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More "Aloofness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... given to the literature of Irishman that is passionate with Irish enthusiasm and loyalty to Ireland, yet from the exigencies of the time had to be written in English; the view not only assumed but asserted by some of the Gael that the Gall may be recognised only if he take second place; the aloofness of many of the Gall, not troubling to understand their rights and duties; the ignoring on both sides of the fine significance of the name Irishman, of a spirit of patriotism and a deep-lying basis of authority and justice that will give stability to the state ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... beginning of December to the first of January. When a new man joins an old regiment there is a reserve about the others which is rather chilling. They wait to see whether he is going to fit in, before they make any attempts to fit him in. In a way, this very aloofness makes for comfort on the part of the newcomer. At mess, he is left alone until he is absorbed naturally. It gives him a ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... place of injured friends, preventing injured foes escaping, turning doubtful battle into victory. But no; these commonplaces of to-day and of all time were swamped by the Fighting Instructions. It will be seen in the sequel what a disastrous moral influence Lestock's aloofness exercised upon a few timid captains, and not improbably upon the entire subsequent course and worst errors of ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... a bent toward sarcasm that sometimes lured him out of his usual cold aloofness. In one of these rare communicative moments he said of little Loth that he crossed the equator at least once a week and didn't mind. He referred to the fact that Loth was more frequently moved than any other pupil but always managed to retain a place near the centre. And no matter what ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... if after frequent consideration mine remained different, it would leave me at least perplexed. For you are a perfect electrometer in these things—but in point of poetic diction, I am not so well satisfied that you do not require a certain aloofness from the language of real life, which I think deadly ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... pronouncement. Moralizing has a bad name; but than good moralizing there is, when one has reached a certain age perhaps, no better reading. Some of us like it even in our novels, feel more at home with Fielding and Thackeray for it, and regretfully confess ourselves unequal to the artistic aloofness of a Flaubert. Well, Lucian's moralizings are, for those who like such things, of the right quality; they are never dull, and the touch is extremely light. We may perhaps be pardoned for alluding to half a dozen conceptions that have a specially modern air about them. The use that ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... skirmishers—all houses mixed—flying, reforming, shrieking insults. On its tortured flanks marched the Hoplites, seniors hurling jests one after another—simple and primitive jests of the Stone Age. To these the three added themselves, dispassionately, with an air of aloofness, ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... perhaps developed most highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It is a conception of God tending to pantheism, to an idea of a comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection, to a conception of aloofness and awestriking worshipfulness. The second idea, which is opposed to this idea of an absolute God, is the God of the human heart. The writer would suggest that the great outline of the theological struggles of that ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... say that the Fairhaven mail-service was abominable, and that her letter had never reached me. But the young fellow who two years ago had wandered about the Green Chalybeate with her had become, now, as unreal as she. I glimpsed the couple, with immeasurable aloofness, as phantoms flickering about the mirage of a brook, throwing ghostly bread crumbs to ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... the screen was that of the President of the United States. "Your scheme worked, senator," he said without preamble. There was an aloofness, a coolness in his voice. Which was only natural, considering the heat of the debate ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... had kept his closest friends from seeking his companionship. Those friends were few, for Deveny's attitude toward his men had always been that of the ruthless tyrant; he had treated them with an aloofness that had in it a contempt which they could not ignore. More—he was merciless, and had a furious temper which found its outlet ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Madonna, fallen at last, is not the weeping Mary of the Christians, but the mother of the Gracchi who has lost her elder son. In the Last Judgment it is a splendid God you see among a crowd of men with heads like the busts in a Roman gallery, with all the aloofness and dignity of those weary emperors. There is almost nothing here of any natural life observed for the first time, and but little of the Christian asceticism so marvellously lovely in the French work of this age; ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... and an umbrella. His journey, since his boat swung out into Massachusetts Bay, had been spent in gloomy speculations, and two young women booked for Baltimore wrongly attributed his reticence and aloofness to a grievous ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... our personality, and not make a 'mess' of friendship." He saw, with Emerson, the risk of degrading it to trivial conveniency. "Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend?" "Leave this touching and clawing." Yet I would not give an unfair notion of his aloofness, his fine sense of the sacredness of the me and the not-me. And, at the risk of not being believed, I will relate an incident, which was often repeated. Calvin had the practice of passing a portion of the night in the contemplation ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... lowering sky, A lonesome pigeon wheeling by; The soft, blue smoke that hangs and fades, The shivering crane that flaps and wades; Dead leaves that, whispering, quit their tree, The peace the river sings to me; The chill aloofness of the Fall— I love ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... aloofness about him which she could not conquer, try as she might. Just so far they were comrades—beyond, Chip walked moodily alone. The Little Doctor did not like that overmuch. She preferred to know that she fairly understood her friends and was admitted, sometimes, to their full confidence. She did ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... does and thinks by means of parody,—and since everything is parodied nowadays, he will even get the event of Bayreuth reproduced for him, through the very un-magic lanterns of our facetious art-critics. And one ought to be thankful if they stop at parody; for by means of it a spirit of aloofness and animosity finds a vent which might otherwise hit upon a less desirable mode of expression. Now, the observant sage already mentioned could not remain blind to this unusual sharpness and tension of contrasts. They who hold ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... change at Fairlands Junction. The little city, itself, is set in the lap of the hills that form the southern side of the valley, some three miles from the main line. It is as though this particular "Queen" withdrew from the great highway traveled by the vulgar herd—in the proud aloofness of her superior clay, sufficient unto herself. The soil out of which Fairlands is made is much richer, it is said, than the common dirt of her sister cities less than fifteen miles distant. A difference of only a few feet in elevation ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... spare, his figure has an appearance of rugged health, of great nervous strength held in reserve. His square-jawed, large-featured face retains an eager boyish enthusiasm in spite of its prevailing expression of thoughtful, preoccupied aloofness. His crisp dark hair is graying at the temples. EDWARD BIGELOW is a large, handsome man of thirty-nine. His face shows culture and tolerance, a sense of humor, a lazy unambitious contentment. CURTIS is reading an article ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill
... was going to say he did not know. Herrick was such a steady old chap, from him radiated such uncomplaining patience, about him was such aloofness concerning his private affairs, that to speak to him on personal matters was difficult. He handed him cigars ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... surcoat of courtesy and the plate-armour of self-confidence lay concealed a curious and interesting man. The less narrow of them detected that something more was here than a strong administrator, and that they had among them an original man of action, with something of the aloofness and mystery ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... meanwhile, her very coldness and aloofness stirred desire in the man, and she shrank as she saw a spark of passion kindling in his eyes. She recognized that there was a strain ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... his brown corduroys and his tan waistcoat, certainly suggested the partridge as he hopped nimbly about in the distant foreground, cocking his ears from time to time with all the aloofness of that wily bird. He was, strange to relate, some little distance from Bazelhurst territory, an actual if not a confident trespasser upon Shaw's domain. His horse, however, was tethered to a sapling on the safe side of the log, ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... mask of aloofness was wiped away as if he were ten years younger and twenty years less responsible than he had been only seconds earlier. "And if they did not beware our rifles, Bartolome here would talk them to death! Is that not so, amigo?" His speech was oddly formal, ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... himself mine; the aloofness of his love, his strict obedience, irritate me, just as his attitude of profound respect provoked me when he was only my Spanish master. I am tempted to cry out to him as he passes, "Fool, if you love ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... so much that she had grown to think suffering her natural element, out of which she could not breathe; she was almost in love with misery. And in so sad a world was there not something ignoble about happiness, a selfish aloofness from the life of humanity? And, illogically blent with this questioning, and strengthening her recoil, was an obstinate conviction that there could never be happiness for her, a being of ignominious birth, without roots in life, futile, shadowy, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Dore's friend, Miss Sinclair, in her relations with the man Spenser Gray. Spenser Gray, it seemed, had been behaving oddly. Ardent towards Miss Sinclair almost to an embarrassing point in the early stages of their acquaintance, he had suddenly cooled; at a recent lunch had behaved with a strange aloofness; and now, at this writing, had vanished altogether, leaving nothing behind him but an abrupt note to the effect that he had been compelled to go abroad and that, much as it was to be regretted, he and she would probably ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... where there were water holes. A valley by no means so prodigally watered as Zoraida's, but none the less an estate to put a sparkle into a man's eyes. It was large, it was sufficiently level and fertile; above aught else it was remote. It gave the impression of a great, calm aloofness from the outside world of traffic and congestion; it lay, mile after mile, sufficient unto itself, a place for a lover of the outdoors to make his home. No wonder that young West had gone wild over it. Hills and mountains shut it in, rising to the sky lines like walls actually ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... intellect. But philosophy is not one of the pursuits which illustrate our affinity with the past: it is a highly refined, highly civilised pursuit, demanding, for its success, a certain liberation from the life of instinct, and even, at times, a certain aloofness from all mundane hopes and fears. It is not in philosophy, therefore, that we can hope to see intuition at its best. On the contrary, since the true objects of philosophy, and the habit of thought demanded for their apprehension, are strange, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... independence inspired, and nationality exalted, a world supergovernment is contrary to everything we cherish and can have no sanction by our Republic. This is not selfishness, it is sanctity. It is not aloofness, it is security. It is not suspicion of others, it is patriotic adherence to the things which made us what ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... rose-blooming South was waiting for them with open arms? 'Open arms'! Apparently it was only 'climates' that were allowed any such privileges with girls like Cornelia. Yet, after all, wasn't it just exactly that very quality of serene, dignified aloofness that had attracted him first to Cornelia among the score of freer-mannered girls ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... perhaps . . . which now looked back at Marise with an expression which Marise did not understand or recognize. If it had not been impossible to think it of Eugenia, Marise would have imagined that her eyes looked troubled, excited. Was it possible that even in her safe ivory tower of aloofness from life, she had felt the jarring blow of the brutally immediate tragedy of the Eagle Rocks? Or perhaps even Cousin Hetty's disappearance . . . she had always hated ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... Island? To such sorts, self-described as human snapping-turtles and alligators, her peacock show of innumerable lights was the jewelled crown of the only civilization they knew, knowing it only with the same aloofness with which they knew the stars. She woke them with the flutter of her wheels as of winged feet and passed like a goddess using the river's points and islands for stepping-stones, her bosom wrapped in a self-communion that gave no least hint ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... big enough to be buried in. I want to have something to do with this material world." And, striking his hand vigorously on a table that stood by: "If I could only make tables," he declared, "I should feel myself more of a man." He was now thirty-four, and the long restraint and aloofness of the last thirteen years, with the gathering consciousness that he labored under unjust reproach of inaction, and the sense of loss in being denied his share in affairs, had become intolerable. It ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... which followed were not only full of anxiety about the war; they were full for him of a suspense painfully maintained. It troubled him perhaps comparatively little that he was driven into a position of greater aloofness from the support and sympathy of any party or school. He must now expect an opposition from the Democrats of the North, for they had declared themselves strongly against the Resolution which he had induced Congress to ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... survivals of feudalism among the tenantry amused me; and though I could not bring myself to pretend an interest in the absurd affectation of foxhunting, I was well received by the county people, whose insularity and aloofness I found greatly exaggerated, perhaps by outsiders not as ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... strings, and Swot giving shouts of delight at each new treasure. Presently, in especial joy over some prize, the boy turned to show it to the doctor, to discover that he was standing well back, watching, rather than sharing, in the pleasure of the two; and, as the little chap discovered the aloofness, he leaned over and whispered something to ...
— Wanted—A Match Maker • Paul Leicester Ford
... thick of this that Miss Morland made her entrance. I do not know if it be a confession of weak-mindedness, or even of snobbishness (I hope not), but the fact was that since I had discovered Miss Morland's identity I did not judge her coldness and aloofness so hardly. I am disposed to think it was merely a reasonable attitude on my part produced by the knowledge of her circumstances, and what I set down as her trials. She bowed to me, and addressed some words to mademoiselle ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... excitement of his news had for a moment thawed her, but a dignified aloofness showed again in her manner. "If you want to see father you'll find him in the ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... to Lady Dawn—to her pale aloofness. She wasn't like this—she was different from all other women. It was ridiculous that he should be so sure that she was different when his only proof was a portrait, quite certainly idealized. He began to argue ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... cottage was a quaint, old-fashioned place on the side of Battle Hill, looking down upon the maples of Sickle Street. The grounds were rather spacious, and the house stood well back from the street, establishing an aloofness that had never been noticed before. A low stone wall guarded the lawn and rose-garden, and there was an iron gate at the bottom of the slope. The front porch was partly screened by "Dutchman's Pipe" vines. With the advent of the tenant, smart Japanese sun-curtains made their appearance, and from ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... without visible change of expression. Her lips, however, were a little parted. The air of aloofness with which she moved through the world seemed suddenly more marked. He would have been a brave man, or one entirely without perceptions, who would have advanced towards ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... little maid seemed surprised at this; however, she had her instructions, and so did not hesitate. She opened the door, stood aside for them to enter, and then followed them in. It was Nora's dressing-room, a place of soft colors, of cool aloofness, and as Bat Scanlon breathed the air of it, with its delicate suggestion of scent, he had a feeling that he was venturing too far; he felt that his act was almost profanation. Through an open door at one end he caught a glimpse of a white bed; but it was only a glimpse, ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... whose hearts are more knit to the things of earth. Those who see in the dearest and most intimate of human relations, the purest and highest gift of God, will watch with a species of terror, and even repulsion, the aloofness, the solitariness of the mystic and the artist. It will seem to them a sort of chilly isolation, an inhuman, even a selfish thing; just as the mystic and the artist will see in the normal life of men a thing fettered and bound with sad and small chains. It is impossible ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it makes him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relation to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone, an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... the heads of the people standing on the edge of the pavement, so he did not press to the front among the rabble, but stood apart, with his back against a shop window. Thus, he was free to move to right or left as he chose. That was a slight thing in itself, an unconscious trick of aloofness—perhaps an inherited trait of occupying his own territory, so to speak. But it is these slight things which reveal character. They oft-times influence human lives, too; and no man ever extricated himself more promptly from the humdrum of moneyless existence ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... it were, to the scene of his passionate youth, but in altered guise. He plays no part himself now, but is an onlooker, a stander-by, chronicling, as from a cloistered aloofness, yet with kindly wisdom always, the little things that matter in the lives of those around him. Wisdom and kindliness, sympathy and humour and understanding, these are the dominant notes of the new phase. Svoermere ends happily—for it is ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... his contemporaries. Those who have once seen his fresco of the "Resurrection" in the hall of the Compagnia della Misericordia at Borgo San Sepolcro, will never forget the deep impression of solitude and aloofness from all earthly things produced by it. It is not so much the admirable grouping and masterly drawing of the four sleeping soldiers, or even the majestic type of the Christ emergent without effort from the grave, as the communication of a mood ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... not so much the good American's reverence for ancestors that inspired the longing to consort with the ghosts of an ancient line, as artistic appreciation of the mellowness, the dignity, the aristocratic aloofness of walls that have sheltered, and furniture that has embraced, generations and generations of the dead. To mere wealth, only his astute and incomparably modern brain yielded respect; his ego raised its ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... devotee of truth, first makes his appearance, his authority is acknowledged because he has renounced himself. As witness of the universal being he purges himself of whatever is peculiar to his own individuality, or even to his human nature. In the aloofness of his meditation he escapes the cloud of opinion and prejudice that obscures the vision of the common man. In short, the element of belief dependent upon the thinker himself is the dross which must be refined ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... to observe how certainly this deficiency in humor and in the delineation of ordinary human feeling is connected with a recluse, a solitary, and to some extent an unsympathizing life. If we combine a certain natural aloofness from common men with literary habits and an incessantly studious musing, we shall at once see how powerful a force is brought to bear on an instinctively austere character, and how sure it will be to develop the peculiar tendencies of it, both good and evil. It was to no purpose that Milton ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... digestion; and he continued the habit, seeing the children seldom except at breakfast and tea, when he would amuse the elders by talking Tory politics with them, and entertain the baby, Emily, with his Irish tales of violence and horror. Perhaps on account of this very aloofness, he always had a great influence over the children; he did not care for any ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... Sour Grapes." Fascinated and horrified, Denis pored over the drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious Rouveyre appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines. The expression of the face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered by a feeble envy; the attitude of the body and limbs, an attitude of studious and scholarly dignity, given away by the fidgety pose of the turned-in feet—these things were terrible. And, more terrible still, was the likeness, was the magisterial certainty with which ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... she emerged with Ali Partab, who looked sleepy, but still more ashamed of his unmilitary dishabille. Rosemary McClean glanced left and right—forgot about the awning and the custom which decrees aloofness—ignored the old woman's waving arm and Ali Partab's frown, and rode toward ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... This last simply because I was me. The house was ancient and beautiful. The room in which I sat had nothing in it but matting as fine as silk, a rare old vase with two flowers and a leaf in formal arrangement, and an atmosphere of aloofness that lulled mind and body to restful revery. After my capacity for tea and sugared dough was tested, the little serving maid fanning me, bowing every time I blinked, the paper doors near by divided noiselessly and, framed by the dim light, sat ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... work himself. In glorious moments when he was rather sure that Galton was far from unsatisfied with his progress, and Ann had looked more than usually distracting in her aloof and sober alluringness,— it was her entire aloofness which so stirred his blood,—he sometimes stopped scribbling and lost his head for a minute or so, wondering if a fellow ever COULD "get away with it" to the extent of making enough to—but he always pulled ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... let Mrs. Woolstan know that the son of a common friend of theirs had just, on his advice, been sent to the same school as Leonard; the boys would be friends, and make each other feel at home. This news Mrs. Woolstan received with some modification of her aloofness; she was very glad; after all, perhaps it had been a wise thing to send Leonard off with little warning; she would only have made herself miserable in the anticipation of parting with him. That, said Mr. ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... impression which Lord John's character leaves on the mind. From his reserved speech, shy manner, and uncommunicative patience under criticism, from the silent abruptness of his decisions, his formidable trenchancy in self-defence when openly attacked, and his aloofness from any attempts to curry favour with the Press, it may be inferred that his character was a dignified one; but he was dignified precisely in the way which makes such actions as taking a subordinate political position particularly easy. He ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... ever. For we would have taken him within our little circle gladly after Stanton's sure report; and there would have been chance after chance for him to make good with us. But no; he preferred the pose of aloofness, and his face betrayed that he was ashamed of that one night's weakness. He never alluded to his evening with Stanton; and when Minckle, who was certain the ice had been broken, put his arm around his shoulder the next day, he looked ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and with the irrepressible impulse to action driving him to take upon himself the burden of it. In any crowd of bystanders he would have been first to go to the rescue where need was, and quickest to see the need not obvious to all. The aloofness of the mere observer was not his; he was too completely one with all he saw to stand apart and let it go its way alone. Fearful and distrustful of himself he long was, but his timidity was only the natural shrinking ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... the leafless trees, on whose branches close-wreathed mistletoe hangs like rooks' nests, the statues stood like guardian angels of the scene. They had lost their air of aloofness and were at one with the white earth, just as the forest trees in their autumn dress of brown and russet appear more in unison with their parent soil than when decked in their ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... himself. The cause of his retirement from aviation was the theme of many romantic legends. They did not know precisely what it was he had done in the pre-historic period of a year before, but they treated him with reverence instead of the amused aloofness with which an office usually waits to see whether a new man will prove to be a fool or a "grouch," a clown or a good fellow. The stenographers and filing-girls and telephone-girls followed with yearning ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... in his white white skin. Black-browed and black-lashed, he had the luminous blue-gray-green eyes of the colleen. There was a curious untamable quality in his look that was the mixture of two mad strains, the aloofness of the Celt and the ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... wore always a mantle of gentle aloofness, like something forgotten among its over-grown garden paths. To Kirk, it was a place under a spell; to the others, who could see its grave, vine-covered, outer walls and its dim interior crowded with strange and wonderful things, ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... between them, however. When one stranger has a splendidly preserved blonde wife and the other a splendidly preserved brunette wife, both of whom have won social prominence by years of hard fighting and aloofness, there remains nothing for the two men but to follow the lead, especially when directly under ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... you out none," said the applicant gently. His voice was extremely gentle, and there was about him all the shrinking aloofness of the naturally timid. The deputy looked him over with quiet amusement—slender fellow with the gentlest brown eyes—and then with a quick side glance invited the crowd to get ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... these pseudo-mysteries felt the intellectual superior of the ignorant aristocracy. This feeling gave her an assurance which impressed people. The men worshipped her beauty and aloofness; but she never felt in the least moved in their company. She accepted their homage as a tribute due to women and found it impossible to respect these lackeys who jumped up and stood ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... presence of the man. There is an indefinable suggestion of nobility in his bearing, an expression of grave dignity in his countenance. The eyes are almost melancholy, the glance is averted and remote. The consciousness of his royal birthright gives an air of aloofness to the figure. ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... large leisure, except in the years when he was in the Boston Custom House, and he was not without leisure even then. He shows no inclination toward scholarship, but was a desultory reader of English, with some French; he had no intellectual interests, apparently, of a philosophical kind; the aloofness in which he stood from Longfellow and Emerson, for example, was not shyness of nature wholly, but stood for the real aloofness of his mind from their ways of life, from the things that absorbed them in their poetic and speculative activity; ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... fetich. This instinct for aloofness,—principally racial,—animates the sincere wing of the Nationalist Party today. Men like Botha and Smuts and their followers adapted themselves to assimilation but there remained the "bitter-end" element that rebelled in arms against the constituted authority in 1914 and ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... I shall be kept here until late in the afternoon. I will put you in a cab." And he led the way to the elevator. As always he was kind and considerate. But in his equable manner was there also some touch of coldness, of aloofness from this wife, who had taken this curious opportunity to ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... about her eager for details, but she separated herself, and kept on toward the dining-room door. There was an aloofness about her, an air of having experienced the heights alone. She was not quite ready to ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... was calmer. To my trembling inquiries he said something consolatory as to the blessed relief of tears. When not praying fervently in the mortuary chamber, he could be seen pacing the gallery in a severe aloofness of meditation. In the evening he took me by the arm, and, without a word, led me up a narrow and winding staircase. He pushed a small door, and we stepped out on a flat part of the ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... was the same indefinite barbaric look as characterized her father. Her face was lovely, dark and proud in expression, but there was an aloofness about it which puzzled the English girl. Donna Inez might have belonged to a race populating another planet of the solar system. She had large black, melting eyes, a straight Greek nose and perfect mouth, a well-rounded chin and magnificent ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... towards the men of action who are doing the rough work of the world. Critics are the object of his fiercest denunciation. "A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think, of superiority, but of weakness.... It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... in considering this universality of Goethe, it behoves us to make some qualifications. His human sympathies are by no means as universal as his intellectual sympathies. He has no love for the common people. He has the aloofness of the aristocrat. He has a Nietzschean contempt for the herd. He takes little interest in the religious aspirations of mankind or in the struggles of human freedom. The French Revolution remains ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... and pale— An Indian aloofness lones his brow; He has lived a thousand years Compressed in battle's pains and prayers, Marches ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... a little piqued at his unexpected attitude of aloofness. What did he mean by a "noble marriage"—to a Duke, or something ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... under your nose. There is no real peace but the peace of the whole world, and that is only to be kept by the whole world resisting and suppressing aggression wherever it arises. To anyone who watches the American Press, this realisation has been more and more manifest. From dreams of aloofness and ineffable superiority, America comes round very rapidly to a conception of an active participation in the difficult business of statecraft. She is thinking of alliances, of throwing her weight and influence upon the side of law and security. No longer a political Thoreau ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... moments, and beneath their haughty exterior there sometimes beats a Cambridge heart. Behind such reserve you would never suspect any passions at all save one of pride. Even frankly irreligious Oxford men acquire an ecclesiastical pre- Reformation aloofness which must have piqued Thackeray quite as much as the refusal of the city to send him to Westminster. He complains somewhere that the undergraduates wear kid gloves and drink less wine than their jolly brethren of the Cam. He was thoroughly ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... she said, with a fine affectation of aloofness, "we shall have to be rather hard upon you; we shall crumple you up like—" Churchill had been moving his stick absent-mindedly in the dust of the road, he had produced a big "C H U." She had erased it with the point of ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... unpreparedly, so suddenly; and in the first shock, an exile which had been a calmly accepted condition, became almost a menace, seemed swiftly to develop a force. The men in the far places felt their aloofness; knew that their souls were beating vainly against prison bars, for the longing to annihilate space and stand beside the beloved dead. That quiet band of men whom we sometimes call "The Pathfinders," and who go away across the world ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... had sufficed to light a fatal star in his sky, and to induce in him, when, as now, he found himself in her vicinity, an attitude towards the rest of the world that justified his mother's employment of the verb to "mooch" (a word that may be taken as implying a moody and furtive aloofness). ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... recently that he had contrived to finish it off. Being distrustful of its merits, he had decided to offer it to just one good publisher, who could take it or leave it. If he took it, well and good. But if the publisher (and possibly just one other) exhibited an attitude of aloofness, Robin had fully decided not to hawk his bantling about among other less reputable and more amenable firms, but to consign ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... fixedness, like the smiling of a star. What did it matter? She was there, beautiful as a young day, and smiling at him; and she was his, only divided from him by a space of time. He took a step; her eyes fell at once, her face regained aloofness; he saw her, encircled by mother, footman, maid, and porter, take her seat and drive away. It was over; she had seen him, she had smiled, but alongside his delight lurked another feeling, and, by a bitter freak, not her face came up before him but the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the aloofness born of timidity or of exaggerated pride, which, in depriving us of contrary views, develops in us the propensity to see things from only one angle, which is always that which happens to flatter our vanity or please ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... butt first in the snow. He walked over to it; Hazel followed. When he stood, with the rifle slung in the crook of his arm, she tried again to break through this silent aloofness which cut her more deeply than any harshness of ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in. Glenn Kilbourne had returned from France early that fall, shell-shocked and gassed, and otherwise incapacitated for service in the army—a wreck of his former sterling self and in many unaccountable ways a stranger to her. Cold, silent, haunted by something, he had made her miserable with his aloofness. But as the bells began to ring out the year that had been his ruin Glenn had drawn her close, tenderly, ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... diplomacy elsewhere. The house went up to an accompaniment of scenes in which only the proprietor was irate. Osmond Orgreave could not be ruffled; he could not be deprived of his air of having done a favour to Darius Clayhanger; his social and moral superiority, his real aloofness, remained absolutely unimpaired. The clear image of him as a fine gentleman was never dulled nor distorted even in the mind of Darius. Nevertheless Darius 'hated the sight' of the house ere the house was roofed in. But this did not diminish his pride in the house. He wished ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... happened on the coast twenty miles through the fields from Yokohama, at Kamakura, that is to say, where the great bronze Buddha sits facing the sea to hear the centuries go by. He has been described again and again—his majesty, his aloofness, and every one of his dimensions, the smoky little shrine within him, and the plumed hill that makes the background to his throne. For that reason he remains, as he remained from the beginning, beyond all hope of description—as ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... our tunes to the same variety of use they tend to lose their significance, and become ludicrous; for our melodies transcend the barriers of everyday life, and only thus can they carry us so deep into Pity, so high into Aloofness; their function being to reveal a picture of the inmost inexpressible depths of our being, mysterious and impenetrable, where the devotee may find his hermitage ready, or even the epicurean his bower, but where there is no room for the busy man of ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... structure of the face had been emphasised at the expense of its young grace and bloom, and the new indications of moustache and beard did but add to its striking and painful black and white. And the whole impression of change was completed by the melancholy aloofness, the shrinking distrust with which eyes once overflowing with the frankness and eagerness of one of the most accessible of human souls now looked out upon ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... enough to arise out of mere imitation into genuine self-expression, never takes her heroes quite seriously. From the day of George Sand to the day of Selma Lagerlof she has always got into her character study a touch of superior aloofness, of ill-concealed derision. I can't recall a single masculine figure created by a woman who is not, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Machinery Hall, is simple, classic, pure, imaginative, poetic in purpose and in effect. He has softened the traditional coldness of the goddess by a warmer humanity without injuring the sense of proud aloofness. The Maiden goddess of the Hunt bears in her hand the crescent bow, its lines here strongly suggestive of those of the young moon, of which it is the symbol and this goddess the deity. Mr. Patigian exhibits ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... opportunistic basis, accepting the existence of capitalism and having for its object the enlarging of the bargaining power of the wage earner in the sale of his labor. Its opportunism was instrumental—its idealism was home and family and individual betterment. It also implied an attitude of aloofness from all those movements which aspire to replace the wage system by cooperation, whether voluntary or subsidized by government, whether greenbackism, ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... nothing sentimental, hinted at or implied, in the correspondence. Whatever the faults of Sidney's romantic visions were, they did not tend to precocious flirtation. The Plainfield boys, attracted by her beauty and repelled by her indifference and aloofness, could have told that. She never expected to meet John Lincoln, nor did she wish to do so. In the correspondence itself ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... grounds, resort has been had to certain passages in the poet's dramas. And Mr. White, though knowing, none better, the poet's wonderful self-aloofness from his representations, thinks it worth the while to make an exception in this particular case. Presuming such and such things to be true in his own experience, the poet, our author observes, must have thought of them while writing certain passages. Our answer is, To be sure, he must ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... be unmindful of world conditions, that peoples are struggling for industrial rehabilitation and that we can not dwell in industrial and commercial exclusion and at the same time do the just thing in aiding world reconstruction and readjustment. We do not seek a selfish aloofness, and we could not profit by it, were it possible. We recognize the necessity of buying wherever we sell, and the permanency of trade lies in its acceptable exchanges. In our pursuit of markets we must give ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... without their budget and civil list," a box within a box, it would appear,—a spot independent of its Valley of Ossau, as Ossau was of Bearn, and Bearn of France. It has lived always in the most utter aloofness from the world's affairs; it still so lives to-day. It is noteworthy too for its old people; Henry IV granted to one of them, born in 1442, a life pension which, it is credibly recorded, was not extinguished ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... beyond I came again to a cluster of buildings, close to the corner of the crossroads, sheltered, homelike, inviting in a large natural bluff of tall, dark-green poplars. Those first two houses had had an aristocratic aloofness—I should not have liked to turn in there for shelter or for help. But this was prosperous, open-handed, well-to-do middle class; not that conspicuous "moneyedness" that we so often find in our new west when people have made their success; but the solid, friendly, everyday liberality ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... less room than the apices of his regular prose and of his poetry for that marvellous perfection of style and phrase which is allowed even by those who complain of a want of substance in him. And another complaint of his "aloofness" affects them in two ways rather damagingly. When it is present it cuts at the root of one of the chief interests of letters, which is intimacy. When it is absent, and Landor presents himself in his well-known character of an angry baby (as for instance when he remarked of the Bishop ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... interested and touched by this demonstration. She had felt shy with Frieda from the first, wishing so earnestly to know her well and win her love that she could not be perfectly simple and natural with her. This shyness had combined with the little aloofness, which every one felt in Catherine, to shut Frieda's heart. But this morning the barriers were down. Catherine, instead of being perfect, exquisite, was nothing short of hideous. The agent had proved that ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... ranchmen themselves, with two or three exceptions, were content to be solicitous at long range—an abstention that relieved and at the same time troubled Huntington. He was not eager to talk with his neighbors about that episode at the post-office, but their aloofness filled him with uneasiness. Well, let them wait! They would hear from him again, and ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... when he was in the Boston Custom House, and he was not without leisure even then. He shows no inclination toward scholarship, but was a desultory reader of English, with some French; he had no intellectual interests, apparently, of a philosophical kind; the aloofness in which he stood from Longfellow and Emerson, for example, was not shyness of nature wholly, but stood for the real aloofness of his mind from their ways of life, from the things that absorbed them in their poetic and speculative activity; ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... doing that now, and her laugh fluted softly through the wood. For that moment the barrier between them lost substance; it became the sheerest tissue, a curtain of gauze. Then the aloofness for which he waited settled on her. She looked away, her glance again seeking the stream. "I can't imagine anything more ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... mere gambling enterprise, wherein those who can ill afford it squander their substance in riotous bookmaking, I am inclined to be grateful that my first experience in this direction has led me to cultivate an unconcerned aloofness from a pursuit which is ruinous to the old and corrupting ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... terrible fiasco, and so he escaped, putting his finger to his lips as he opened the front door to warn his daughter that she must not reveal his flight. Charlotte's correspondence with her publisher is also full of pathos. It shows how keenly she felt her aloofness from the world, which she ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... before whom there must be awe and reverence, and not a flippant scouting of the ancient ideals. Man, who is so tried by temptation and scourging of the spirit, is a creature to be loved, appreciated, understood; not a being to whom shall be shown arrogance, aloofness, and pride. The university that makes snobs of its graduates has not yet entered into its ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... into each other's eyes, and something, it could hardly be called inimical, rather an aloofness from the tie of blood, was visible to each in the other's steadfast gaze. Aurora Googe shivered. Her eyes fell before the ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... how our economic arrangements would strike a disinterested intelligence that looked at them freshly for the first time. Let us take some matter of primary economic importance, such as the housing of the population, and do our best to criticize it in this spirit of personal aloofness. ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... out from this letter which hurt Helen deeply. First of all there was a certain humble aloofness in his attitude which troubled her, but more significant still was his confessed departure from his ideals. Her brave and splendid lover had surrendered to the enemy—for her sake. Her first impulse ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... passion for justice and equality. He was never weary of sowing and resowing in the laws of the Nation and in the mind of the people the grand ideas of the Declaration of Independence. This entire absorption in one loftly purpose lent to him a singular aloofness and isolation in the politics of the times. He was not like other political leaders. He laid stress on the ethical side of statesmanship, they emphasized the economical. He was chiefly concerned about the rights of persons, they about the rights of property. ...
— Charles Sumner Centenary - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 14 • Archibald H. Grimke
... loyalty, Elise relapsed into a sulky obedience to her governess and her mother. To their puny vision it seemed that her attitude towards them was one of haughty aloofness, and everything possible was done to subdue her spirit. Being unable to see that the child was lonely, and too proud to admit her craving for sympathetic companionship, they tried to tame the thoroughbred as they ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... me sharply and clearly as though I experienced it for the first time. It was a peculiar emotion: the first time I had ever felt the oppression of space—can I describe it?—the utter bigness of the world and the aloofness of myself, a little boy, within it—now that my father was gone. It was not at that moment sorrow, nor remorse, nor love: it was an inexpressible cold terror—that anywhere I might go in the world, I ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... sufficed to light a fatal star in his sky, and to induce in him, when, as now, he found himself in her vicinity, an attitude towards the rest of the world that justified his mother's employment of the verb to "mooch" (a word that may be taken as implying a moody and furtive aloofness). ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Mrs. Vulcany once remarked that Miss Harleth was too fond of the gentlemen; but we know that she was not in the least fond of them—she was only fond of their homage—and women did not give her homage. The exception to this willing aloofness from her was Miss Arrowpoint, who often managed unostentatiously to be by her side, and talked ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... some prize, the boy turned to show it to the doctor, to discover that he was standing well back, watching, rather than sharing, in the pleasure of the two; and, as the little chap discovered the aloofness, he leaned over and whispered something ...
— Wanted—A Match Maker • Paul Leicester Ford
... quaint, old-fashioned place on the side of Battle Hill, looking down upon the maples of Sickle Street. The grounds were rather spacious, and the house stood well back from the street, establishing an aloofness that had never been noticed before. A low stone wall guarded the lawn and rose-garden, and there was an iron gate at the bottom of the slope. The front porch was partly screened by "Dutchman's Pipe" vines. With the ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... how she deceived herself—for the harmless self- deceptions of us chronic mummers are always amusing. The fact was, this melting and inviting mood had far more of nature and sincerity in it than there had been in her icy aloofness. Icy aloofness, except in the heroines of aristocratic novels, is a state of mind compatible only with extreme stupidity or with some one of those organic diseases that sour the disposition. Never had she been ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... great world (she had visited Paris only twice and briefly), her mind charmingly developed by conscientious tutors. But at the moment he thought that the compelling power lay in some deep subtlety of eye, her little air of lofty aloofness, her classic small features in a small face, and the top-heavy masses of blue black hair which she carried with a certain naive pride as if it were her only vanity; in her general unlikeness to the gray-eyed ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... he knew was that his father would have nothing to do with Gower, never mentioned the name voluntarily, let his catch of salmon rot on the beach before he would sell to a Gower cannery boat,—and had enjoined upon his son the same aloofness from all things Gower. Once, in answer to young Jack's curious question, his natural "why," ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Dubby sorely, for there had grown a firm bond of sympathy between them. The old huskie had learned that a character may dignify a calling, and that a true heart often beats beneath a racing harness; while Baldy had long since discovered that Dubby's aloofness was but the inevitable loneliness of a Dog that has had ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... suddenly that this solitary person glanced up and I saw the white hair, keen eyes and pale, aquiline features of the Earl of Wyvelstoke. At sight of me he closed the book and rose, and in stern features, in every line of his slender, shabby figure was a stately aloofness that chilled me. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... profound a reason, does he not show us to ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the deprecating aloofness and ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... and the sea in the distance covered with boats carrying fantastic sails, never for a moment make the impression of reality. But they are beautiful compositions, designed to please the eye and stimulate the fancy, and are even attractive by virtue of their novel aloofness from the actual world. ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... the appearance of marshalling itself in one grand, exhaustive cyclorama. On every hand were snowy summits forming a titanic ring which seemed to concentrate upon Lame Gulch; and much of the sense of aloofness and security which was the chief element in Amberley's content came from the illusion which he carefully guarded, that that wall of giants really was impenetrable. He liked, too, to feel himself at a great altitude above the lower world ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... unhandsome city which boasts of its riches and still accepts with smug content its rows upon rows of ugly architecture, to sit dreaming, then, of red-tiled roofs, of cloud-caressed hills, of terraced vineyards, of cypresses in their dark aloofness, is not out of the natural order of things; but that into this idle and pleasant dream there should enter so divine a voice, living, feeling, pulsing, this was not ordinary ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... Complaints of the aloofness of the British civilian very seldom proceed either from Indians of the upper classes or from the humbler folk. They generally proceed from the new, more or less Western-educated middle class whose attitude towards British ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... Florence Accademia, and the wonderful and most impressive "Crucifixion" of S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi (Florence) was commissioned by Pietro Pucci in 1493, though it was not completed till April of 1496. Unsurpassed here is the master in the solemnity, the sense of aloofness from earthly things, which he conveys to us in these six figures—the Crucified, with as spectators His mother, the beloved disciple, and kneeling saints, seen against the wide stretch of such an Umbrian background as we may see from Perugia or Cortona or Assisi; and next in importance ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... meal with the Misses Bartlett was an ordeal he never forgot. Their formal aloofness and evident dismay at his presence were enough in themselves to embarrass him; but combined with the necessity of choosing the right knife and fork, of breaking his bread properly, and of removing his spoon from his coffee-cup, they were quite overpowering. During his two years in the army he had ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... that that peculiarity of the French genius, which, despite its unsurpassed and almost unmatched literary faculty, has prevented it from contributing any of the very greatest masterpieces to the literature of the world, has communicated to them this aloofness, this, as it may almost be called, provincialism. But some such note there is in them, and it may be that the immense stretch of time during which they were worse than ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... at Bernal. Her husband, however, found her more difficult than ever after communicating his news to her. He tried once to imagine her being dissatisfied with him for some reason. But this attempt he abandoned. Thereafter he attributed her coldness, aloofness, silence, and moodiness to some nervous malady peculiar to the modern woman. Bernal's presence kept him from noting how really pronounced and unwavering her ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... accompaniment of scenes in which only the proprietor was irate. Osmond Orgreave could not be ruffled; he could not be deprived of his air of having done a favour to Darius Clayhanger; his social and moral superiority, his real aloofness, remained absolutely unimpaired. The clear image of him as a fine gentleman was never dulled nor distorted even in the mind of Darius. Nevertheless Darius 'hated the sight' of the house ere the house was roofed in. But this did not diminish his pride in the house. He ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... "sanctions" which France threatened to apply. The Bavarian is too lethargic, slow, and easy-going to be readily frightened—in temperament he has little in common with the high-spirited, nervous Prussian. Bavarians spoke of Germany and Germany's war-debt with an aloofness as of neutrals. It did not trouble them deeply. They were sceptical as to France's ability to collect a huge indemnity. The fifty per cent tax they regarded as an absurdity. "It is possible to ruin Germany, ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... plainly glad to leave Effie an honestly married woman with the right to look forward to happy, useful years. The story breeds generous thoughts on the theme of young womanhood: it handled the problem neither from the superior altitude of the conventional moralist nor the cold aloofness of the latter-day realist—Flaubert's ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the value of periphery is greatly enhanced by the interoceanic location of the country; and the danger of entanglements arising from a marked central location is reduced by the simplicity of the political neighborhood. But our country has paid for this security by an historical aloofness and poverty of influence. Civilized countries which are wholly central in their location are very few, only nine in all. Six of these are mountain or plateau states, like Switzerland and Abyssinia, which have used the fortress character of their land to resist conquest, and have preferred ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... untutored savages. If ever boat breasted the "foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," it was this, and if ever its occupants realised the complete strangeness of their situation and their utter aloofness from the tracks of their fellowmen, it must have been on this cloudless moonlit summer night. There was hardly a stretch of the world's waters, at all events in any habitable zone, where they could have been ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... exercise, which always relieved my nerves. But I had no success in associating with them beyond the mere play. Not only I was not their school-mate, but my book-life and lonely habits had given a cold aloofness to my whole expression, and veiled my manner with a hauteur which turned all hearts away. Yet, as this reserve was superficial, and rather ignorance than arrogance, it produced no deep dislike. Besides, the girls supposed me really superior to ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... and artistic existence, between the proud joy of living and ascetic hostility to life, in two brothers of the house of Medici, Lorenzo and Girolamo, who are suitors for the hand of one and the same woman. The following novel, His Royal Highness (1909), shows how a prince, educated in aloofness from life, is saved from a living death through love for an American heiress. Finally, there appeared only last year a masterpiece in the most exquisite style, the narrative Death in Venice (1913). It is a heart-felt confession, taking as its theme ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Anne's silence, her persistent aloofness, began to irritate him at last. Weeks had passed since her return to the city and she had given no sign. He had long since ceased his sly pilgrimages to the neighbourhood of Washington Square. Now as the days grew shorter and the nights infinitely longer, he was conscious, first, of a distinct ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... make no attempt at helping him. She sat there in silence, her face white, almost stern. In her aloofness it was as though she were trying to hold herself, from the ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... grace as a boy—this pious task-work that almost spoilt the anticipation of meals! But to-night, after so long an interval, he could look at it without prejudice, and with artistic aloofness render to himself a true impression ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... waters. His great stature was somewhat magnified by his voluminous coat, with its deep, upturned storm-collar. There was that about him to attract considerable attention. But he remained unconscious of it, and his aloofness was by ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... appreciation. Instead of mingling with the throng, marching and fighting, fearing and suffering, it seems easy to stand apart and let nature and art and life unfold itself before one in a rich panorama. But not on such terms can life be lived. One hopes to avoid suffering by aloofness; but there falls upon the spirit a worse sickness than the weariness of toil—the ache of pent-up activities and self-tortured mystifications. The soul becomes involved in a dreary metaphysic, wondering fruitlessly what it is that mars the sweet and beautiful world. The ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... expressive of I knew not what hidden emotion seemed to pass for one moment over her aristocratic features as she read it. But it vanished instantaneously, and she turned to me with her previous air of haughty and imperturbable aloofness. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... unconcerned with any other issue, sets the tale to an enchanting melody. It does not occur to him to condone or to reprobate the loves of Hugo and Parisina, and in detailing the issue leaves the actors to their fate. It was this aloofness from ethical considerations which perturbed and irritated the "canters," as Byron called them—the children and champions of the anti-revolution. The modern reader, without being attracted or repelled ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... the meetings of the Cabinet. During six months Pitt put up with this peevishness; but on the receipt of alarming news from Holland, he exerted his authority. On 27th January 1795 he informed Richmond that his long absence from the Cabinet and his general aloofness would make his return unpleasant and "embarrassing to public business. This consideration," he added, "must decide my opinion ... and at this critical time it seems indispensable to make some such arrangement as shall substitute some other efficient military aid in so important a Department."[416] ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... lectures, are anything but colourless; they show very distinctly the predilections of the writer, and it is hardly conceivable that they should have been written by a defender of absolutism, or even by an old-fashioned Tory. What Acton really demanded was not the academic aloofness of the pedant who stands apart from the strife of principles, but the honesty of purpose which "throws itself into the mind of one's opponents, and accounts for their mistakes," giving their case the best possible colouring. For, to be sure of one's ground, one must meet ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... just bowed with that strange aloofness that is not insolent. Her manner is never like a person of the lower classes, trying to show she thinks she is an equal. It has exactly the right note—perfectly respectful as one who is employed, but with the serene unselfconsciousness that ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... described by keeping Emma always at a certain distance, even when he appears to be entering her mind most freely. He makes her subjective, places us so that we see through her eyes—yes; but he does so with an air of aloofness that forbids us ever to become entirely identified with her. This is how she thought and felt, he seems to say; look and you will understand; such is the soul of this foolish woman. A hint of irony is always perceptible, and ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... naturally led to a high degree of animosity and unfriendly charges against the Missouri Synod. Her attitude of certainty and conviction in the doctrines which she championed was branded and denounced as "intolerance," "bigotry," "narrow-mindedness," "exclusiveness," "aloofness," "pride," "Pharisaism," etc. In his Problems and Possibilities Dr. Gerberding wrote: "We have often said that this body of Lutherans, more than all others, has saved the Germans of the Middle West from being swamped in materialism and rationalism. Honor to whom honor ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... exultant patriotism of the times, and the sense of their aloofness from the continent of Europe, which was now born in the breasts of Englishmen, is evident from many ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and the second, this aloofness came upon Scott Brenton's nerves, and drove him well-nigh mad. Night after night, he tramped the floor, asking himself in vain if such a situation could develop, without some fault upon his side. Day after day, he strove most conscientiously to renew the old relations with his wife. He might ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... wave swept up behind it and dissolved in turn; and he sat on, hour after hour, under the white-hot sky, unconscious of the heat, the dust, the tumult, embodying to the wild factious precipitate hordes a long tradition of serene aloofness. ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... silence, because they loved greatly. Like Aunt Elinor. Aunt Elinor had loved her husband more than she had loved her child. Quite calmly Lily decided that, as between her husband and herself, her mother loved her husband. Perhaps that was as it should be, but it added to her sense of aloofness. And she wondered, too, about these great loves that ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... From his reserved speech, shy manner, and uncommunicative patience under criticism, from the silent abruptness of his decisions, his formidable trenchancy in self-defence when openly attacked, and his aloofness from any attempts to curry favour with the Press, it may be inferred that his character was a dignified one; but he was dignified precisely in the way which makes such actions as taking a subordinate political position particularly easy. He foresaw that his position would be one of extreme difficulty, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... chiefly affected the society of tea-house maidens, the immature of both sexes, doubtful characters of all classes, and criminals awaiting trial; has evinced an unswerving affinity towards light amusement and entertainments of a no-class kind; and in place of a wise aloofness, befitting a wearer of the third Gold Button and the Horn Belt-clasp, in situations of critical perplexity, seems by his own ingenuous showing to have maintained an unparalleled aptitude for behaving either with the crystalline simplicity of a Kan-su earth-tiller, ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... her admiringly, quick to note her well-bred manner, her quiet aloofness, unusual in girls of ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... Bozzy begins to talk to me, and the old Doctor growls "Sir," all the worries and anxieties of life fall magically away, and Dismal Jemmy vanishes like the ghost at cock-crow. I am no longer imprisoned in time and the flesh: I am of the company of the immortals. I share their triumphant aloofness from the play that fills our stage and see its place in the scheme of the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... recognized with an almost prayerful gratitude that it was something paramount to physical lure, which beckoned him along the path of love. Into the more genuine and intimate recesses of her life, where the soul keeps its aloofness, she had given him only keyhole glimpses, but they had been such glimpses as kindled his eagerness and awakened his hunger for exploration. There had been candid indications reenforced by a dozen subtler things that her liking for him was more than casual, and yet she denied him any chance ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... conflict with different political systems; the many indirect, subtle, far-reaching ways in which the world and the Church interacted upon each other in all the great departments of speculation, art, industry, social and political life. A certain aloofness and coldness of judgment in dealing with sacred subjects was the reproach which was most frequently brought against him. As he himself said, he wrote rather as an historian than a religious instructor, and he dealt with his subject ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... overlooked the busier district about the mills, where the water-power found its way, and it was something of a climb even from the business street of the old hill village, which the rival prosperity of the industrial settlement in the valley had thrown into an aristocratic aloofness. From the upper windows of the rectory one could have seen only the red and yellow of the maples, but from the study door we caught glimpses past their boles of the outlying country, as it showed between ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... the welfare of millions of people distributed over a vast continent. Office seekers apparently regard themselves as a privileged class with a right of personal access to the President, and any appearances of aloofness or reserve on his part gives sharp offense. The exceptional force of such claims of privilege in the United States may be attributed to the participation which members of Congress have acquired in the appointing power. The system thus created imposes upon ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... intervals when all the performers left the platform one of them went amongst the marble tables collecting offerings of sous and francs in a battered tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat. It was a girl. Her detachment from her task seems to me now to have equalled or even surpassed Heyst's aloofness from all the mental degradations to which a man's intelligence is exposed in its way through life. Silent and wide-eyed she went from table to table with the air of a sleep-walker and with no other sound ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... of the Church fling back a witticism in the court of an angry magistrate, he would probably have felt more doubtful than ever concerning the status of the early Fathers. It is a relief to turn from the letters of Martyn, with their aloofness from the cheerful currents of earth, to the letters of Bishop Heber, who, albeit a missionary and a keen one, had always a laugh for the absurdities which beset his wandering life. He could even tell with relish the story of the drunken pedlar whom he met in Wales, ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... He seemed, somehow, to survey Rudolph Musgrave and all his doings with complete and unconcerned aloofness. The man's life, seen in its true proportions, dwindled into the merest flicker of a match; he had such a little while to live, this Rudolph Musgrave! And he spent the serious hours of this brief time writing notes and charts and pamphlets that perhaps some hundred men in all the universe ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... to repeat her admonition, for, in the days that followed, Pierce Phillips maintained toward the women members of the party an admirable attitude of aloofness. He was not rude, neither was he discourteous; he merely isolated himself from them and discouraged their somewhat timid advances toward friendship. This doubtless would have met with Laure's whole-hearted approval had he not treated her in precisely the same way. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... There was a look in her blue eyes that Peg had never seen there before—an aloofness in her manner that was almost painfully eloquent—and after a second of utter astonishment Peg sprang to her feet and caught Faith roughly by the arm, peering down to look ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... of some importance in his day," and his writings on physics are still mentioned with respect in works devoted to the history of science. But he is perhaps chiefly remembered as the savant whom Frederick the Great attracted to his court during a period of aloofness from the scintillating Voltaire, and who consequently became a writhing target for the jealous ridicule of that waspish wit. Poor Maupertuis, unhappy in his exit from life, would appear to have been restless ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... disappointment to me in some of his large set pictures in the Academia and elsewhere, shows himself lovely in fresco (though I think the "crumb" element helps him). His great Crucifixion is big altogether, and has so permanent a force in its aloofness from mere drama and mere life. In San Marco, the cells of the monks are quite charming, a row of little square bandboxes under a broad raftered corridor, and in every cell is a beautiful little fresco for the monks to live up to. But they no ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... he had said, "Let us respect our personality, and not make a 'mess' of friendship." He saw, with Emerson, the risk of degrading it to trivial conveniency. "Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend?" "Leave this touching and clawing." Yet I would not give an unfair notion of his aloofness, his fine sense of the sacredness of the me and the not-me. And, at the risk of not being believed, I will relate an incident, which was often repeated. Calvin had the practice of passing a portion of the night in the contemplation of its beauties, and would come into our chamber over the roof ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... speaking. Ultimately, from some fastness in the rag a half-sovereign was extracted, and was laid upon the table by Sweeny. The clerk, a well-dressed young gentleman, whose attitude had throughout been one of the extremest aloofness, made an entry in his book with an ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... entered with so fearless a front, the little woman drew up suddenly at sight of the boy, and, entrenching herself behind the doctor, began to swing by his coat-tails, and to take furtive glances at the stranger in silence and aloofness. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... deceit. Attached to his name was an unsavoury reputation of card-playing for high stakes, of drinking too much, although not to the extent of actual drunkenness; and the character had alienated from him the friendship of serious men, and evoked a disapproving aloofness in the manner of his instructors. At the moment when he most needed help those who were best fitted to give it sedulously avoided his company, and in this first moment of meeting Darsie was tempted ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... not know that the aloofness in the eyes of Miss Wainwright—he had seen the name on her suit-case—gave way to horror when her glance fell on his gloved hand. She had a swift, shuddering vision of a grim-faced man, jaws set like a vise, hacking at his wrist with a hunting-knife. But the engaging ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... the ideals of which this building was the outward expression, he would wake from his constructive reverie to realise sadly for the first time, not the beauty, but the incompleteness, of the institution; not its proximity to the city beyond, but its air of aloofness from the community in which ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... permit a well-bred clergyman to decline in his discussion of temporal interests. These matters that are of human and secular consequence simply, should properly be handled with such a degree of generality and aloofness as may imply that the speaker represents a master whose interest in secular affairs goes only so far as ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... grotesque caricature. The photograph here reproduced (p. 128), by far the best likeness extant, he gave to Madame Novikoff in 1870, receiving hers in return, but pronouncing the transaction "an exchange between the personified months of May and November." The face gives expression to the shy aloofness which, amongst strangers, was characteristic of him through life. He had even a horror of hearing his name pealed out by servants, and came early to parties that the proclamation might be achieved before as few auditors as possible. Visiting the newly ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... had followed her into the library, she turned and put both her hands upon his arm, her soft nearness like a perfume and a breath. To Reardon, she was immeasurably beautiful and as far as that above him. His heart beating terribly in his ears, he drew her to him sure that, in her aloofness, she would reprove him. But Esther, to his infinite joy and amazement, melted into his ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... hearty satisfaction over his altered circumstances. To all these, whether they were moved by mere neighbourly good will, or perchance were inspired by impulses of selfishness, the old man exhibited a mien of aloofness ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... down the hill, caught a glimpse of the carriage and its occupants, and noted the dainty bonnet bending towards the dark head. A sense of loneliness, of aloofness, seemed to possess her that evening. The scent of flowers had something sad in its sweetness (as flower-scents often have); the sunset light suggested solemn thoughts. Mrs. Beaton remarked that she looked languid ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... presences waiting for the moment when the issue of this struggle would be decided. The air was filled with their chill breath. The struggle round the bed was at its height. On one side doctors, nurses, the father, the mother—on the other that still, ironic Figure, in His very aloofness so strong, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... their names down except Paulsberg, who curtly refused. A man who wrote as much as he did could not sign his name to nonsensical notes, he said. And he rose and walked away in dignified aloofness. ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... since his interview with Kate and her subsequent astonishing and unexpected payment of the mortgage had been one of polite aloofness. That matter was still a mystery which he hoped to solve sometime. But long ago Mr. Wentz had learned that the life of a banker is not the free independent life of a laundryman, and that with a competitor like Abram Pantin forever harassing him by getting the cream of the loans, it was sometimes ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... great force. He would have been picked out of a multitude, not alone because of his remarkable height, but because he had an air of command and the aloofness which shows ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... face, or been otherwise daunted by Nostromo's resolution. He was "much of a man," their Capataz was, they said, too scornful in his temper ever to utter abuse, a tireless taskmaster, and the more to be feared because of his aloofness. And behold! there he was that day, at their head, condescending to make jocular remarks to this man or ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... window upon her, and a breeze came with it and stirred her hair. She had those purple shadows under her eyes which betray us after long, sleepless hours when we live with our troubles and the world dreams around us; she had no color at all in her cheeks, and she had that aloofness of manner which Manley, in his outburst, had described as being shut up inside herself. She glanced up at them, just as she would have done had they both been strangers, and went on sugaring her coffee with a dainty exactness ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... frequent consideration mine remained different, it would leave me at least perplexed. For you are a perfect electrometer in these things—but in point of poetic diction, I am not so well satisfied that you do not require a certain aloofness from the language of real life, which I think ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Kid has got to the Variations of 'The Blue Bells of Scotland.' Nevertheless she is yearning for the day when she will arrive at the part where she crosses hands (Var. 8)—a tremendous achievement in her eyes, but viewed with cold aloofness by Henry ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... country it at first appeared that the war was one more in a long series of European quarrels and that we must play our part in the great conflict as mere spectators and strictly adhere to the American policy of traditional aloofness and isolation, which had been our immemorial custom and habit. Although we were bound to maintain a policy of isolation, Woodrow Wilson from the beginning foresaw its futility, and afterward gave expression to this ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... in. And on the way out he lived up to the letter of their agreement. The situation exhilarated him: Grace with her new air of virtue, her new aloofness; his comfortable car; Johnny Rosenfeld's discreet back ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... friends, preventing injured foes escaping, turning doubtful battle into victory. But no; these commonplaces of to-day and of all time were swamped by the Fighting Instructions. It will be seen in the sequel what a disastrous moral influence Lestock's aloofness exercised upon a few timid captains, and not improbably upon the entire subsequent course and worst errors ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... long time no technical words were invented to give aloofness and seeming precision to philosophic and scientific discussion. Aristotle was the first to use words incomprehensible to the average citizen. It was in these conditions that the possibilities of human criticism ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... is parodied nowadays, he will even get the event of Bayreuth reproduced for him, through the very un-magic lanterns of our facetious art-critics. And one ought to be thankful if they stop at parody; for by means of it a spirit of aloofness and animosity finds a vent which might otherwise hit upon a less desirable mode of expression. Now, the observant sage already mentioned could not remain blind to this unusual sharpness and tension of contrasts. They who hold by gradual development as a ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
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