we nag or boss the other one; and nagging or bossing leads on to the tendency to despise the other one. Our very attitude of superiority sets us up above them. Then, when at the bottom of our hearts we despise someone, we blame them for everything—and yet we think ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... visitation and care of their son. But Kelly had grit! While fasting, she confronted these tough issues in her life and unflinchingly made the necessary decisions. When she returned to Canada she absolutely decided, without any nagging doubts, reservations or qualifications, to make any changes necessary to ensure her survival. Only after having made these hard ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... all, specialists. And there was no conceivable way they could benefit from it personally. The only alternative was that they were offering their professional advice and that it would be best to heed it. Still, there was a vague, nagging something.... ...
— The Adventurer • Cyril M. Kornbluth
... in judging him by this standard. In the "freshness" of his age and kind, he is skeptical as to her good looks and other fascinations, and takes wicked satisfaction in giving her to understand that he, at least, "is not fooled by her tricks and manners." If her "nagging" is a thorn under his jacket, his cool disdain is a grain of sand inside of ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... or two the moulting season comes. At this time the old crows are usually irritable and nervous, but it does not stop them from beginning to drill the youngsters, who, of course, do not much enjoy the punishment and nagging they get so soon after they have been mamma's own darlings. But it is all for their good, as the old lady said when she skinned the eels, and old Silverspot is an excellent teacher. Sometimes he seems to make a speech to them. What he says I cannot guess, but judging by the way ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... has brought the Germans into disrepute with the natives employed by them is their military spirit, which gives rise to a desire to regulate everything; and that other attribute of the military spirit, nagging. You should never nag an African, it only makes him bothered and then sulky, and when he's sulky he'll lie down and die to spite you. But in spite of the Germans being over-given to this unpleasant habit of military regularity ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... is to go on nagging in this way," Pao-yue remarked smiling, "will I any more be afraid to die? on the contrary, it would be better ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... implements and medieval household equipment. He had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an icehouse, a commodious porch, a washing machine, even a bathroom. But Bella remained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly, surely, the effect of thirty years of nagging was beginning to tell on Ben Westerveld. He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, the coarser. She beat him and molded him as iron beats ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... "You were not a nagging woman, Constance," he went on in a somewhat softened tone. "In fact you have been a good wife; you have never thrown it up to me that I was unable to make good to the degree of many of our friends in purely commercial lines. All you have ever said is the truth. ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... charming. She was smilingly cruel; regaled him with Lord Uxmoor's wealth and virtues, and said he was an excellent match, and all she-Barfordshire pulling caps for him. Severne only sighed; he offered no resistance; and at last she could not go on nagging a handsome fellow, who only sighed, so she said, "Well, there; I advise you to join us before the opera is ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... reforms - including Rwanda's first ever local elections held in March 1999 - the country continues to struggle to boost investment and agricultural output and to foster reconciliation. A series of massive population displacements, a nagging Hutu extremist insurgency, and Rwandan involvement in two wars over the past four years in the neighboring DROC continue ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... they should say or do. They have a great gift, but they lay down their price for it, and suffer for others as well as in themselves more than their share. But in general, the average boy and girl needs a "daily exercise" which in most cases amounts to "nagging," and in the best hands is only saved from nagging by its absence of peevishness, and the patience with which it reminds and urges and teases into perfect observance. The teasing thing, and yet the most necessary one, is the constant check upon the preoccupying interests of children, so that in ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... with his father's wishes. They could easily do that, or thought they could, by making life at the ranch unbearable for him. That, he was convinced, was the reason that Betty had adopted her cold, severe, and contemptuous attitude toward him. She expected he would find her nagging and bossing intolerable, that he would leave in a rage and allow her and Taggart to come into possession of the property. Neither she nor Taggart would dare make off with the money and the idol as long as he was at the ranch, for they would fear ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... did say something," Henley reluctantly admitted. "He was nagging the life out of me at the store about what you intended to do, and holding me up to ridicule, and I reckon I did say that I wouldn't be here—that my business would keep me in Texas. As for that matter, I told you about the trip long ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... days at a time, which was bad for Adelle's fortune, had she but realized it. But, as has been shown, she had come now to the time when she felt relieved if Archie was not at home, glum and sulky, or nagging and fighting her will. With the place and her boy she had enough to fill her mind, and easily forgot all money troubles when Archie was not there to remind her of them. Somehow they raised the money for the workmen, and the building went on, ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... a thing that can be changed, instead of changing it, is the height of folly, and if a matter cannot be changed why worry over it? How utterly useless is the worry. Then, too, worry is the parent of nagging. Nagging is worry put into words,—the verbal expression of worry about or towards individuals. The mother wishes her son would do differently. Can the boy's actions be changed? Then go to work to change them—not to worry over them. If they cannot ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... but it required the greatest care and vigilance on the part of all the officers of the picket to enforce this order. One of their sentries would hail one of ours with some friendly remark, and it was difficult to suppress the desire to reply. If a reply was not forthcoming, a nagging ejaculation, calculated to provoke, would follow, such as, "What's the matter, Yank, are ye deaf?" "Maybe ye are afeared o' those d——d officers." "We 'uns don't give a d—— for our officers," and so volley ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... affair seems almost too deliberate. The leader plods steadily, stopping from time to time to rest on the steep slopes. The others string out in a leisurely procession. It does no good to hurry. The horses will of their own accord stay in sight of one another, and constant nagging to keep the rear closed up only worries them without accomplishing any valuable result. In going uphill especially, let the train take its time. Each animal is likely to have his own ideas about when and where to rest. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... know and to bear natural pain. Corporal punishment must be done away with not because it is painful but because it is profoundly immoral and hopelessly unsuitable. Repress the egoistic demands of the child when he interferes with the work or rest of others; never let him either by caresses or by nagging usurp the rights of grown people; take care that the servants do not work against what the parents are trying to insist on in this and ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... said her husband, sternly; "I don't want any of your back answers. It goes on all day long up to bedtime, and last night I laid awake for two hours listening to you nagging in your sleep." ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... kept nagging at his brain until he admitted it. Turned it over and over and looked at it from all sides. What wasn't right? The way ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... his much-tried endurance broke down under the petty gnatlike irritations of Fonseca and his myrmidons. It was on the deck of his own ship, in the harbour of San Lucar, that he knocked down and soundly kicked Ximeno de Breviesca, Fonseca's accountant, whose nagging requisitions had driven the ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... The patient was a Galician Hebrew, a shirtwaist operator. Not much was known about her make-up, but it is certain that she was a bright girl. The patient herself said after recovery that her father was nagging her constantly with complaints that she was not making enough money, although he himself did not work and she contributed much to the support of her family. She disliked him very much and claimed that all her relatives ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... Fourth Avenue, Harry was beset with one nagging question. Why had Paula Ralston never brought any of her clients to see him before? He was the dispenser of over a hundred good jobs that offered high salaries. The answer was just as persistent ...
— The Observers • G. L. Vandenburg
... was in a nagging mood. He walked up and down the room a few times, finally stopping in front of his chum, Buck Badger. They had been talking about the Saturday ball-game, and ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... touch of deliberate, selfish aloofness that startled Stanton's thoughts with the one persistent, brutally nagging question: After all, was a woman's undeniably glorious ability to save a drowning man the supreme, requisite ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... she said calmingly. "Of course you haven't. Besides, even if you had, it serves her right. Every one could see she's a nagging woman. And they seemed quite prosperous. They're hysterical— that's what's the matter with them, all of them—except the eldest, the one that never spoke. I rather ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... "up." There was something comforting about it. He'd driven a couple of the experimental jobs, one with the cockpit set on gimbals, and one where the whole ship rotated, and he hadn't cared for them at all. Felt disoriented, with something nagging at his mind all the time, as though the ships had been sabotaged. A couple of pilots had gone nuts in the "spindizzy," and remembering his own feelings as he watched the sky go by, ...
— Slingshot • Irving W. Lande
... beast—went and came daily in the same occupations with the infallible accuracy of mechanism. But, as they said in their idiom, they had eaten their white bread first. Mademoiselle Cormon, like all persons nervously agitated by a fixed idea, became hard to please, and nagging, less by nature than from the need of employing her activity. Having no husband or children to occupy her, she fell back on petty details. She talked for hours about mere nothings, on a dozen napkins marked "Z," placed in the ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... his liking,—for she regarded happiness as a thing to be made, like her preserves. But the luckless abbe made the break in a clumsy way, the natural way of his own naive character, and it was not carried out without much nagging and sharp-shooting, which the Abbe Birotteau endeavored to bear as if he did not ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... exclaimed her husband, "I've never had a pain in my life. I wish you wouldn't keep nagging at me all the time to have an operation performed, whether I need it or not. Let my appendix alone. It's always treated me with extreme loyalty and respect, so why the deuce should I turn upon the ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... what I can, Susan Jane." The gray head nestled close to the strong young shoulder. The nagging woman rested, breathing deep. The fierce storm was rolling away; darkness was giving place, outside, to the sunset glow which, during all the terror and ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... a long period of blessed darkness, of peace, of non-remembering, then his mind clawed upward toward consciousness. The fear and uncertainty were with him again—nagging, nibbling, gnawing at ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... have been born a drover by rights. 'Tis a grand nagging one as her'd have made, and sommat what no beast would ever have ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... "You were chosen to sing the part of the Princess, and I am sure no one else can sing it half so well. Try to think that, all the time you are rehearsing. Remember, Laurie believes in you, and so do we. When the great night comes you won't have to listen to that horrid Mr. Atwell's nagging, or say your lines over and over again. You will truly be the Princess, and that will make you forget everything else. If you believe in yourself, nothing can make you fail. For your own sake, don't think for a minute of giving up ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... By dint of continually nagging at the men below from his commanding position above, the second-mate hurried them up so with their work that in a very short space of time the decks were scrubbed and washed, the sun drying them almost without the use of ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... through life successfully with the bare gifts of the Almighty, generous though He may have been. If I find that I have need of cunning, or brutality,—than which nothing is farther from my nature,—or even nagging, I do not hesitate to ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... she, and was at once aware of a guilty, nagging impression that she would not have said it to him half an hour earlier for anything in ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... in his emotion like nectar, and nagging him to provoke a further supply] Stop, please. [She takes off her jewels]. Will you take these to your room and keep them safe? I don't want to run the risk of their ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... finally a curiously malevolent newspaper representing the worst type of Protestant ignorance and prejudice, which exists on its libelous and indecent and dishonest assaults on Catholicism wherever it may be found. These are not alone, for the condition of ascerbity and nagging is practically universal. It merely echoes the pulpit and a portion of the general public. We all know of the so called "church" in Boston that is the forum of "escaped nuns" and "unfrocked priests," but in many places of better repute the sermon that bitterly ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... I'll make the man sorry for himself. There's no crime I know more detestable than nagging and worrying with the intention of making other people uncomfortable. In a properly civilised society men who ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... nap, a thing that had not happened in years. He stayed on the front gallery and kept count. Those moving distant black specks typified uneasiness for the squire—not fear exactly, or panic or anything akin to it, but a nibbling, nagging kind of uneasiness. Time and again he said to himself that he would not think about them ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... point of making a personal assault on him from this simple summing up of affairs, because he had an imbedded desire to lick, or anyway try to lick, this particular person, could he be provoked into an encounter. It is as well to say here that his dream was never gratified. The nagging man is never a ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... as a piece of animated furniture, a dumb waiter, always ready when required, and decently out of sight when not wanted—not dumb, though! He cannot say I failed to talk about it: but, of course, that is nagging and bad temper, and "making yourself ridiculous for nothing, my dear." Nothing! I warned him over and over again; but he must have company. He would be stifled unless he went among men now and again—"Male ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... and clamor and with what vain pride! Now the pride of those years in Harvey came with the railroad, and here, pulling at the paper, stands big George Brotherton with his ten stone heart. He has been sputtering and nagging for a dozen pages to swing off the front platform of the first passenger car that came to town. He was a fat, overgrown youth in his late teens, but he wore the uniform of a train newsboy, and any uniform is ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... smiled at. Certainly it struck no roots outside his own heart. Even his family did not share his belief. When he married, as he did when he was nearly fifty, his wife was impatient with his Faith—indeed, fearful of it, and with persistent, nagging reasonableness urged his return to the respectable paths of Presbyterianism. To his pain, when his girl, his Philippa, grew up she shrank from the emotion of his creed; she and her mother went to the brick church under the locust-trees of Lower Ripple; and when her mother ...
— The Voice • Margaret Deland
... I mean. "With all my heart," says she. So I read although it be on a Sunday, so good are your letters; and you must know, I have copies of many, and after a little while we are as much alive and brisk, as if we had no nagging at all, and return to the duties of the day with ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... the brief sharp debates, the prosing of bores, interrupted by angry cries of "Vote! Vote!" the reiterated announcement of the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations that the conferees could not agree, the perpetual nagging of two Democrats and one Populist, the long trying intervals of debate on matters irrelevant to the great question torturing every mind, during which there was much confusion on the floor: the Senators ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... took me through the school, I noted everywhere a happy and courteous relation between pupils and teachers. They spoke pleasantly to one another. I heard no nagging or scolding. I saw no one sulking or pouting or in bad temper. And yet there was every evidence of respect and obedience on the part of the pupils. There was none of that happy-go-lucky comradeship which I have sometimes seen ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... get the old man started on me, ma, too. When a fellow travels six months out of the year in every two-by-four burg in the Middle West, nagging like this is just what he needs when he ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... not sympathetic," you say. "They are often nagging, and use the confidences of the daughter to make her uncomfortable." Well, if this be so, you, at least, can learn the lesson, and by your habits of thought fit yourself to be the wise, loving, companionable, ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... you kept nagging me about "Who is the girl?" and I said you could search me, you wouldn't have it that way. But, honestly, until this morning I didn't know her myself. Now that I can put you ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... him to our school. They were probably feeling, on their own account, that they had come to town for better things than they had been getting; and likely enough they met his demands halfway. There was usually a certain element of cheeriness in his nagging; but the cheeriness was quite ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... he cried, "that before you were two hours in Portsmouth you ascertained Frazer's address from an old friend. You caught the next train for London, went to his lodgings, encountered a nagging landlady, and found that your cousin had taken his overcoat to the pawnbroker's to raise money for his fair to Stowmarket You drove frantically to Liverpool Street, interviewed a smart platform inspector, and he ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... to an extraordinary fit of nagging anger. He got up and stood upon the hearthrug to deliver his soul the better. It was an altogether unexpected and illuminating outbreak. He was flushed with guilt. The more angry and eloquent he became, the more profoundly thoughtful grew the ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... hope now of changing the widow and her "orphan" but if he could not convert them he could show them. As sure as he knew anything he was convinced that Colonel Huff had simply fled from his wife's nagging tongue and, when he got the time, Wiley intended to hire a pack-train and set out across Death Valley to find him. Virginia came and went, but always she avoided him scrupulously. Not once since she had returned from Vegas had she met ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... grown-ups never learn that their minds don't work as ours do, and what may be poetry for some of us is cod-liver oil for them? Why must we be forever nagging them at home with "Don't do this" and "Don't do that," and forever preaching at them in school with ponderous prose platitudes cut up into lengths? How much wiser than we they are, who know that life is free and ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... Whereas Mrs. Elderfield had scrupulously obeyed every direction given by her lodger, Mrs. Jordan was evidently resolved that her husband should live, move, and have his being in the strictest accordance with her own ideal. Not in any spirit of nagging, or ill-tempered unreasonableness; it was merely that she had her favourite way of doing every conceivable thing, and felt so sure it was the best of all possible ways that she could not endure any other. The first serious disagreement ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... really reformed?' I says. 'Do you think nine months is long enough to have taught her a lesson?' I didn't want to damp him, but personally I have never known but one case of a woman being cured of nagging, and that being brought about by a fall from a third-story window, resulting in what the doctors called permanent paralysis of the vocal organs, can hardly be taken as ...
— The Observations of Henry • Jerome K. Jerome
... crossly, exasperated at the nagging necessity of arousing himself to explanations. "There's no use arguing about it. I'm going to see it through in spite of that hound McDougall and his ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... Of course, you'd deny it. You always do. But don't you suppose I've got eyes? It's been the same damn thing all the time you've been here. After every nagging letter—thank God they don't write often any more!—you've been all in; and after their Sunday visits—you can thank God they've been few, too—you're utterly knocked out. It's a shame! ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... it, but you know—yes, you must know that parsons are as jealous of each other and as nasty to each other as actors, singers, writers, or any other 'professional' persons in the world. In fact, I believe if you were to set two spiteful clergymen nagging at each other, they'd beat any two 'leading ladies' on the operatic stage, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Tantrums, Nagger, certificated by the College of Spiritual Athletics. Terms for ordinary nagging, two shillings and sixpence per hour. ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... think a man who is as harsh-minded as he is ought to be a teacher," was Gif's comment. "He can't get a cadet to do his best if he's forever nagging at him. Now, if I was a teacher, I'd do my best ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... jaws: now on his back, thick-arm'd With shells, he strikes where opening space he sees; Now on his sides; now where his tapering tail In fish-like form is finish'd, bites the steel. High spouts the wounded monster from his mouth; The waves with gore deep purpling: drench'd, the wings Droop nagging; and no longer Perseus dares To trust their dripping aid. A rock he spies Whose summit o'er the peaceful waters rose, But deep was hid when tempests mov'd the main. Supported here, his left hand firmly grasps The craggy edge; while through his sides, and through, The dying savage ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... right of punctilious examination. La Peyrade had now reached a point when he was forced to see that, in order to restore his influence, which was daily evaporating, he must strike some grand blow; and it was precisely this nagging and vexatious fancy about the proofs that the barrister decided to take as the starting-point of a scheme, both deep and adventurous, which came into ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... ever be a most reverent servant to the soul. But in fact, and particularly in hours stately with momentous things, what a sacrilegious trick it has of nagging its holy mistress with triflet light as air—small ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... his witty vein, attacked Labordette right at the other end of the table. Louise Violaine strove to make him hold his tongue, for, she said, "when he goes nagging at other people like that it always ends in mischief for me." He had discovered a witticism which consisted in addressing Labordette as "Madame," and it must have amused him greatly, for he kept on repeating it while Labordette ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... with sleep. You are almost off when a mosquito that in some inexplicable way has eluded all screens and nettings comes singing its way about your face. It is just one. It seems so small. If it were only big enough to hit, something worthy of one's strength. But the mean little nagging specimen seems to elude every effort of yours. Maybe you take calm, deliberate measures to end its existence, but meanwhile you are thoroughly aroused and lose quite a bit of the sleep ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... their capacity. Outside of their business they knew absolutely nothing; they were even ignorant of Paris. To them the great city was merely a region spreading around the Rue Saint-Denis. Their narrow natures could see no field except the shop. They were clever enough in nagging their clerks and their young women and in proving them to blame. Their happiness lay in seeing all hands busy at the counters, exhibiting the merchandise, and folding it up again. When they heard the six or eight voices of the young men and women glibly gabbling the consecrated ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... She was shorter than her sister by several inches, and had a small, wrinkled face, thin, gray hair, and a decided stoop. Some people said she had acquired the stoop in bending so constantly over her husband's bed during his last protracted illness. Others affirmed that her sister was slowly nagging the life out of her, and simply because she had been blessed with that which had been denied her—a daughter. Be this as it may, everybody who knew Mrs. Slogan knew that she never lost an opportunity to find fault with the ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... three friends were up to, it is possible that they might now have been left in peace for some time; for the crowd, seeing no chance of further sport from Coaldust, began to melt away. But a fresh character entered the scene to keep alive the nagging interest of the drama. ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... sorry! George is more upset than I've ever seen him—they've got what they wanted, and they're sailing before long, I hear, to live in Florence. Father said he couldn't stand the constant persuading—I'm afraid the word he used was "nagging." I can't understand people behaving like that. George says they may be Ambersons, but they're vulgar! I'm afraid I almost agree with him. At least, I think they were inconsiderate. But I don't ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... In a negative manner they did one surprising and fortunate thing: in leaving out the amusing notes they did not attempt to replace them, and consequently the nursery had one book free from that advice and precept, which in other verse for children resulted in persistent nagging. The illustrations were entirely redrawn, and Abel Bowen and Nathaniel Dearborn were asked to do the engraving for this ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... one and herself collapsing. Thus the trouble spreads, and may end in half of what answers to the Lower Sixth of a boys' school rocking and whooping together. Given a week of warm weather, two stately promenades per diem, a heavy mutton and rice meal in the middle of the day, a certain amount of nagging from the teachers, and a few other things, some amazing effects develop. At least this is what folk ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... will almost break the good old soul's heart for Griff to leave her; but she expects to have him in hand as if he was in the nursery. She is ever so much worse than she was with me, and he is really good-nature itself to laugh off her nagging as he does- -about what he chooses to put on, or eating, or smoking, or leaving his room untidy, as well ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... combination of perfect patience with quiet persistence—a combination which the Jesuits on a larger scale have turned into the characteristic of their order. It is especially remarkable when it breaks the bonds of silence, and takes the form of what in vulgar language is called "nagging." No form of torture which has as yet been invented, save, perhaps, the slow dropping of water on some highly sensitive part of the frame, can afford a parallel to this ingenious application of the ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... Louise's intention when she came downstairs on this morning. The nagging of Betty Gallup, the gossip of the other neighbors, the wild suspicions whispered from lip to lip did not influence her so much. It was what she had herself discovered the evening before in the captain's ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... hanged if I do!" exclaimed Abel without moving, and his tone implied that the ceaseless nagging had got at last on his nerves. He was a robust, well-built, red-brown young fellow, who smelt always of freshly ground meal, as though his body, from long usage, had grown to exhale the cleanly odour of the trade he followed. His hair was thick, dark ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... reproachfully. The American knew it was hunger, heat and nerves that were nagging these two ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... man! To be led like a cow," groaned Mrs. Kohler. "Oh, it is good that he has no wife!" She was reproaching herself for nagging Fritz when he drank himself into foolish pleasantry or mild sulks, and felt that she had never before ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... show ballyhoo; later, the manager of the side show, and, soon after, the proprietor of a second-class vaudeville house. Just when the moving picture had passed out of the stage of a curiosity and become a promising industry he was an ambitious young man of twenty-six with some money to invest, nagging financial ambitions and a good working knowledge of the popular show business. That had been nine years before. The moving picture industry had borne him up with it where it threw off dozens of men with more financial ability, more imagination, and more practical ideas...and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... successfully a charter at the going rates in a stiff market, but skippers are, in the final analysis, the Genii of the Dividends. And Cappy knew skippers. He could get more loyalty out of them with a mere pat on the back and a kindly word than could Mr. Skinner, with all his threats, nagging and driving, yet he was an employer who demanded a full measure of service, and never permitted sentiment to plead for an incompetent. And his ships were his pets; in his affections they occupied a position but one degree removed from that occupied by his ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... sneered the officer in a nagging way, that irritated me, though the remark was, doubtless, true. "Home with his wifie," he repeated in a sing-song, paying no attention to the elucidation of a subject he had raised. "Good old man, Hamilton, but since marriage, ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... rain, and she had not let him have a nickel for car fare—she who had five thousand dollars. She let him walk the streets in the cold and in the rain. "Miser," he growled behind his mustache. "Miser, nasty little old miser. You're worse than old Zerkow, always nagging about money, money, and you got five thousand dollars. You got more, an' you live in that stinking hole of a room, and you won't drink any decent beer. I ain't going to stand it much longer. She knew it was going to rain. She KNEW it. Didn't ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... an uncomfortable little thought nagging at her breast. Was he really so simple as she had decided? Had he not baited her into losing her temper—and insisting on his coming to dinner? Surely he could not know her ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... shadow of a very real man followed her down the road—a shadow in grotesquely flapping rags, with head flung back. A dozen times she caught herself listening for the tramp of his feet beside hers, and flushed hotly at the nagging consciousness that pointed out each time only the mocking echo of her own tread. Like the left-behind cottage, the road became unexpectedly lonely ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... Lucy," said Margaret. "I don't mind their nagging, but I do mind standing in your way. And they'll keep you back as long as I'm still on ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... ballocks, meaning that he will take only one of my stones[FN488] and leave me the other." So he ceased not running and the other followed after him, but being unable to catch him he returned to his guests and served them with somewhat of bread and so forth, whilst the woman kept blaming him and nagging about the matter of the geese which she said had been carried off, but which had been given by her to her lover. The husband enjoined her to silence; however she would not hold her peace[FN489] and on this wise he was balked of the meal to feed his wife's ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... ever occurred to you to put them together?" asked she. "They are impossible people; so, naturally, you have selected the very mildest and most Christian women to endure their nagging. They can't live with the saints of the earth. Experience has proved that. Put them into one room, and let them fight ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... discredited as a fountain of truth." The explanation is, of course, somewhat conjectural. Homer, who was certainly not a free-thinker, made his deities sufficiently ridiculous, and, at times, altogether odious. Mr. Lang says with truth: "When Homer touches on the less lovable humours of women—on the nagging shrew, the light o' love, the rather bitter virgin—he selects his examples from the divine society of the gods."[94] But whether the very plausible conjectures made by Verrall as to the real purpose of Euripides in his treatment of the oracle in Ion, or, to quote another instance, his explanation ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... and I knew that Madame Renard was boiling with rage, for she kept on nagging at me: 'Oh, how horrid! Don't you see that he is robbing you of your fish? Do you think that you will catch anything? Not even a frog, nothing whatever. Why, my hands are tingling, just ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... found herself to be under his protection. Like all deaf-mutes, he was very suspicious, and very readily perceived when they were laughing at him or at her. One day, at dinner, the wardrobe-keeper, Tatiana's superior, fell to nagging, as it is called, at her, and brought the poor thing to such a state that she did not know where to look, and was almost crying with vexation. Gerasim got up all of a sudden, stretched out his gigantic hand, laid it on the wardrobe-maid's head, ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... and hates and fears are within ourselves. I know a man who has a nagging wife; she has a constant wish for new things. He bought her a hat, and for two days she was happy; then she nagged, and he bought her a dress. Three days later she demanded a necklace, and he gave her a necklace. He may continue giving her everything ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... revealed the stern and heroic Communist maintaining his views despite the reproaches of father and mother and the nagging of his wife. It showed also the Anarchist brother (as might be expected from the Bolshevik hostility to Anarchism) as an unruly, lazy, ne'er-do-well, with a passionate love for Sonia, the young bourgeoise, which was likely to become dangerous if not returned. She, on ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... happy at home, I do think it's a pity for her to jump into being a woman at eighteen. More'n one I've coaxed into waiting. But when a girl's disposition is wearing thin through bickering and nagging day in and day out, the sooner she's in a home of her own ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... about her. The neighborly inquisition had fallen like a blight on the family fortunes. A vague migratory impulse was on her. She wanted to go somewhere and begin all over again. By dint of persistent nagging she persuaded her husband to move to Wyoming, then in the golden age of the cattle industry. Those were days when steers, to speak in the cow language, had "jumped to seventy-five." The wilderness grew light-headed with prosperity. Wonderful are the tales still ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... wise man in the county," he returned. "If your sanity doesn't make you happy, I can tell you it's worth a great deal less than my craziness. Look at that dandelion, now—it has filled two hours chock full of thought and colour for me when I might have been puling indoors and nagging at God Almighty about trifles. The time has been when I'd have walked right over that little flower and not seen it, and now it grows yellower each minute that I look at it, and each minute I see it ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... business, was absent from home for long periods; irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and unpaid bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive luxury. Any one but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as Flora would have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a taker, not a giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved affection unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she insisted on having ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... totally indifferent to the unpleasant side of your position as a sateen or rival wife, though it is the antipode of the bed of roses, especially under internecine feuds and perpetual snipsnaps with sundry aunts and sisters-in-law of mine of rather nagging idiosyncracies. But ignorance of language will probably blind your sensitive ears to the sneering and ill-natured tone ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... successfully turned from his purpose here. Yet now as he swung around and walked away down the alley Drew was left with a nagging doubt, a feeling that in some way or other Shannon had come off even in this encounter.... ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... is far, alas, from having twenty thousand a year. The full enjoyment of these luxuries, on Ambrose Tester's part, was dependent naturally, on the death of his father, who was still very much to the fore at the time I first knew the young man. The proof of it is the way he kept nagging at his sons, as the younger used to say, on the question of taking a wife. The nagging had been of no avail, as I have mentioned, with regard to Francis, the elder, whose affections were centred (his brother himself ...
— The Path Of Duty • Henry James
... visitors here begin to scorn you. And that will soon happen, don't rely upon your youth—all that flies by express train here, you know. You will be kicked out. And not simply kicked out; long before that she'll begin nagging at you, scolding you, abusing you, as though you had not sacrificed your health for her, had not thrown away your youth and your soul for her benefit, but as though you had ruined her, beggared her, robbed her. And don't expect anyone ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... made a privilege by the expert teacher, school procedure becomes well-nigh automatic and there is never any occasion for nagging, hectoring, or badgering. Such things are abnormal in life and no less so in the vitalized school. They are a confession on the part of the teacher that she has reached the limit of her resources. She admits that she cannot do what Tom Sawyer did so well, and so ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... Freeland and I will take Tryst and the little ones in at present.' Good-hearted people, do a lot for the laborers, in their way. All the same, she's a bit of a vixen. Picture of a woman, too, standin' there; shows blood, mind you! Once said, all over—no nagging. She took the little girl off with her. And pretty small I felt, knowing I'd got to finish that job, and the folk outside gettin' nastier all the time—not sayin' much, of course, but lookin' a lot!" The agent paused in his recital and gazed fixedly at a bluebottle crawling ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... any reversion to such tactics must be firmly reprehended, and the child should understand that continued offense means a return to the nursery. But before company it is best to say as little as possible, since too much nagging in the presence of strangers lessens a child's incentive to good behavior before them. If it refuses to behave nicely, much the best thing to do is to say nothing, but get up and quietly lead it from the table back to the nursery. It is not only bad for the child but annoying to a guest to continue ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... felt a maternal compassion for this helpless dear with her double chins and self-sacrificing past, and she wondered whether her father had not had the same attitude during the years of nagging reproach at his lack of material prosperity. She resolved to come home that night with a budget of news items concerning Steve's return, even bringing a rose from the floral offering that was to be ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... Windybank had time to reflect, and he wished himself well out of the whole business. Here and there a man sighed or fidgeted in the darkness. Basil was quick to notice the signs, and equally quick to combat them. He whispered words of hope and promise, and stimulated the nagging ones ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... emperor. When not even this sufficed, he hit upon the following third means of raising money. There was a senator, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, who had noticed that the roads during the reign of Tiberius were in bad condition and was always nagging the road commissioners about it and furthermore kept making a nuisance of himself before the senate regarding the matter. Gaius took him as a confederate and through him attacked all those, alive or dead, who had ever been road commissioners ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... and old man Brown,—the one who went to school with father out in this gosh awful land of the grasshopper,—he is the limit. He never lets a day go by without some slur about my grandfather or some other member of the family who existed long before I was born. Thinks he's witty. He is always nagging at me about cigarette smoking. I wish you could see the way he mishandles a cigar. As you know, I seldom smoke more than a half dozen cigarettes a day, but he swears to God I am everlastingly ruining my health, and it has got on my nerves so that if ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... afternoon?" persisted the old gentleman, with nagging determination, as if he were cross-questioning a criminal in a ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin |
