"Crabbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... creature, that he came near dropping a plate of biscuit the first time she spoke, and almost upset the coffee the next time. I have often noticed that the anchorites of the frontier belong to two classes—those who have left humanity and civilization from sheer antagonism to men, a selfish, crabbed love of solitude, and those who have fled from their fellows from a morbid sensitiveness. The Inhabitant ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... to do it, sir, and I be here to see this pretty contradiction of the song that "youth and age cannot live together"!' answered Laurie, smiling at the pair. '"Crabbed age", papa; that makes all the difference in the world,' said Bess quickly; for she loved poetry, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... no perception whatsoever of the poetry of farm-life: he considers a woodman's work crabbed prose. The idea of making poetry out of any part of it, or out of a herder's work either, is to him stark idiocy. Sheep-washing, for instance, is simply working a whole spring day in very chilly water, and sheep-shearing is a task at which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... find invaluable help in the study of this character and this development. The man shows himself in them with none the less disguise because he shows himself unwillingly. In these hard, crabbed, formal, painfully truthful letters we see the whole narrow, precise, and fanatical soul of this Puritan of art, who sacrificed himself, his family, his friends, and his country to an artistic sense of duty only to be paralleled among those religious people whom ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... nature with even stronger genius, on the other hand, struck notes of discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than any poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we hold about the insight and imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clownish, when the humour was on him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning's latent powers of melody, his method when he ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
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