"Hanger-on" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... peculiar to themselves, and a certain supernatural power, or that mere empty delusions receive a shape from our fears. For my part, I am led to believe in their existence, especially by what I hear happened to Curtius Rufus. While still in humble circumstances and obscure, he was a hanger-on in the suite of the Governor of Africa. While pacing the colonnade one afternoon, there appeared to him a female form of superhuman size and beauty. She informed the terrified man that she was "Africa," and ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... if you intend that, you must lay down the matter; for this rapier, it seems, is in the nature of a hanger-on, and the good gentleman would happily be ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... great belle and beauty and half the men in Virginia proposed to her, they used to say, before she married Ned Peyton. 'No, I can't accept you for a husband,' the minx would reply, 'but I think you will do very well indeed as a hanger-on.' It looks as if you'd got George for ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... Pocahontas was a gay little hanger-on of the camps,—not like this silent owl! Her mind seems older than her years, and just notice her care of him, will you? I reckon he'd have wandered away and died but for her grip on ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... eulogist, euphemist; optimist, encomiast, laudator[Lat], whitewasher. toady, toadeater[obs3]; sycophant, courtier, Sir Pertinax MacSycophant; flaneur[Fr], proneur[Fr]; puffer, touter[obs3], claqueur[Fr]; clawback[obs3], earwig, doer of dirty work; parasite, hanger-on &c. (servility) 886. yes-man, suckup, ass-kisser [vulgar], brown-noser [vulgar], teacher's pet. Phr. pessimum ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Shelley great pleasure, for he was sincerely attached to Hunt; and though he would not promise contributions to the journal, partly lest his name should bring discredit on it, and partly because he did not choose to appear before the world as a hanger-on of Byron's, he thoroughly approved of a plan which would be profitable to his friend by bringing him into close relation with the most famous poet of the age. (See the Letter to Leigh Hunt, Pisa, August 26, 1821.) That he was not without doubts as to Byron's working easily in harness ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... account King Philip of Macedon, destroyer of the liberties of Greece, sent for Aristotle, his hanger-on, as one capable of answering any question whatsoever, and said to him (when he had entered ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... Judge is a shabby outcast, a tavern hanger-on, a genial wayfarer who tarries longest where the inn is most hospitable, yet with that suavity, that distinctive politeness and that saving grace of humor peculiar to the American man. He has his own code of morals—very ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... heel; And Patience can endure no more To hear the Belgic lion roar. Give up the phrase of haughty Gaul, But proud Iberia soundly maul: Restore the ships by Philip taken, And make him crouch to save his bacon. Nassau, who got the name of Glorious, Because he never was victorious, A hanger-on has always been; For old acquaintance bring him in. To Walpole you might lend a line, But much I fear he's in decline; And if you chance to come too late, When he goes out, you share his fate, And bear the new successor's frown; Or, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift |
