"Frigidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her bringing up. For nearly fifteen years, she had been lying, stifling her fever, exerting an implacable will to appear gloomy and half asleep. It cost her nothing to keep this mask on her face, which gave her an appearance of icy frigidity. ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... other's history, for though they had both known her in their girlish days at Tonnerre, in the department of Yonne, they had not known each other. Madame Valiere (Madame Depine learnt, and it seemed to explain the frigidity of her neighbour's manner) still trailed clouds of glory from the service of a Princess a quarter of a century before. Her refusal to wink at the Princess's goings-on, her austere, if provincial, regard for the convenances, had cost her the place, and from these purpureal ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... adopted in her intercourse with Marien, her stepmother could see, was no evidence of coquetry. She showed, in her behavior to the friend of the family, a freedom from embarrassment which was new to her, and a frigidity which could not possibly have been assumed so persistently. No! what struck Madame de Nailles was the suddenness of this transformation. Jacqueline evidently took no further interest in Marien; she had apparently no longer any affection for herself—she, who had ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... Washington. It stated that the bearer was a Federal attorney sent out to investigate the Smelter City Coal Claims and any other matters bearing on the contests of the Holy Cross. The letter was couched—Wayland thought—with peculiar frigidity, as though he and not the coal claimants were the guilty party to an undecided contest. Then he glanced back at the bearer: an incredibly young and inexperienced youth—not more than twenty-two or three, barely ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... a stare that blended frigidity and surprise in just the right proportions. "I ain't said nothing about forty-eight nine-fifty. What I ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... happy. He was nearing port; he held it for an established fact that, before a fortnight, the banns would be published. Was he alone in his compartment? An adored image kept him company; he spoke to it, it replied to him. Blended with a rather uncommon frigidity of soul, Samuel Brohl had an imagination that readily took fire, and, when his imagination was kindled, he felt within him something warm, which he took for a heart, and sincerely persuaded himself that he had such an organ. ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... pensioners, in the classic style, over the altar of which hangs a picture by West. I never could look at it long enough to make out its design; for this artist (though it pains me to say it of so respectable a countryman) had a gift of frigidity, a knack of grinding ice into his paint, a power of stupefying the spectator's perceptions and quelling his sympathy, beyond any other limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience, I seize this opportunity to wreak ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... three kinds of impotency—viz., that which proceeds from frigidity; that which is caused by sorcery (ligature or point-tying), and that which proceeding from some defect of conformation is properly designated as impotentia coeundi. The different lends of impotency may be thus classed—1. Those which are proper to ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... have been so weak as to think of marrying Burleigh in self-defence, and she punished him by an indifference of manner which approached frigidity; until one of the evening journals copied a bitter attack upon him from the leading newspaper of his State, when she relented and permitted him to console himself in her presence. And although, as the weeks passed and she saw Senator North from the gallery of the Senate only, or for a few impersonal ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... absolutely necessary? Sometimes the girl left behind persisted in her writing. Several of them, if he had worked in a number of towns, usually did. A fellow could not be rude to them—he must let them down gradually; so he wrote regularly for a while, praying that the growing frigidity of his ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... Professor Felton, of Harvard, and the party made an evening's entertainment out of them." This last sentence is the one I allude to; and were it not for fear of appearing too fanciful I should say that these few words were, to the initiated mind, an unconscious expression of the lonely frigidity which characterised most attempts at social recreation in the New England world some forty years ago. There was at that time a great desire for culture, a great interest in knowledge, in art, in aesthetics, together with a very scanty supply of the materials for such ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... remembered it. The Boltons had kept it up very well, and in spite of the earthy and mouldy smell, it was conscientiously clean. There was not a speck of dust anywhere; the old yellowish-white paint was spotless; the windows shone. But there was a sort of frigidity in the perfect order and repair which repelled her, and she left her things tossed about, as if to break the ice of this propriety. In several places, within and without, she found marks of the faithful hand of Bolton in economical patches ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... purity of heart." The conventional or orthodox idea of Buddha or Deity might seem smooth and fair, like a gold chain, being polished and hammered through generations by religious goldsmiths; but it has too much fixity and frigidity ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya |
