crotchetiness

Put this down to personal crotchetiness, if you like; but I am not alone in my sense that something has gone wrong.

To him, the gripe genre reflects the crotchetiness of people growing older, who don't like what's coming up behind them.

Hazlitt was oblivious to the surroundings and tolerated the crotchetiness.

At a distance at least, his crotchetiness is likable.

It turned out that Mr. Messiah, despite his crotchetiness, led a secret life.

In treating all these subjects he showed ability, but, wherever the theme allowed, an incurable crotchetiness crept in.

It was unclear whether it was bad blood, crotchetiness or fear of arousing suspicion that fueled her attitude.

The drawback to this collection is that after a while Mr. Epstein begins to grow disdainful in his crotchetiness.

Peter valued his uncle's advice and love and even his occasional crotchetiness, but things would have been easier, clearer somehow, if he were training under someone unrelated to him.

These repeated resignations gave him a reputation for crotchetiness, which he did not decrease by his disposition to embarrass his old colleagues by his action on free trade questions in the session of 1841.

We met when she was only 82 and "felt sorry" for what she perceived as my crotchetiness; where I had found only stench, grease and noise at street fairs, she had felt the pulse of crowded life.

Which explains the 72-year-old Mr. Michalski's gift for constructive crotchetiness, a characteristic flipped on its head and filtered through a squeaky-clean 1940's small town for "Poland on the Passaic: Tales of a New Jersey Boyhood."

At times, he may slide toward Andy Rooneyesque or Grandpa Simpsonesque crotchetiness, but mostly, like his literary ancestor Mark Twain, his crankiness is good-humored and sharp-witted, and aimed at well-defended soft spots of hypocrisy and arrogance.

In the course of his 172 patrol flights, Pirx had run the gamut of psychic responses, having been subject to attacks of drowsiness, crotchetiness, even fits of feebleminded eccentricity. . . and once was on the verge of committing some far-from-harmless prank.