Quotes & Sayings About Sneering

Who the fuck are you? Davy, were you on a fucking date?" Kurt wasn't sure how to express the anger coursing through him without an assault charge, and even though the asshole was no longer kissing or touching Davy, he was getting more irate.

"What the fuck Kurt?"

Ripping his mouth away, Davy panted. "What the fuck are you doing?"

"Kissing you." Or perhaps devouring.

"What makes it okay for you to kiss me and not Andrew?" The words weren't a simple question, but a sneering mockery. Kurt's anger returned full force and his hands moved to Davy's hair, yanking his mouth back within easy reach. "You're mine," he snarled before shoving his tongue back in Davy's mouth. — K.C. Burn

The fact is that much of advertising's power comes from this belief that advertising does not affect us. The most effective kind of propaganda is that which is not recognized as propaganda. Because we think advertising is silly and trivial, we are less on guard, less critical, than we might otherwise be. It's all in fun, it's ridiculous. While we're laughing, sometimes sneering, the commercial does its work. — Jean Kilbourne

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods. — Joe Abercrombie

shake him up. Get him out of his comfort zone so he could stop sneering at everybody else who was out of theirs. Get him thinking about something besides his own neuroses for a change. — Lev Grossman

No friend had I made there, but I wasn't with this group to make friends, and besides, he sneered too much. I've found that people who sneer are almost always sneering at me. — Megan Whalen Turner

Inconsistent professing Christians injure the Gospel more than the sneering critic or the heretic. — Charles Spurgeon

I have never sneered in my life. Sneering doesn't become either the human face or the human soul. I am expressing my righteous contempt for Commercialism. I don't and wont trade in affection. You call me a brute because you couldn't buy a claim on me by fetching my slippers and finding my spectacles. You were a fool: I think a woman fetching a man's slippers is a disgusting sight: did I ever fetch your slippers? I think a good deal more of you for throwing them in my face. No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who cares for a slave? — George Bernard Shaw

When you have characters talking about music in any way, especially about music someone doesn't know, some people presume it's about showing social capital and sneering at those who don't have it. — Kieron Gillen

They so wanted it to be simple, believers. "It is what is!" they cried, sneering at the possibility of other eyes, other truths, overlooking their own outrageous presumption. "It says what it says," spoken with a conviction that was itself insincerity. They ridiculed questions, for fear it would make their ignorance plain. Then they dared call themselves "open. — R. Scott Bakker

In Allston, as generous as he was with his praise and encouragement, Sophia had come face-to-face with the male art establishment and its aesthetic. She had encountered it before when she was hustled out of Thomas Doughty's studio while a men's painting class was in session. More recently, at a gathering in the Reverend Channing's parlor, she had been stunned when the minister had quoted the influential British artist Henry Fuseli's sneering observation that there was "no fist" in women's painting - and then demanded Sophia's response. Flustered, Sophia had "sunk away into my shell," unable to speak, she confided in her journal. She had enough trouble summoning the confidence to paint each day, let alone defend women artists as a class. Channing's question struck to the heart of Sophia's ambivalence about taking the initiative to create original works of art. Virtually — Megan Marshall

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They're too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer's less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they're guardians of language. They're no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind. — Stephen Fry

Shane was horrid to her, always sneering at her because she was honest and simple about the things she liked. Shane hated Stella - I think it was because Stella didn't want to be a lady of quality. She was quite happy to be herself. That's what really worried Shane. Shane likes people to compete so that she can make fools of them. — John Le Carre

Sneering springs out of the wish to deny; and wretched must that state of mind be that wishes to take refuge in doubt. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can't handle their cash just like the rich can't, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way. — Angela Carter

Young gentlemen whose whiskers have not yet developed are authoritatively deciding that nothing can be decided, and dogmatically denouncing all dogmas. We meet them every day, and we notice that in proportion to their ignorance is their confidence in sneering at every holy thing. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

He glanced over at Luthar, sneering down into his bowl as though it was full of piss. No respect. He glanced over at Ferro, staring yellow knives at him through narrowed eyes. No trust. He shook his head sadly. Without trust and respect the group would fall apart in a fight like walls without mortar.
Still, Logen had won over tougher audiences, in his time. Threetrees, Tul Duru, Black Dow, Harding Grim, he'd fought each one in single combat, and beaten them all. Spared each man's life, and left him bound to follow. Each one had tried their best to kill him, and with good reasons too, but in the end Logen had earned their trust, and their respect, and their friendship even. Small gestures and a lot of time, that was how he'd done it. 'Patience is the chief of virtues,' his father used to say, and 'you won't cross the mountains in a day.' Time might be against them, but there was nothing to be gained by rushing. You have to be realistic about these things. — Joe Abercrombie

Liberals dispute that Reagan won the Cold War on the basis of their capacity to put mocking quotation marks around the word, won. That's pretty much the full argument: Restate a factual proposition with sneering quote marks. — Ann Coulter

Bryn looked from Halt to Horace and back again. He saw no pity in either face.
"I don't want to," he said in a very small voice. Horace found it hard to reconcile this cringing figure with the sneering bully who had been making his life hell for the past few months. Halt appeared to consider Bryn's statement.
"We'll note your protest," he said cheerfully. "Now continue, please. — John Flanagan

I'm not sneering at sex. It's necessary and it doesn't have to be ugly. But it always has to be managed. Making it glamorous is a billion-dollar industry and it costs every cent of it. — Raymond Chandler

Rule by the statist elite is not benign or simply a matter of who happens to be in office: it is rule by a growing army of leeches and parasites battening off the income and wealth of hard-working Americans, destroying their property, corrupting their customs and institutions, sneering at their religion. — Murray Rothbard

I scanned through another section finding yet another thing I wasn't about to let happen.
"You want to pick my clothes? What the hell is wrong with my clothes?"
His eyes took in my sleeveless top and sank lower as if he was sneering with disdain at my jeans. They were jeans for monkey butt's sake!
"I have a certain reputation Synthia. I won't have it smeared with being shadowed by a child who wears the clothes of an immature teenager."
"I'm wearing jeans, half the country wears them! — Amelia Hutchins

I hate the word 'sneering', I can't help the way my face looks. — Jeremy Paxman

I was a normal eighteen-year-old: shuttered, self-conscious, untravelled and sneering; violently educated, socially crass, emotionally blurting. — Julian Barnes

It is your enemies who keep you straight. For real use one active, sneering enemy is worth two ordinary friends. — E.W. Howe

But at the same time, in reality, what a difference there is between the world today, and what it used to be! And with the passage of more time, some two or three hundred years, say, people will look back at our own times with horror, or with sneering laughter, because all of our present day life will appear so clumsy, and burdensome, extraordinarily inept and strange. Yes, certainly, what a life it will be then, what a life! — Anton Chekhov

LARRY
(with increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey) I'm afraid to live, am I?
and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! (He laughs with a sneering, vindictive self-loathing, staring inward at himself with contempt and hatred. Then abruptly he makes Hickey again the antagonist.) You think you'll make me admit that to myself? — Eugene O'Neill

I am most deeply concerned over a trend toward conformity, a growth of anti-intellectualism, which manifests itself in a sneering attitude toward education, science, and the arts. The tendency is to stifle mental freedom, which is the very basis of a democracy's life and growth. — Anais Nin

I was once on a BBC current-affairs show and the sneering host produced a Solzhenitsyn quote designed to demonstrate that my view of American pre-eminence was all hooey, and rounded it out with a snide "I take it you've heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?" "Oh, sure," I said. "We have the same piano tuner." Which we did. — Mark Steyn

Get me in here. Get me in here now!" I order. I have to get out of the swamp before it happens again.
But it does.
I feel it before I see it. Dozens of thick, razor-sharp needles pierce my right leg, sinking into my skin. It hurts like nothing I've felt before, and a strangled scream of pain escapes me.
Babette whips her head around, the motor forgotten. "Rylan! What is it!"
"Get me out! GET ME OUT!" I scream. Fearfully, I look over my shoulder, but seconds later I wish I hadn't as the attacker comes to the surface. It has a scaly body, sharp claws, feral eyes, and a long, ugly, sneering snout that's clamped around my leg.
Melanie identifies it with a shriek. "GATOR! — Colleen Boyd

He pampered himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneering at himself through his work, and it may well have been from such a pleasure that his sad little dream world sprang. — Yasunari Kawabata

I haven't got time to be neurotic," he had heard Helen say once; and the words had made him go weak with anger. He had thought it was the most stupid and reactionary remark he ever heard in his life; but was it any more stupid than the sneering thrust he had made in reply: "Time! You haven't got the imagination! — Charles Jackson

A teenage boy with a Mohawk sat across from me, sneering. I'd seen that look before. Why was it a problem to knit in public?
"My grandma knits."
I ignored him.
"So what are you making, Grandma?" Mohawk's voice was ugly.
I arched my eyebrow. "A cashmere cock ring. Your grandma ever knit one of those?"
The kid's eyes grew wide, and he suddenly became very interested in a four-year-old issue of Teen Vogue. — Leslie Langtry

Right now I have the suspicion that the ace of diamonds is trapped forever, face down, beneath the king of diamonds, which is sneering at me like Juror Number Five, and my whole life feels like a similar misshuffle. — Daniel Handler

I wonder how many Christians there are who so thoroughly believe God made them that they can laugh in God's name; who understand that God invented laughter and gave it to his children. Such belief would add a keenness to the zest in their enjoyment, and slay that sneering laughter of which a man grimaces to the fiends, as well as that feeble laughter in which neither heart nor intellect has a share. It would help them also to understand the depth of this miracle. The Lord of gladness delights in the laughter of a merry heart. — George MacDonald

Gawd, he thought furiously, he hadn't expected it to be like this. Just a lousy walk down the yard to give a carrot to the gangly chestnut. Guilt and fear and treachery. They bypassed his sneering mind and erupted through his nerves instead. — Dick Francis

I know of no other place that is so fascinating yet so frustrating, so aware of the world and its own place within it but at the same time utterly insular. A country touched by nostalgia, with a past so great - so marked by brilliance and achievement - that French people today seem both enriched and burdened by it. France is like a maddening, moody lover who inspires emotional highs and lows. One minute it fills you with a rush of passion, the next you're full of fury, itching to smack the mouth of some sneering shopkeeper or smug civil servant. Yes, it's a love-hate relationship. — Sarah Turnbull

Inevitable pickup trucks complete with full gun racks,
chainsaws,
fishing poles,
and big, sneering dogs in the back,
line the streets and parking lots.
Meek murmur of autumn skies,
Ford and Chevy outfits to roll through town,
as people get ready for a long, gray, foggy winter,
big, four-wheel-drive pickups with snow blades attached,
the box loaded down,
with a high stack of cordwood topped by a huge elk carcass,
to go disheartened in the midst of wretched weather,
cold, raw, continually snowing. — Brian D'Ambrosio

He froze, becoming stone still. As the hover climbed the hill to the palace, his shoulders sank, and he returned his gaze to the window. "She's my alpha," he murmured, with a haunting sadness in his voice.
Alpha.
Cress leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees, "Like the star?"
"What star?"
She stiffened, instantly embarrassed, and scooted back from him again. "Oh. Um. In a constellation, the brightest star is called the alpha. I thought maybe you meant that she's ... like ... your brightest star." Looking away, she knotted her hands in her lap, aware that she was blushing furiously now and this beast of a man was about to realize what an over-romantic sap she was.
But instead of sneering or laughing, Wolf sighed, "Yes," he said, his gaze climbing up to the full moon that had emerged in the blue evening sky. "Exactly like that. — Marissa Meyer

A criminal trial is like a cultural in-flight test in which society projects its own history, fears, impatience, insolence, clemency, insecurities, dreams and nightmares upon facts ... What's inside is every fairy-tale monster, a brutal ogre, a bloodthirsty werewolf, an elegant vampire, a scheming devil, a bullying giant, a sneering troll, or maybe just an abusive stepfather. — Ron Franscell

The other thing you have to understand was that the message crept into our national consciousness very slowly. It did not happen all at once. We did not wake up one morning to hear it pouring out of the radio at full strength. It started with a sneering comment, the casual use of the term "cockroach," the almost humorous suggestion that Tutsis should be airmailed back to Ethiopia. Stripping the humanity from an entire group of people takes time. It is an attitude that requires cultivation, a series of small steps, daily tending. — Paul Rusesabagina

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you. — Woodrow Wilson

Oh, God, I would give anything to change the past," he gasped. "To make it so that the last thing you saw was not me walking away from you. In your memories I am forever one and twenty, and cocky, and sneering, and looking self-righteous. And I've changed, Beth," he gasped, choking on a sob he could not hide. "I want so damn much for you to see how I've changed. To see me now. There are no lies in my eyes. No motives other than to show you that I am not the callous man I was. And that I love you ... . I love you so damn much."
He was crying. The tears trickled unchecked down his cheeks, dripping onto his lips. She touched them, wiped them away, which only caused them to spill faster and harder. — Charlotte Featherstone

I can't always tell when Baz is mocking me. He's got a cruel mouth. It looks like he's sneering even when he's happy about something. Actually, I don't know if he ever is happy. It's like he's got two emotions -- pissed off and sadistically amused.
(And plotting, is that an emotion? If so, three.)
(And disgusted. Four.) — Rainbow Rowell

In the aftermath of loss, we do what we've always done, although we are changed, maybe more afraid. We do what we can, as well as we can. My pastor, Veronica, one Sunday told the story of a sparrow lying in the street with its legs straight up in the air, sweating a little under its feathery arms. A warhorse walks up to the bird and asks, "What on earth are you doing?" The sparrow replies, "I heard the sky was falling, and I wanted to help." The horse laughs a big, loud, sneering horse laugh, and says, "Do you really think you're going to hold back the sky, with those scrawny little legs?" And the sparrow says, "One does what one can." So what can I do? Not much. Mother Teresa said that none of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love. This reminder has saved me many times. — Anne Lamott

Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due. — Camille Paglia

He [Tom Avery] is acutely, palpably afraid of Friday nights, what to do with them, those gaping, sneering, and stubbornly recurring widths of time - how to accommodate them, fill them, use them, annihilate them. He'd do anything to sidestep a Friday night. Friday nights demand conviviality and expenditure. It's the time to let loose (yeah, sure). — Carol Shields

Though people are laughing at the dirt surrounding you, they are missing to see the seeds also planted, growing silently within. — Anthony Liccione

I'm learning. The mick from the lanes of Limerick letting the envy hang out. I'm dealing with first-and second-generation immigrants, like myself, but I've also got the middle classes and the upper middle classes and I'm sneering. I don't want to sneer but old habits die hard. It's the resentment. Not even anger. Just resentment. I shake my head over the things that concern them, that middle-class stuff, it's too hot, it's too cold and this is not the toothpaste I like. Here am I after three decades in America still happy to be able to turn on the electric light or reach for a towel after the shower. — Frank McCourt

Men never fail to dwell on maternity as a disqualification for the possession of many civil and political rights. Suggest the idea of women having a voice in making laws and administering the Government in the halls of legislation, in Congress, or the British Parliament, and men will declaim at once on the disabilities of maternity in a sneering contemptuous way, as if the office of motherhood was undignified and did not comport with the highest public offices in church and state. It is vain that we point them to Queen Victoria, who has carefully reared a large family, while considering and signing ... — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Harry uttered an inarticulate yell of rage: In that instant, he cared not whether he lived or died. Pushing himself to his feet again, he staggered blindly toward Snape, the man he now hated as much as he hated Voldemort himself
"Sectum - !"
Snape flicked his wand and the curse was repelled yet again; but Harry was mere feet away now and he could see Snape's face clearly at last: He was no longer sneering or jeering; the blazing flames showed a face full of rage. Mustering all his powers of concentration, Harry thought, Levi
"No, Potter!" [ ... ] Snape's pale face, illuminated by the flaming cabin, was suffused with hatred just as it had been before he had cursed Dumbledore.
"You dare use my own spells against me, Potter? It was I who invented them - I, the Half-Blood Prince! And you'd turn my inventions on me, like your filthy father, would you? I don't think so ... no! — J.K. Rowling

The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it. — Tony Tulathimutte

There is no way back. No other explanations have been offered, in two thousand years of sneering skepticism toward the Christian witness, that can satisfactorily account for how the tomb came to be empty, how the disciples came to see Jesus, and how their lives and worldviews were transformed. — N. T. Wright

Molly blinked, then looked at Thomas and said, "Wait a minute ... We're his flunkies."
"You, may be," Thomas said, sneering. "I'm his thug. I'm way higher than a flunky."
"You are high if you think I'm taking any orders from you," Molly said tartly. — Jim Butcher

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister
corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used. — Richard M. Rorty

I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book ... I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it. — Maurice Cowling

Surely, then, this was a situation that merited the high-minded if somewhat sneering riposte of John Maynard Keynes: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? — Kathryn Schulz

They who suspect a Mephistophiles, or sneering, satirical devil, under all, have not learned the secret of true humor, which sympathizes with gods themselves, in view of their grotesque, half-finished creatures. — Henry David Thoreau

Alpha. Cress leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees. "Like the star?" "What star?" She stiffened, instantly embarrassed, and scooted back from him again. "Oh. Um. In a constellation, the brightest star is called the alpha. I thought maybe you meant that she's ... like ... your brightest star." Looking away, she knotted her hands in her lap, aware that she was blushing furiously now and this beast of a man was about to realize what an over-romantic sap she was. But instead of sneering or laughing, Wolf sighed. "Yes," he said, his gaze climbing up to the full moon that had emerged over the city. "Exactly like that." With — Marissa Meyer

War is only a sort of dramatic representation, a sort of dramatic symbol of a thousand forms of duty. I fancy that it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you. — Woodrow Wilson

The Earl of Blackstone didn't seem particularly mysterious to Emily. In fact, as he stood there silently - except for that sneering laugh he'd tried to cover up - she could think of several other adjectives to add to the list next time Sarah was searching for one: rude, self-important, boorish. And, if one could judge by the slightly slack-jawed way he stared at her, perhaps even "simple. — Jenny Holiday

I shirk not. I long for work. I pant for a life full of striving. I am no coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the storm, nor even quail before the awful shadow of the Veil. But hearken, O Death! Is not this my life hard enough, - is not that dull land that stretches its sneering web about me cold enough, - is not all the world beyond these four little walls pitiless enough, but that thou must needs enter here, - thou, O Death? — W.E.B. Du Bois

Could the observers of the crucifixion "clearly perceive" the ways of God? No - even though they were looking right at a wonder of grace. They saw only darkness and pain, and the categories of human reason are sure God cannot be working in and through that. So they called Jesus to "come down now from the cross," sneering, "He saved others . . . but he can't save himself." (Matt 27:42 NIV). But they did not realize he could save others only because he did not save himself. Only — Timothy J. Keller

A woman alone always seems a little unusual; it is not true that men respect women: they respect each other through their women - wives, mistresses, "kept" women; when masculine protection no longer extends over her, woman is disarmed before a superior caste that is aggressive, sneering, or hostile. As an "erotic perversion, — Simone De Beauvoir

When his hands were dry and chapped, he recalled the softness of her skin. When the world shivered at the approaching winter, he recalled the warmth of being beside her. When he felt the sneering judgment of the eyes around him, he recalled the invincibility she'd instilled in him with her belief. — Alexandra Bracken

No need to be like that, sir," said Groat levelly. "No need to be like that. You can't destroy the mails. You just can't do it, sir. That's Tampering With The Mail, sir. That's not just a crime, sir. That's a, a - " "Sin?" said Moist. "Oh, worse'n a sin," said Groat, almost sneering. "For sins you're only in trouble with a god, but in my day, if you interfered with the mail, you'd be up against Chief Postal Inspector Rumbelow. Hah! And there's a big difference. Gods forgive. — Terry Pratchett

Iko, too, glanced back. Kinney was sneering contemptuously at Kai's hand on Iko's broken arm. — Marissa Meyer

I could not but feel that it was ironical that the old relative should have spoken disparagingly of fawns as a class, sneering at their timidity in that rather lofty and superior manner, for he himself could have walked straight into a gathering of these animals and no questions asked. — P.G. Wodehouse

A lot of stand-up comedians are actually very insecure, and they come on slightly battling the audience. They want to be the superior person in the room, sneering at the world. That can be very funny. But to me, what's more interesting is that the world is on my shoulders, and it's pushing me down. — Stephen Merchant

You idiot,' Layla said. 'You sneering, despicable - '
'You're beginning to repeat yourself. — Eloisa James

Let us have evil prancing on the page and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the inherited beliefs, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Holy Roller, about people being able to make themselves better. Such a book would be sensational, and so it is. But I do not think it is a fair picture of human life. I — Anthony Burgess

Given the clientele, the restaurants on Capri might resemble those fancy Northern Italian places on the East Side of Manhattan where the captain has taken bilingual sneering lessons from the maitre d' at the French joint down the street and the waiter, whose father was born in Palermo, would deny under torture that tomato sauce has ever touched his lips. — Calvin Trillin

My own brother calling me a brickhead. Sneering faeries insulting me. Women punching me in the face. How much more am I to swallow in one bloody day? — Nora Roberts

You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it - low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion - and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

all the while sneering at us deprived Northeastern Somerville kids across the fields. — Bobby S. Richardson

I've sometimes thought that it's only by recalling that desperate devotion my kids once felt for me that I can maintain my own desperate devotion in the face of their adolescent sneering. — Ayelet Waldman

Exactly." Taking his time, he rose, pulled her to her feet. "You're really stuck on me, aren't you?"
"Stuck?" Her mouth would have fallen open if she hadn't been so busy sneering. "Please. You'll
embarrass yourself."
"Crazy about me." He slipped his arms around her, chuckling when she pushed against his chest
and arched away. "I saw you today, more than once, standing at the window looking at me."
"I don't know what you're talking about. I might have looked out the window."
"Looking at me," he continued, slowly drawing her against him. "The way I was looking at you.
Wanting me." He nuzzled gently at her neck. "The way I was wanting you. And more." His lips
brushed her cheek as she turned her head away. "There's more than the wanting between us. — Nora Roberts

Immediately on my arrival at the Project I began studying linguistics, because that seemed imperative to me. I was soon amazed to learn that, when it came to the primary, most fundamental concepts in this field - a field supposedly precise, quantified, mathematized - there was absolutely no agreement. Why, the authorities could not come together on so basic and preliminary a question as what exactly morphemes and phonemes were. But when I asked the appropriate people, in all sincerity, how in the world they could accomplish anything, given this state of affairs, my naive question was taken as a sneering insinuation. I — Stanislaw Lem

My family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering. — William Gilbert

What are others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being? — Graham Greene

Adam kept sneering, near a shout now. Yeah, well what about saving him from right now? What about the hell of thinking it's best just to fucking chop your balls off than to have your body somehow betray your stupid fucking belief system? — Emily M. Danforth

They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator's prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard's own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. — John Updike

...a leering, sneering obscene little harpy... — Virginia Woolf

The menopause is probably the least glamorous topic imaginable; and this is interesting, because it is one of the very few topics to which cling some shreds and remnants of taboo. A serious mention of menopause is usually met with uneasy silence; a sneering reference to it is usually met with relieved sniggers. Both the silence and the sniggering are pretty sure indications of taboo. — Ursula K. Le Guin

My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I've decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there ... Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with? — David Foster Wallace

He was staring off across the long broad fields, raising his eyes above the red clay soil to the horizon, looking across the fiery-red plains of Hell with its endless gauntlet of dead-brown imps
the cotton, the cotton, cotton, cotton
closing his eyes to them and seeing only the horizon and its towering ranks of derricks. Steel giants, snorting and chuckling amongst themselves; sneering wonderingly at the cotton and the bent-backed pigmies admist it. Huffing and puffing and belching up gold. — Jim Thompson

Betty's now have a patio garden, where the tourists can sit in the sun and fry to a crisp; it's in the back, that little square of cracked cement where they used to keep the garbage cans. They offer tortellini and cappuccino, boldly proclaimed in the window as if everyone in town just naturally knows what they are. Well, they do by now; they've had a try, if only to acquire sneering rights. — Margaret Atwood