"Impassivity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... motionless behind him. A strange impassivity had succeeded her last fruitless appeal, as though through excess of suffering her faculties were numbed, animation itself were suspended. She leaned against the wall, staring with wide, tragic eyes at the flame of the lamp that ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... calmly, her eyes as blue as precious stones. "The old pine-tree," she said, "I wish it were cut down, darkening the house the way it does." She spoke with a sovereign impassivity, no trace of feeling in ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... does not suffer, and who does not suffer because he does not live, is that logical and frozen ens realissimum, the primum movens, that impassive entity, which because of its impassivity is nothing but a pure idea. The category does not suffer, but neither does it live or exist as a person. And how is the world to derive its origin and life from an impassive idea? Such a world would be but the idea of ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... solved it?" the detective leaned forward suddenly, the level gaze from beneath his close-drawn brows seeming to pierce the younger man's impassivity. ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... here and there by the hats and coats of gentlemen representing the interspaces of clay. In the midst of the flowers was a gaudy dais, on which a powerfully-built black gentleman sat in a raised chair, his majestic impassivity contrasting with the overt astonishment with which a row of savagely ugly attendant chiefs grinned and gaped on ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... be noticed in this band of rescuers a young man in evening clothes and top-hat. Now, in America a young man in evening clothes and a top-hat may be a terrible object. He is not likely to do violence, but he is likely to do impassivity and indifference to the point where they become worse than violence. There are certain of the more idle phases of civilization to which America has not yet awakened—and it is a matter of no moment if she remains unaware. This matter ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... a vast impassivity in all which lay around him took possession even of Yeobright in his wild walk towards Alderworth. He had once before felt in his own person this overpowering of the fervid by the inanimate; but then it had tended to enervate a passion far sweeter ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy |
