"Passionless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... none of which she neglected and from the total of which, as she flattered herself, the air of distinction almost mathematically resulted. This air corresponded superficially with her acquired Calabrian sonorities, from her voluminous title down, but the colourless hair, the passionless forehead, the mild cheek and long lip of the British matron, the type that had set its trap for her earlier than any other, were elements difficult to deal with and were at moments all a sharp observer saw. The battle-ground then was ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... glorious castles their own hands have built from his design, but no brains to design castles for themselves, or to comprehend divinity. As a god, he is to be great, secure, and mighty; but he is also to be passionless, affectionless, wholly impartial; for Godhead, if it is to live with Law, must have no weaknesses, no respect for persons. All such sweet littlenesses must be left to the humble stupid giants to make their toil sweet to them; and the god must, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... very delicate affection, were all that remained to call up the sorrowful thoughts of his old love, and those old times of virility, when Pa and his strength and his rough boisterousness had been the delight of perhaps a dozen regular companions. He sometimes looked at the two girls with a passionless scrutiny, as though he were trying to remember something buried in ancient neglect; and his eyes would thereafter, perhaps at the mere sense of helplessness, fill slowly with tears, until Emmy, smothering her own rough sympathy, would dab Pa's eyes with a harsh handkerchief and ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... them turn away and hide themselves from a second sight of it. They both take refuge in a land of fiction, of romance, from the realities into which they dread to splash; a world unsubstantial, diaphanous, faint-hued, almost passionless, which they make out of beauty and heroism and purity, which they alembicize and refine, but into which there never enters any vital element, anything to give it flesh and bone and pulsing life: it is a mere soap bubble. And beautiful ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... ripe, or whether your Puritan strain survives to make all passion reprehensible, or whether simply they have too many ideas to leave room for anything else. But, from whatever cause, they give to a stranger like me, the impression of being perfectly frigid, perfectly passionless. And so, as you say, of missing the great ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... it is not necessary to confess here that a despotic energy can effect such far more readily than a Government of which the strength is diffused in many conflicting parties. No doubt, if we could create a despotical governing machine, a steam autocrat,—passionless, untiring, and supreme,—we should advance further, and live more at ease than under any other form of government. Ministers might enjoy their pensions and follow their own devices; Lord John might compose histories or tragedies at his leisure, and Lord Palmerston, instead of racking ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... eternal outrage has ceased. And these gentle divinities, if too human and too beset with infirmities, are not impure, and not vexed with ugly appetites, nor instinct of quarrel: they are tranquil as are the hills and the forests; passionless as are the seas and the fountains which they tenant. But, when he ascends to the dii majorum gentium, to those twelve gods of the supreme house, who may be called in respect of rank, the Paladins of the classical Pantheon, secret horror comes over him at the thought that demons, reflecting ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... spite of every effort to suppress them." There were only two men in the country whom he could have had in mind when he wrote such words as these. In all Washington's career there is nowhere a stronger proof of his strong will, self-reliance, and passionless impartiality than that he could stand between two such furnaces as Hamilton on one side and Jefferson and Madison on the other, both glowing at the intensest white heat, while he remained usually as calm and as unmoved as if breathing ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... of the moralist, there were extenuating circumstances in Pons' case. Man only lives, in fact, by some personal satisfaction. The passionless, perfectly righteous man is not human; he is a monster, an angel wanting wings. The angel of Christian mythology has nothing but a head. On earth, the righteous person is the sufficiently tiresome Grandison, for whom the very Venus ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... With this incessant, passionless sensibility, it was not unnatural that his thirst for friendship was stronger than his need of love; that to him friendship was hardly distinguishable from love. Throughout all his letters there is a series of causeless ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... not charming here? The quiet is absolute. It is always still. We are absurdly contented here; we have no servants, you see, and we all plough and harrow and sow and reap—not many acres, because we need little. It is one kind of life, quite harmless and passionless, monsieur. I have been raking hay this morning. It is so strange that the Emperor should be troubled by the silence of these ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... like a sheet of ice, separating her heart from the society of those she saw. As yet no guest of her father had ever been of equal birth to hers; at least, her heart had never asked the question. It is probable, that her age—of careless, passionless youth—was the cause of this; perhaps the hour of love had already struck, and the heart of the inexperienced girl was fluttering in her bosom. She was hurrying to clasp her father in her embrace, when she ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... silence, so dreadful seemed that inhuman, snake-like man, so strange his aged, passionless councillors, and the place of council surrounded by a dizzy gulf, that fear took hold of them like the fear of an evil dream. Godwin wondered if Sinan could see the ring upon his breast, and what would happen to him if he did see it; while Wulf longed to shout aloud, to do anything that would break ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... thanked the judges with a slight inclination of his proud head, and sank into the arm-chair. The accused and the judges now sat on the same seats, and one would almost have suspected that the cardinal, in his magnificent costume, with his noble, lofty bearing, his peaceful, passionless face, and sitting in his arm- chair, alone and separated from all others, was himself the judge of those who, in their dark garments and troubled and oppressed spirits, and restless mien, were sitting ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... that she looked at him, and was beyond the power of his sounding. She grew vehement, full of still, passionless rage. She was like a goddess pronouncing ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... heart gave a great leap, then seemed to stop. For her sweet face was touched with that same unearthly tranquillity which was Norhala's; in her brown eyes was a shadow of that passionless spirit brooding in Norhala's own; her voice as she answered held within it more than echo of Norhala's faint, ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... been tempted to romance in any form; never but once had sentiment interfered with a passionless transfer of scientific notes to the sanctuary of the unvarnished note-book or the cloister of the juiceless monograph. Nor have I the slightest approach to that superficial and doubtful quality known as literary skill. Once, however, as I sat alone in the middle of the floor, classifying ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... sir, than you are of the same family as the flat-nosed, thick-lipped, low-browed, ink-skinned negro, or the squalid, passionless, brutalized Esquimaux. I have said that nature delights in vagaries; and all these are no more than some of her mystifications. Of this class is the elephant, who, while verging nearest to pure materialism, makes a ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... impressed me as with a sudden sense of light. I was dazzled, and I vaguely understood that my "Roses of Midnight" were sterile eccentricities, dead flowers that could not be galvanised into any semblance of life, passionless in all their passion. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... polished by study and travel, grown tall and graceful, and "ideally beautiful," a veritable "Prince Charming," he came over the sea, out of fairyland, via Rotterdam, to seek his fortune—to attempt, at least, to wake the grandeur-enchanted Princess from her passionless dream of lonely, loveless sovereignty. He came, was seen, and conquered! But not at once; ah, no; for this charming royal idyll had its changing strophes, marking deepening degrees of sentiment—admiration, interest, hope, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... of Shelton's and his wife were staying in the house, who offered to the eye the picture of a perfect domesticity. Passionless and smiling, it was impossible to imagine they could ever have a difference. Shelton, whose bedroom was next to theirs, could hear them in the mornings talking in exactly the tones they used at lunch, and laughing the same laughs. Their life seemed to accord them perfect satisfaction; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... O Spirit, passionless, but kind, Is there in all the world, I cry, Another one so base and blind, Another one so weak as I? O Power, unchangeable, but just, Impute this one good thing to me, I sink my spirit to the ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... the unhappy creatures, if they could put from them their hearts, their dreams, harden themselves with a hardness that could not be softened, be forever cold and passionless, tear out their entrails, and, since they are filth, become monsters! If they could no longer think! If they could ignore the flower, efface the star, stop up the mouth of the pit, close heaven! They would at least ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... reserved and bashful; and he made this and their other interviews provokingly short. She had hoped to have found in him an impetuous and impassioned lover—one who needed but the opportunity to pluck the ripe fruit so temptingly held out to him; but she found him, instead, an apparently cold and passionless man, taking no advantage of his intimacy with her, and treating her with a distant respect that precluded all hope in her bosom ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... that she might have strength to do a tremendously courageous thing quickly; she prayed that she might be rewarded for doing it by afterwards having physical and mental peace; she prayed that she might be permanently changed, that she might, after this last trial, be allowed to become passionless, that what remained of the fiercely animal in her might die out, that she might henceforth be as old in nature as she already was in body. "For," she said to herself, "only in that oldness lies safety for me! Unless I can be ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... passionless atmosphere, so little accustomed to such scenes, Roma sat in her wounded pride and humiliation, with her head down, and her beautiful ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... renunciation became a religion. It is Romola who represents George Eliot in this book, gives voice to her ideas, and who preaches the new gospel she would have the world learn. If Romola has her limitations as a conception of womanly character, is too "passionless and didactic," yet she does admirably represent the influence on a thoughtful woman of a contention between culture and religion, and how such a person may gradually attain to a self-poised life in loving service toward others. She is not an ideal woman. She was given a ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... of helplessness when he heard that soft mechanical voice. He remembered it now. The passionless voice knew all, understood all, and forgave nothing. That artfully manufactured voice had spoken to him, had listened, and then had judged. In his dream, he had personified the robot-confessor into the figure of a ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... table, and, swinging one-half of it, he made a formidable onslaught. Two of the waiters were knocked senseless and the leader's nose and teeth crushed in by the rude cudgel. The morose moon started up, a tragic hieroglyph in the passionless sky. Quell, seeing its hated disk, howled, his face aflame with exaltation. Then he leaped like a hoarsely panting animal upon the poet; a moment and they were in the grass clawing each other. And the moon foamed down ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... was told in the even, passionless voice of the native-born, mixed with quaint reflections, borrowed unconsciously from native foster-mothers, and turns of speech that showed they had been that instant translated from the vernacular. Kim watched, listened, ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... also argues that the jury can eliminate "the personal equation" better than the judge. But is this so? Does education count for nothing in producing that calm, firm, passionless state of mind which is essential in those who determine causes between party ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... lives apart, a dreary and a passionless existence, will find that in the past, more than in the future, his thoughts have found their resting-place; memory usurps the place of hope, and he travels through life like one walking onward; his eyes still turning ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... ray of color had gone out of her face—it was white and passionless as stone; but she kissed the children all around, gave a little present to Isabella, who had been her only bridesmaid, shook hands and said a word or two of thanks to honest James Ferguson, her "father" for ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... this stupor increased; her mind appeared to have subsided into a stagnant and almost death-like calm. For the greater part of the time, her eyes were closed; her face almost as fixed and passionless as that of a corpse. She no longer took any notice of surrounding objects. There was an awfulness in this tranquillity, that filled her friends with apprehensions. The physician ordered that she should be kept perfectly quiet; or that, if she evinced any ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... don't you see—don't you see? This Being who is so keenly sympathetic, so tenderly alive to a spene of sorrow, that He weeps and groans, though knowing that joy is coming in a moment, is not the calm, passionless, inflexible God you chilled our hearts with this morning. Why, this is the very extravagance of tender-heartedness. This is a gentleness that I can scarcely understand. What mother, even, would first weep with her children over a sorrow that she was about to remove with ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... been the training of his earlier career to suppress himself, and be simply a perfect official. His policy aided the vast progress of the nation, but won no credit by the process. Men saw with wonder the westward march of an expanding people, but forgot to notice the sedate, passionless, orderly administration that held the door open and kept the peace for all. In studying the time of Adams, we think of the nation; in observing that of Jackson, we think of Jackson himself. In him we see the first popular favorite of a nation now well out of leading-strings, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... branch and twig of the great trees upon it gleamed in the moonlight as though made of glass. In the distance the river between its low hills seemed a shining, winding path of silver, and over it the moon hung white and clear and passionless. The mystery of silence, the majesty of things eternal, brooded softly; and with a sudden movement of her hands Claudia held ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... Middle Ages passionate, O passionless voice! What distant bells Lodged in the hills, what palace state Illyrian! For it speaks, it tells, Without desire, without dismay, Some morrow ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... wonderfully; but the greater his execution the more marked appeared to me the difference between the highest cultivated talent and the supremacy of Genius. He played difficult music, he shook and warbled and imitated, some of his tones were very exquisite, but it was all lifeless, the passionless semblance of beauty. I was as if walking in a Gorgon's ice-palace, with magnificent, clear crystals, and noble, transparent pillars, and all the artifice of beauty and comfort, but evermore a deep chill from the lavish elegance. When he had done, I knew ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... a corpse dimmers up through deep water, In his eye lit the passionless passion of slaughter, And men who had fought with O'Neil for the life Had gazed on his face with less ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... white, cold, almost passionless in the grim hardness that had settled in it. He unfolded a long typewritten letter, and handed it ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... she went down the stairs. From the drawing room came the voices of Grace and Mrs. Denslow, chatting amiably. The second man was carrying in tea, the old silver service gleaming. Over all the lower floor was an air of peace and comfort, the passionless atmosphere of daily life running ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to start on their daily flight to the mainland from the big tree close to the twin palms half-way up the hill, and as they flew hastily and in close company they scolded each other in unmannerly terms. The language must have been vexing, for as they sped along far above the passionless sea one jostled the other. It was just the sort of action to provoke hungry, peevish birds to vindictiveness. That which had been jostled turned on the offender with angry shrieking, and instantly a clamorous fight was in progress. Claws became interlocked, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... song, words of Ronsard to a pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as the shades embarked for the passionless land. Yet a little while, sang the poet, and there shall be no more love; only to sit and remember loves that might have been. There is a falling flourish in the air that remains in the memory and comes back in incongruous places, on the seat of hansoms or in the warm bed at night, with something ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Kiryakov himself comes quietly and stolidly into the room. He sits down in the chair and strokes his whiskers. Silence reigns. Marya Petrovna looks timidly at his handsome, passionless, wooden face and waits for him to begin to talk, but he remains absolutely silent and absorbed in thought. After waiting in vain, the midwife makes up her mind to begin herself, and utters a ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... help of your police, Highness," answered the Egyptian, in the same passionless accents. "They are skilful and brave, but they have not the Greater Knowledge. I could turn the wisest of them into a fool, and frighten the bravest out of his senses in a few minutes. Use them yourself, Highness, should it become necessary. They would be less ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... her love. Of the inevitable end of these things he never thought. He was like a schoolboy in love for the first time. His desires led him no further than the mystic joy of her presence, the sweet, passionless content of propinquity. For the time the rest lay somewhere in a world of golden promise. The sole right that he burned to claim was the right to have her continually by his side in the moments when he was freed from his work, and even with the prospect of the following night before him, ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dim aisles of the ancient church. Up the long nave comes Pelagius, Justinian's pope, with Narses by his side, to swear by holy cross and sacred gospel that he has not slain Vigilius, Pope before him: and this Narses, smooth-faced, passionless, thoughtful, is the conqueror of the Goths, and having conquered them, he would not suffer that a hair of the remnant of them should be hurt, because he had given his word. High-handed Henry the Fifth, claiming power over the Church, being refused full coronation by Pope ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... moustache was on his lip, and his hair was closely cut. The outline of his head and the expression of his face seemed those rather of one born on the banks of the Rhine than on the banks of the Seine, so calm and passionless did they appear. His dress was plain but neat. Flocon was the chief editor of "La Reforme," the name of which indicates its character. It was this man who, in February, 1833, repressed the violence of his partisans and saved the office of ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... stories in which I myself played important but not always heroic parts. By means of intellectual exercises of this kind I achieved a tranquillity like that of an old man, fearing nothing, desiring nothing, regretting nothing. I no longer reckoned the days or the hours, I content to enjoy a passionless condition of being that asked no questions and sought none of me, nor did I trouble to number my journeys in the world of infinite shadows. But in that long hour of peace I realised that in some inexplicable way I was interested in the body of a little boy, whose hands obeyed my ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... room there arose suddenly the sound of many feet shuffling, as if men were carrying a heavy weight, and presently the smell of ether began to come to them through the key-hole. And they heard groans, and a dull, passionless voice that spoke words of blasphemy ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... Those calm, passionless menials. They remove the number fifteen. They insert the number sixteen. They are like Destiny— Pitiless, Unmoved, Purposeful, Silent. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... when the coloured mantle of the days Slips from my shoulders, and I lie Forgetful, dumb, Mingled with earth in passionless embrace, Will you, forgotten as a bird, Singing unheard In space, Will you not come When every other dream is gone, Bringing to that silent place The shadow of a gesture flung By motionless hands, a floating echo hung From an unspoken word, And to the empty sky The sunset of a day which ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... the world finds no delight, there the passionless will find delight, for they look not ...
— The Dhammapada • Unknown
... if it is to be adequate to experience, be a passionless thing. On the contrary it must be passionate, since human nature is passionate too; and it must be a great deal more passionate. It must not moderate grief, but deepen it; not banish joy, but exalt it. It must weep—and bitterer tears than any that the world can shed—with ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... they are passionless, but quite The contrary; but then 't is in the head; Yet as the consequences are as bright As if they acted with the heart instead, What after all can signify the site Of ladies' lucubrations? So they lead In safety to the place for which ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Elvine made a half impatient movement. Instantly the blue eyes turned in her direction, and their expression startled her. They were full of a stony, passionless regard. Not for her, but inspired by the thought behind them. She shivered under their gaze and their impression upon her ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... Laura, Catullus's Lesbia, and eight other far-famed objects of poetic adoration, Harvey suddenly denounces her in burlesque rhyme as 'a serpent in brood,' 'a poisonous toad,' 'a heart of marble,' and 'a stony mind as passionless as a ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... snow and frozen hurricanes—these, alas! know well that the disease of Ivan was no pretence, but a reality, as grim, as terrible, as sullen, as the temperament of their peasant-brethren. And not one of them but had felt, to some degree, the same, deep, passionless, revulsive anger that was working in him, and turning him from the old, secret habits of spiritual meditation and high thought, into passions of blasphemy and atheism which burned ever deeper into ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... answered Jasper, in his even, passionless tone. "The fraud has been worked by Frank. He had access to the books. He was the only person who saw Rex Holland; he was the only official at the bank who could possibly falsify the entries and at the same time ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... lingering Indian Summer, Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing, Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects, ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... solemn questions, and refusing to depart until their riddles were in some sort solved. That Carlyle was haunted by these questions, and by the pitiless Sphinx herself who guards the portals of life and death,—that he had to meet her face to face, staring at him with her stony, passionless eyes,—that he had to grapple and struggle with her for victory,—there are proofs abundant in his writings. The details of the struggle, however, are not given us; it is the result only that we know. But it is evident that the progress of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... here. He has taken every trouble and made every sacrifice to save enough for a visit to me in Switzerland. Considering his cool, quiet, and passionless nature, the faithful attachment and friendship of this young man are of great value to me. As a very young musician he attracted my attention in the Dresden orchestra by his uncommon musical certainty and circumspection. Being struck by ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... difference, that is worthy of remark; the clearly marked degrees of gratitude and the proportional duration of his visits. Anything further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tried to act philosophically, but it would not do. In the upper room he gave the ladies a brief account of his adventure. He spoke in a cold, passionless manner, without looking once at Elsie. Of course, he did not reveal the motives that had influenced him. When he had finished he rose ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... special students and auditors, chiefly women, were gathered here. The first lectures, treating of the archaic beginnings of music, might have easily fallen into a business-like recital of dates, but Professor MacDowell never sank into the passionless routine of lecture giving. His were not the pedantic discourses students link most often to university chairs. They were beautifully illuminating talks, delivered with so much freedom and such a rush of enthusiasm ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... have shown nothing but contempt for their brothers who attempt to sing after their passion has died away. It seems likely, beside, that instead of giving an account of his genius, the depleted poet depicts his passionless state only as a ruse to gain the sympathy of his readers, reminding them how much greater he might have been if he had not wantonly ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... 'im as brought me up," was the passionless rejoinder, slowly spoken; "but ah doan't know no one o' the name o' Christ, an', what's more, ah's sure 'e doan't work down our way,"— with which he sauntered forward with his hands in his trowser pockets, and sat in the bow; and the old man ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the burning emotion that thrilled in her veins as she submitted to the ministrations of her maid. She had not even troubled to tell her father, although the elderly peer was her only near relative. Not until he was seated at breakfast did she inform him in level, passionless tones of what had happened. Even then she said nothing of her suspicions of Ralph Fairfield. But for her pale face she might have been speaking of something in which she was but ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... countenance, far from it, yet most remarkable; the features were fixed and still as a statue, rigid, with a calm so passionless, that one might have thought the very soul had fled from that form, the more so as the whole of the marble face was overspread with the most extraordinary paleness. There was not a tinge of color in the cheek, scarce even on the lips, and the dead ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... had heard about the grave being opened, and found me in the hut. He tried to induce me to give back to the grave the one whom I had rescued. The horror of that request was so tremendous that it force me into passionless calm. When I refused he threatened. At his menace I rejoined in such language that ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... which sometimes tremble on the rim Of clouded skies when day is closing dim, Flashing athwart the purple spears of rain The hope of sunshine on the hills again I need no prophet's word, nor shapes that pass Like clouding shadows o'er a magic glass; For now, as ever, passionless and cold, Doth the dread angel of the future hold Evil and good before us, with no voice Or warning look to guide us in our choice; With spectral hands outreaching through the gloom The shadowy contrasts of the coming doom. Transferred from ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... association with Maggie she felt this truth, though she did not define the feeling to herself. She only realized the comfort of withdrawing from the fretful presence of her aunt to the contemplative, passionless serenity of the Word of God. But even this was an offence. "What are you doing at a', Maggie?" was the certain inquiry if she went to the quiet of her ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... perhaps, more real happiness concealed under her calm exterior, than is often to be found under the wilder mirth of merrier beings. Ever ready to yield her wishes to those of her friends or companions, many persons imagined that she had little will, and no fixed wishes, or deliberate aspirations—passionless and pure as the lily of the vale, many supposed that she was cold and heartless. Oh! ignorant! not to remember that the hearts of the fiercest volcanos boil still beneath a head of snow; and that it is ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... under these circumstances, in the sunlight and the fresh breeze, was very different from sitting with her yonder in the little room, with the lamp burning on the table, and the quietness of night around. The calm pleasure of passionless intercourse was realised and sufficing. Ida, too, seemed content to enjoy the moment; there was not that wistfulness in her eyes which had been so new to him and so strong in its influence. It was easy to find indifferent subjects of conversation, ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... hear him approaching as usual, the passionless monotone of his voice growing ever nearer and more distinct, as he flapped methodically first one rein, then the other, over the unhurried action of his horse, sagely admonishing him to "G'long! ye old fool! Git ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... covering to the mark. When it is so, its weight, as in the sonnet to Pitt, is too frequently only another word for an ephemeral violence of political feeling which, whether displayed on one side or the other, cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in the minds of comparatively passionless posterity. Extravagances, too, abound, as when in Kosciusko Freedom is made to look as if, in a fit of "wilfulness and sick despair," she had drained a mystic urn containing all the tears that had ever found "fit channel on a Patriot's furrowed cheek." The ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... said—"I would not be a traitor to you in so much as a thought! Had I loved anyone else I would never have married you,—no!— though you had been ten times a prince and king! No! You do not understand. I come to you heartwhole and passionless, without a single love-word chronicled in my girlhood's history, or a single incident you may not know. I have never loved any man, because from my very childhood I have hated and feared all men! I loathe their presence— their looks—their voices—their manners,—if ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... life are not discovered by us. At moments unforeseen, some gracious influence descends upon the soul, touching it to an emotion which, we know not how, the mind transmutes into thought. This can happen only in a calm of the senses, a surrender of the whole being to passionless contemplation. I understand, now, the intellectual ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... him down the stairs, across the lawn, and out on the lonely beach, where the quiet moon and the passionless stars dropped down their crystal rain. The sweet south wind blew up cool from the sea, and afar off the tinkle of a sheep-bell stirred the silence of the night. The lamp in the distant lighthouse gleamed like a spark of fire, and at their feet broke the tireless billows, ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... story, 'Elsie Venner,' by Oliver Wendell Holmes, in which he gives the most vivid description of the rattlesnake I have ever seen. One of his characters has two of them in a cage. 'The expression of the creatures,' he writes, 'was watchful, still, grave, passionless, fate-like, suggesting a cold malignity which seemed to be waiting for its opportunity. Their awful, deep-cut mouths were sternly closed over long, hollow fangs, which rested their roots against the swollen poison-gland where the venom had been hoarded ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... good a city? Against whom do ye will to fight? Against your brethren? What victory will ye gain?—none other than weeping!" The words fell on deaf ears, and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, and exile forced Dino to look to the stranger. There is something strangely touching in the dry, passionless way in which he tracks Henry of Luxemburg from city to city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here and there in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the Emperor finds. The weary waiting came ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... friend, my heart grew pensive when I saw The flower, for thee so sweetly set apart, By one whose passionless though tender heart Is worthy to bestow, as angels are, By an unheeding hand conveyed away, To close, in unsoothed night, the ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... He seemed to wait. There was no word of answer, none of comment from the man sitting near him. But, for one, at least, who heard the passionless, monotonous recital of a murder of the long ago, there followed a silence as relentless as fate, a silence shrouded in the mystery of the darkness and striking despair into two hearts—a silence more fearful than ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... directly or indirectly, the instincts are the prime movers of all human activity; by the conative or impulsive force of some instinct (or of some habit derived from an instinct) every train of thought, however cold and passionless it may seem, is borne along towards its end, and every bodily activity is initiated and sustained. The instinctive impulses determine the ends of all activities and supply the driving power by which all mental activities are sustained; and all the complex ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... arose and paced the floor, looking straight before him. Stanley watched him furtively, trying vainly to read behind the mask of that passionless face. ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... son of Madame de Montespan, one of the most adroit courtiers of the old as well as of the new court, "honorless and passionless" (sans honneur et sans humeur), according to the Regent's own saying, took a severer view than Dubois of the arrangement to which he had contributed. "The councils are dissolved," he wrote in his memoirs; "the nobility will never recover from it—to my great regret, I must confess. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... statues in niches made to receive them,—the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, in their cold, severe beauty, all passionless and pure, in spite of the glowing mythology that called them into existence. There were paintings, too, that became a part of my being, I took them in with such intense, gazing eyes. Indeed, the house was lined with them. I could not walk through a room without stopping ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... night for lovers, it seemed; for sweet meetings and sweeter partings; a night that mocked with its great passionless calm at the wild anguish of this woman's impatience. Yet a night upon which sound travelled far. She bent her ear—was there nothing to hear yet, nothing but the lap of the restless waters? Were those ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... staringly bright; and through their curtainless panes the loungers below could see the forms of those who were even then deciding the fate of Tennessee. And above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and passionless, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... the removal of the present pressure might cause a degeneracy of the human race, and indeed that the whole body might become purely rudimentary, the man himself being nothing but soul and mechanism, an intelligent but passionless ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... MILDRED—[In a passionless tone.] I detest you, Aunt. [Looking at her critically.] Do you know what you remind me of? Of a cold pork pudding against a background of linoleum tablecloth in the kitchen of a—but the possibilities are wearisome. ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... reading Milton's "Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity," and only laid the book aside as the little feet gathered outside her door, and clear, passionless voices blended in a ...
— Daybreak - A Story for Girls • Florence A. Sitwell
... wind," written when she had already been removed from his side. She died in 1812, and was closely followed by her brother Thomas. Wordsworth's grief for these children was profound, violent, and lasting, to an extent which those who imagine him as not only calm but passionless might have some difficulty in believing. "Referring once," says his friend Mr. Aubrey de Vere, "to two young children of his who had died about forty years previously, he described the details of their illnesses with an exactness and an impetuosity ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... considering them as fools, laughed their folly to scorn. Juvenal looked down upon the corruption of the age from the eminence of his virtue, and punished it like an avenging deity. Persius, pure in heart and passionless by education, while he lashes wickedness in the abstract, almost ignores its existence, and shrinks from probing to the bottom the vileness of the human heart. His works comprise six satires, all of which breathe the natural amiability and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... and he began to speak, but she stopped him, and went on in a passionless sort of voice. "Some one is coming," she said, "and we must say good-bye; and since you wish it, it is Good-bye.' But I'm not a child, to change my fancies in a day, so I won't promise to forget. And I think you have treated me very badly, so neither will I promise ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... arching vines, and arrived at the broad and spacious portico. Before it, on either side of the steps, reposed the image of the Egyptian sphinx, and the moonlight gave an additional and yet more solemn calm to those large, and harmonious, and passionless features, in which the sculptors of that type of wisdom united so much of loveliness with awe; half way up the extremities of the steps darkened the green and massive foliage of the aloe, and the shadow of the eastern palm cast its long and unwaving ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... detail, placing it in its proper relations, and usually giving it a significance which, as long as it was kept isolated, failed to appear. This is done without a trace of ill-temper. He moves over the subject with the passionless strength of a glacier; and the grinding of the rocks is not always without a counterpart in the logical pulverisation of the objector. But though in handling this mighty theme all passion has been stilled, there ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... to us apparently with the intention of taking the horse by the bridle, but at this nearer sight of it the brute snorted and reared up, so that it almost fell backwards upon me. As it found its feet again the figure struck it on the head in the same passionless, inhuman way that it had struck Leo, whereon the horse trembled and burst into a sweat as though with fear, making no further attempt to escape or to disobey. Then it took one side of the bridle in its swathed hand and, Leo clinging to the other, ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... rules. But there are unalterable facts. And the supremely important one here is that sexual intimacy is only a perfect experience when it is a mutual experience. I think the delusion is nearly dead that woman is a passionless creature, who will never actively desire her husband but who ought to be willing to receive him whenever he desires. Happy marriages can only be built upon the grave of that misconception. It was held to be a view honoring to women. As a matter ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... and shutters, out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at the side of the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... lighted up the crimson curtains, but no voice of music came forth. The window was as dumb as the pale, faintly befogged moon overhead, itself seeming but a skylight through which shone the sickly light of the passionless world of the dead. Not a form was in the street. The eyes of the houses gleamed here and there upon the snow. He leaned his elbow on the window-sill behind which stood that sealed fountain of lovely sound, looked up at the moon, careless of her or of ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... awhirl; lips parted, she stared at Celia in stunned silence, making as yet no effort to reconcile the memory of the man she knew with this cold, merciless, passionless portrait. ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... built Moro calmly returned the stare of the four white men, his face passionless, his inert hands and thick bare feet curiously expressive of a primitiveness beyond conception. Evidently he had decided upon a course of action from which nothing would sway him, and he waited until the ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... convention the two parties, as now formed, first came into conflict. At once important differences became apparent. Although nearly equal in numbers, in spirit the two parties were signally unequal. While the secessionists were bold, vigilant, and uncompromising, the cooperationists were timid and passionless, though full of a passive confidence that the Union would in some way be preserved. A knowledge of this difference explains many things, in themselves apparently inexplicable. It shows how it was possible that a State so confessedly loyal that it would have rejected ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... he first had stood up, expressed the utmost amazement, and this gradually, under the lion glance, became more and more of dismay, quailing, collapsing visibly under the passionless gravity of that look. Even the tall form seemed to shrink, the eyes dilated, the brows drew closer together, and the chest seemed to pant, as the relic was held forth. There was a dead silence throughout the court as the King ceased to speak; only he ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that you stay here at Wrayth until you care to make fresh arrangements for yourself," he began, averting his eyes, and speaking in a cold, passionless voice. "But if I can help it, after I leave here to-day I will never see you again. There need be no public scandal; it is unnecessary that people should be told anything; they can think what they like. I will explain to ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... opposed uncompromisingly to this war. Several days before the speech of the Senator from Vermont exploded the inflamed nervous system of the country, he had made an address which had been copied in every State in the Union and been hopefully commented on abroad. In this speech, which was a passionless, impersonal, and judicial argument against interference in the domestic affairs of a friendly nation seeking to put down an insurgent population whose record for butchery and crime equalled her own, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... successful—he made money at it. No man was ever more naturally endowed to succeed on the turf than was Banker Philip Crane. Cold, passionless, more given to deep concentrated thought than expression, holding silence as a golden gift—even as a gift of rare rubies—nothing drew from him an unguarded word, no sudden turmoil quivered his nerve. It was characteristic of the man that he had waited nearly twenty years to resume racing, which ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... became more human, and less an angel, of course, but that only made her more real, and allowed them to become acquainted with her, to talk with her, and to love her more. There was no thought of wrong, for the devotion of these men was a great, passionless love unhinting of sin. Cummins and his wife accepted it, and added to it when they could, and were the happiest pair ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... the theory of law, the life and opinions of Don Francisco. In the moments when the sun shone the heat made the sticky cistus bushes with the glistening white flowers all about me reek with pungence. Then a cool whisp of wind would bring a chill of snow-slopes from the mountains and a passionless indefinite fragrance of distances. At intervals a church bell would toll in a peevish importunate manner from the boxlike convent on the hill opposite. I was reading an account of the philosophical concept ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... both win, gentlemen," he said, tone passionless. "But I am willing to give you one more chance, from a ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... this veil of peace, Love now pours her omnipresence, And various nature Feels through every feature The joy intense, Yet so passionless, Passionless and pure; The human mind ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... place on the small sofa by the slight, small table which she used! Her hair was grey, and her eyes sunken, and her lips thin and bloodless; but yet never shall I see her equal for pure feminine beauty, for form and outline, for passionless grace, and sweet, gentle, womanly softness. All her sad tale was written upon her brow; and its sadness and all its poetry. One could read there the fearful, all but fatal danger to which her childhood has been exposed, and the daily thanks with which she praised her God for having ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... two inches to his stature that he might come up to his wife's chin. For ten years he was always seen in the same little bottle-green coat with large white-metal buttons, and a black stock that accentuated his cold stingy face, lighted up by gray-blue eyes as keen and passionless as a cat's. Being very gentle, as men are who act on a fixed plan of conduct, he seemed to make his wife happy by never contradicting her; he allowed her to do the talking, and was satisfied to move with the ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... but her policy as a whole was her own. It was a policy, not of genius, but of good sense. Her aims were simple and obvious: to preserve her throne, to keep England out of war, to restore civil and religious order. Something of womanly caution and timidity perhaps backed the passionless indifference with which she set aside the larger schemes of ambition which were ever opening before her eyes. In later days she was resolute in her refusal of the Low Countries. She rejected with a laugh the offers of the Protestants to make her "head of the religion" and "mistress ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... neighborhood, going to see her daily, and gave himself up to the education of his son. The boy was apt to learn; but to unlearn was here the arduous task,—and for that task it would have needed either the passionless experience, the exquisite forbearance, of a practised teacher, or the love and confidence and yielding heart of a believing pupil. Roland felt that he was not the man to be the teacher, and that his son's ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
