Quotes About Surly

“Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.”

— Larry McMurtry

“Embrace everything you put your hearts on ... for you will surly achieve it”

— Runa Magnus

“On the National Executive sat Charles Clarke, looking like a rather manky chimpanzee with his unkempt beard, jug ears and his air of surly aggression.”

— Tony Benn

“O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.”

— Andrew Lang

“Very slowly, she peeked around the tree trunk. Saw a slim, petite figure, flanked by two very large, very dangerous-looking soldier of fortune types picking their way through the bodies and the rubble.
"Amy?"
Oh, God. It was Amy.
"Get away from her," Jenna ordered, stepping out from behind the conifer, wielding the iron pan like a club.
Both men stopped. Glanced at her. Glanced at each other over Amy's head.
"What?" The biggest one grunted out a surly laugh. "Or you'll souffle us?"
Okay. She was definitely going after him first.”

— Cindy Gerard

“I do not deny that he was eccentric; the mania he had for keeping that cat and teasing her until she flew at his face like a demon, was certainly eccentric. I never could understand why he kept the creature, nor what pleasure he found in shutting himself up in his room with this surly, vicious beast. I remember once, glancing up from the manuscript I was studying by the light of some tallow dips, and seeing Mr. Wilde squatting motionless on his high chair, his eyes fairly blazing with excitement, while the cat, which had risen from her place before the stove, came creeping across the floor right at him. Before I could move she flattened her belly to the ground, crouched, trembled, and sprang into his face. Howling and foaming they rolled over and over on the floor, scratching and clawing, until the cat screamed and fled under the cabinet, and Mr. Wilde turned over on his back, his limbs contracting and curling up like the legs of a dying spider. He was eccentric.”

— Robert W. Chambers

“YOU FOUND ME, when i was HEARTLESS and afraid. ABSOLUTE silence and all we never say. LOVE DONT DIE, DONT GIVE IT AWAY. HOLD MY HAND, and lets watch our days fade away. This is not WHERE THE STORY ENDS. TOGETHER we stand with SOME TRUST in the palms of our hands. Dont let me go, stay with me and BE THE ONE. Be my one and only. HEAVEN FORBID i lose you now. I will surly break and isolate. WE BUILD AND WE BREAK, HAPPINESS is at stake. UNCERTAINTY always gets the better of us, But have a little faith. I'll LOOK AFTER YOU, till OUR LAST DAYS.”

— Rhyan Roads

“Now shame is the only direct attack on conceit, the defensive image of oneself. Conceit is the common denominator of the Organization man, the hipster, and the juvenile delinquent-this is why I have been lumping them together. The conceited image of the self is usually not quite conscious, but it is instantly woundable; and people protect it with a conformity to their peers (oneself is superior). But the conceited groups differ in their methods of confirming and enhancing conceit: the juvenile delinquent by surly and mischievous destructiveness of the insulting privileged outgroup; the hipster by making fools of them with token performances; the Organization Man by status and salary. To his inner idol, they sacrifice the ingenuous exhibition and self-expression that could make them great, effective, or loved in the world; but that can also be shamed if it is mistaken, out of place, or disproportionate.”

— Paul Goodman

“He bathed in icy water and scrubbed and scratched his body with a block of pumice stone, and the pain
of his scraping seemed good to him. He knew that he had to tell his guilt to his father and beg his forgiveness. And he had to humble himself to Aron, not only now but always. He could not live without that. And yet, when he was called out and stood in the room with Sheriff Quinn and his father, he was as raw and angry as a surly dog and his hatred of himself turned outward toward everyone-a vicious cur he was, unloved, unloving.”

— John Steinbeck

“Wish and learn to smooth away the surly wrinkles, to raise your lids frankly, and change the fiends to confident, innocent angels, suspecting and doubting nothing, and always seeing friends where they are not sure of foes.”

— Emily Brontë

“Been in a lot of time zones. Been on a lot of planes. Had a lot of complimentary honey-roasted peanuts whapped onto my tray table by hostile flight attendants. "Would you care for some peanuts, sir?" WHAP. Like that. The flight attendants hate us passengers, because we're surly to them because our flight is delayed. Our flight is always delayed. The Russians will never be able to get their missiles through the dense protective layer of delayed flights circling over the United States in complex, puke-inducing holding patterns.”

— Dave Barry

“Syn opened a door to their right. "Sumi? Get in here and let Hauk know that you're okay. I can't do anything with this unreasonable, surly bastard."
"He's not unreasonable. He's just fierce.”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“Ali was a lucky, lucky girl having those two big hot men at her disposal. Not that Roslyn wasn't content with her one surly man, but still ... two. Some people were enjoying their apocalypse a little too much.”

— Kylie Scott

“I had never been allowed to invite friends on my birthday, and nor was I on this one. I was sullen and surly, I ate the cake without a word ...”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”

— Marcus Aurelius

“They could hear people complaining; one surly voice said, "I can't see no gas ... "
"That's because it's colorless," said Ginny in a convincingly exasperated voice, "but if you want to walk through it, carry on, then we'll have your body as proof for the next idiot who didn't believe us ...”

— J.K. Rowling

“Oh, come off it. That surly cunt is squirming like a snake."
"Could there be some sort of Freudian symbolism in your choice of similes?"
"What?"
"Forget it ...”

— Stieg Larsson

“Malone is surly, scary and ugly," I say. "So I'm gonna pass on him, if you don't mind." "I don't know," Chantal says. She looks past me. "What do you say, Malone? Want to go out with Maggie?”

— Kristan Higgins

“You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.”

— Greg Boyle

“You haven't asked me about Arin," Roshar said as he rode alongside him.
"What?"
"The tiger. Not the surly human.”

— Marie Rutkoski

“Lord, confound this surly sister, blight her brow with blotch and blister, cramp her larynx, lung and liver, in her guts a galling give her.”

— John Millington Synge

“I was a theater geek, and I was a surly cheerleader, and that's really kind of a contradiction.”

— Natalie Zea

“Knowledge of physical laws can, in some cases, give you the confidence to confront surly people. A few years ago I was having a hot-cocoa nightcap at a dessert shop in Pasadena, California. I had ordered it with whipped cream, of course. When it arrived at the table, I saw no trace of the stuff. After I told the waiter that my cocoa was plain, he asserted I couldn't see the whipped cream because it sank to the bottom. Since whipped cream has a very low density and floats on all liquids that humans consume, I offered the waiter two possible explanations: either somebody forgot to add the whipped cream to my hot cocoa or the universal laws of physics were different in his restaurant. Unconvinced, he brought over a dollop of whipped cream to test for himself. After bobbing once or twice in my cup, the whipped cream sat up straight and afloat. What better proof do you need of the universality of physical laws?”

— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“You know, Drake, I seem to recall this impertinent young pup who once told me that problems shared are problems solved. (Jake)
And I seem to recall a surly pirate telling me to mind my own business or I'd find myself gutted. (Morgan)”

— Kinley MacGregor

“If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked.”

— Arthur Miller

“The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.”

— Ronald Reagan

“Dust is not a constant. There's not a fixed quantity that has always been the same. Conscious beings make Dust-they renew it all the time, by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on. And if you help everyone else in your worlds to do that, by helping them to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious ... Then they will renew enough to replace what is lost through one window. So there could be one left open.”

— Philip Pullman

“Surly. I eyed him, biting my tongue, wanting to tell him to back the hell up and go talk to”

— Cambria Hebert

“How did a man like you ever end up at a table of negotiation?" "I was trained by a surly Mistborn, a sarcastic Terrisman, and a group of disrespectful thieves," Elend said, sighing. "Plus, on top of that, I was a fairly insufferable person to begin with. But, kindly continue with your insult-I didn't mean to interrupt.”

— Brandon Sanderson

“A brawl was in progress near the threshold of the tavern, a writhing mixture of arms, legs, flying hats, and bottles and canes. Anytime there was a fight, the greatest likelihood was that her brother had started it.
"Merripen," she said anxiously, "you know how Leo is when he's foxed. He's probably in the middle of the fray. If you would be so kind-"
Before she had even finished, Merripen made to leave the carriage.
"Wait," Rohan said. "You'd better let me handle it."
Merripen gave him a cold glance. "You doubt my ability to fight?"
"This is a London rookery. I'm used to the kind of tricks they employ. If you-" Rohan broke off as Merripen ignored him and left the carriage with a surly grunt. "So be it," Rohan said, exiting the carriage and standing beside it to watch.”

— Lisa Kleypas

“When chill November's surly blast make fields and forest bare.”

— Robert Burns

“One hobby I did not pick up was crocheting, an obsession among prisoners throughout the system. Some of the handiwork was impressive. The inmate who ran the laundry was a surly rural white woman named Nancy whose dislike for anyone but "northerners" was hardly a secret. Her personality left a lot to be desired, but she was a remarkable crochet artist. One day in C Dorm I happened upon Nancy standing with my neighbor Allie B. and mopey Sally, all howling with laughter. "What?" I asked, innocently. "Show her, Nancy!" giggled Allie. Nancy opened her hand. Perched there in her palm was an astonishingly lifelike crochet penis. Average in size, it was erect, fashioned of pink cotton yarn, with balls and a smattering of brown cotton pubic hair, and a squirt of white yarn ejaculate at the tip.”

— Piper Kerman

“If a farmer and his family can get up at 5:30 every morning to milk cows, surly we can get up at that time to practice basketball.”

— Don Meyer

“He really just wanted to go about his business. I would put Eddie Murray in the same category as Andre Dawson. He would like to kid around with the press and (be surly), but he was a total professional. I see why he is a Hall of Famer. I am just glad I had the pleasure of playing for Eddie (Murray) for one year.”

— Gary Carter

“Books are savaged and careers destroyed by surly snots who write anonymous reviews and publishers can't be bothered to protest this institutionalized corruption.”

— Warren Murphy

“Winter is on the road to spring. Some think it a surly road. I do not. A primrose road to spring were not as engaging to my heart as a frozen icicled craggy way angered over by strong winds that never take the iron trumpets from their lips.”

— William Alfred Quayle

“I've inherited the worst of each parent. I have my father's hypochondria and lack of concentration. I have his amorality. I have everything bad that he had. Then I have my mother's surly, pill-like, complaining, whining attitude.”

— Woody Allen

“And sure enough,the youth in question was not his usual dapper self. His face was puffy, his eyes red and wild; his shirt(distressingly unbuttoned)hung over his trousers in sloppy fashion. All very out of charactar: Mandrake was normally defined by his rigid self-control. Somthing seemed to have stripped all that away. Well, the poor lad was emotionally brittle.He needed sympathetic handling. "You're a mess," I sneered "You've lost it big time. What's happened? All the guilt and self-loathing suddenly get to you? It can't just be that someone else called me, surly?”

— Jonathan Stroud

“It's a dirty little secret that most New Yorkers are pleasant, thoughtful, patient, and polite. The Chamber of Commerce must work overtime to maintain the surly, off-putting image that is widely believed to define the city. In truth, niceness is nearly epidemic in this town.”

— Judith Kelman

“He knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.”

— J.M. Coetzee

“Begin your story with a sentence that will immediately grab hold of your listener's ears like a surly nun in a Catholic school.”

— Amy Sedaris

“I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a 'surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow'. Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.”

— Edward Abbey

“Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington's elites - politicians and intellectuals - miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today's world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe.”

— Fareed Zakaria

“Vin snorted, kneeling in the low tent as she pulled her belt tight; then she crawled over to him. "I don't know how you read while riding," she said. "Oh, it's quite easy - if you aren't afraid of horses." "I'm not afraid of them," Vin said. "They just don't like me. They know I can outrun them, and that makes them surly.”

— Brandon Sanderson

“If your master is surly, from getting up early
(And tempers are short in the morning),
An inopportune joke is enough to provoke
Him to give you, at once, a month's warning.”

— W.S. Gilbert

“The Scots are poor, cries surly English pride; True is the charge, nor by themselves denied. Are they not then in strictest reason clear, Who wisely come to mend their fortunes here?”

— Charles Churchill

“A young boy shouldn't be given up for hopeless just because he's lazy, surly, and good for nothing. Don't be discouraged by those things - maybe he's just trying to be like his daddy.”

— Gracie Allen

“Choose a good disagreeable friend, if you be wise
a surly, steady, economical, rigid fellow.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.”

— William Shakespeare