Fractious

She'll mind the ill-tempered young, and she'll wring milk from her breasts if fractious infants need it.

His right hand kept trying to do this job, insisted on forgetting its reduction in spite of the pain, and he found himself returning it to his knee again and again, like a dog too stupid or fractious to heel.

And sometimes, when she rendered him this service, she felt as impersonal as a sick nurse smoothing out a fractious invalid.

Now instead of wasting their time, and heating themselves in fractious disputations about doctrinal points drawn from the Bible, these men ought to know , and if they do not it is civility to inform them, that the first thing to be understood is, whether there is sufficient authority for believing the Bible to be the word of God, or whether there is not?

"This afternoon, man, I went down to Jiggs' Buffet where he used to pour draft beer in tender befuddlement and get hell from the boss and go staggering out—no—and I went to the old barber-shop next to the Windsor—no, not there—old fella told me he thought he was—imagine!—working in a railroad gandy-dancing cookshack or sumpin for the Boston and Maine in New England! But I don't believe him, they make up fractious stories for a dime. Now listen to hear. And tonight I'm going to see him again for the first time in seven years, he just got back from Missouri."

Block tackle and a strangling pully will bring your lion to heel, no matter how fractious, even Leo ferox there, the Libyan maneater.

He invented an Old Country for himself, a home of all remembered virtues, so splendid in the distance that, on return, he often found reality a sad falling off and withdrew his muddleheaded self into fractious advocacy of the good old times.

He spoke as though to a fractious child.

Shiva, for whom the world was things, for whom history could only be explained as the continuing struggle of oneself-against-the-crowd, would certainly insist on claiming his birthright; and, aghast at the very notion of my knock-kneed antagonist replacing me in the blue room of my childhood while I, perforce, walked morosely off the two-storey hillock to enter the northern slums; refusing to accept that the prophecy of Ramram Seth had been intended for Winkie's boy, that it was to Shiva that Prime Ministers had written, and for Shiva that fishermen pointed out to sea ... placing, in short, a far higher value on my eleven-year-old sonship than on mere blood, I resolved that my destructive, violent alter ego should never again enter the increasingly fractious councils of the Midnight Children's Conference; that I would guard my secret—which had once been Mary's—with my very life.