"Impersonal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from the girls to Mark and from Mark to the girls, precisely as if she were exhibiting rare specimens to her husband and her husband to her rare specimens. And in the tone of one exhibiting pinned, dried, and completely impersonal specimens, she announced, "They're sisters. Their name ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... was, though somewhat impersonal, wholly genuine. The tone of chivalrous respect rang true, and she could comprehend the half-instinctive straining after an ideal by one whose belief in her sex was, if slightly crude, almost reverential. It touched her, though she ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... amazing in her power, a woman whose life was bound up with his and yet held apart from him in the most inexplicable, absorbing way; a woman he had never seen, save for her gloved arm in the limousine that night, who at one unexpected moment projected a dazzling, impersonal existence across his path, and the next, leaving him battling for his life where greed and passion and crime swirled about him, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... prophets. He had lived the atoning life and died a sacrificial death. It was not wonderful that the author of the fifty-third of Isaiah should have such a noble example in mind when he penned his deathless words, but these words were meant to have an impersonal meaning too. They stand as a description of the ideal manhood, the true servant of God, the saviour of the race in any and every generation. This kind of manhood, just because it is the true manhood, the eternal or divine manhood, must inevitably suffer in a selfish world, but these sufferings ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... women are so much like humans that you can't tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they're interested in petty, personal things it's because they're not given a fair chance at big, impersonal things. Everybody's jumping on the American woman because she knows more about bridge-whist than about her husband's business. Why does she? Because he's satisfied to have her—you can take my word for it! He likes her to be absorbed in clubs and bridge and idiotic ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... there would have been the possibility. But no weak-muscled "foreigner," pap-nurtured in the lowlands, could, she knew, of course, accomplish such a feat. It was fine to know things, as he did, but muscle was what counted now! In queer, impersonal reflection, born, doubtless, of a dumb hysteria, she reflected bitterly upon the healthy weight ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... of self-analysis which often compelled him to take his own life into the laboratory of reflection and study its reactions with an almost impersonal directness. That analysis told him that Conscience Williams, had she chosen to do so, might have imposed upon him the thrall of infatuation, even had there been no powerful appeal to his mentality. Every fiery element that had lain dormant in his nature ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... stood in her eyes; but she persevered. She struck boldly for the public, the impersonal note. She set against the tragic appeal of the dead the equally tragic appeal of the living. She had in her mind the memory of that London church, with the strained upturned faces, the "hungry sheep"—girls among ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... consideration, while he passed one of his long narrow hands over his forehead. When she had finished her vivacious recital, he began to talk slowly and gravely about himself, with the tolerant and impersonal detachment of one who has reduced life to a gesture, a manner. "I wonder if he has ever really cared about anything—even about me?" she questioned, after a minute; but while the thought was still in her mind, he mentioned his mother's name, and it was impossible to doubt the sincerity ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... enough prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women contrive to palliate their defects and even to turn them into graces. Her dress never seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal air, as though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations of the most approved models; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will ever do so by ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... comfortably aware of eyes of admiration lifted to her more and more frequently from the crowd. She envied the blue coolness of the mountains, or breathed gingerly because the sting of alkali-dust was in the air, or noted with impersonal attention the flash of sun on a horse struggling in the far off corrals. The growing excitement of the crowd, as though a crisis were approaching, merely lulled her more. So the voice of Corson was half heard; ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the oldest and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain, contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the extreme to which his love will allow him. All is general, impersonal, indirect,—the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather for himself the occasion which had produced them; and then passes off, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the Latin construction is personal ('the nation is said to have consisted'), while English commonly has the impersonal construction ('it is said ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... rotund man with a high complexion, and his bulging eye was on the menu before his soft body had sunk into his chair. His conversation proved limited, but strictly to the point; he told Rachel what to eat, and once or twice what to avoid; lavished impersonal praise upon one dish, impartial criticisms upon another, and only spoke between the courses. It was a large dinner-party; twenty-two sat down. Rachel was at last driven to ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... events, self looms large, even in the crisis of supreme self-sacrifice. In the passive part, which even the most active among us play for the greater portion of our lives, self is merged in the detached and impersonal interest which we take in what passes before our eyes. Yet must we describe these things only as they are designed and coloured by our proper eyes, and therefore, with no greater hope of accuracy than to approximate to the ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... here be translated, 'Just listen to that.' It is more correctly expressed by ne voila pas, the barbarism resulting from the consideration of voila as a verb and the introduction of the euphonic t and the il of impersonal verbs ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... and infirm, had died out, but the symbol of them remained. To explain the symbol a myth was created, which kept sufficiently near to the original idea as to retain evidence of its close connection with the descent of property; and thus was launched the dateless, impersonal, unlocalised story which Mr. Campbell has given as a specimen of vagrant traditions, which "must have been invented after agriculture and fixed habitations, after laws of property and inheritance; but it may be as old as the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, or Egyptian civilisation, ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... to anchor outside the harbor about eleven o'clock on the night of the last day. Mary and John were standing together at the forward rail. There had been but little talk between them, and only of a desultory and impersonal character. As the anchor chains rattled in the hawse-pipes, John said, "Well, that ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... writing it down in the order-book. "Very well. That is Wednesday of next week. You have given us more time than we need." She put complete, impersonal business into her tone; and this time he marched off in good order, leaving peace in the ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... startled at her words and by her passionate earnestness; the more so that, in the manner of her speaking as in her words, there was an impersonal touch very unusual to those who speak on religious topics. And there was a note of sadness in her voice as well. It was as if she spoke to him professionally of the sickness of some one dear to her and sought to keep her love for her patient from influencing ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... was not to participate in the result of the old Judge's or young hero's happy championship of the cause of her sex, she conceived her separateness high aloof, and actually supposed she was a contemplative, simply speculative political spirit, impersonal albeit a woman. This, as Emma, smiling at the lines, had not to learn, was always her secret pride of fancy—the belief in her possession ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... consistere means 'to take a stand with a person', 'to agree.' This impersonal use ...
— Selections from Erasmus - Principally from his Epistles • Erasmus Roterodamus
... if he had been interrupted in his thoughts, or was recalled to a recognition of our existence, but just as he would turn the tiller in steering his boat,—while the eye still continued its conversation with that impersonal, elemental company which he seemed to keep. I found it out of my power to relate myself to him as an individual. In most faces you study special character; but in him it was somewhat older and more primitive,—somewhat which seemed to be rather existence itself than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... how prettily pointed and slim her hand was. Yes, that was pretty—and her hair—the way it grew about her forehead and ears and the back of her neck. She gazed at her young curve and colour and flame of life's first beauty with deep curiosity, singularly impersonal for her years. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... imperfection latent in the system came out. A man's business grew to such proportions that he had to have more helpers than he knew by their first names; but that fact was not regretted; it was rather hailed with joy. And yet it has since led to an impersonal system wherein the workman has become something less than a person—a mere part of the system. No one believes, of course, that this dehumanizing process was deliberately invented. It just grew. It was latent in the whole early system, but no one saw it and no one could foresee it. Only ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... his office Tom Van Dorn and Henry Fenn sat with their feet in the window sill, looking through the open window into the moon. In their discourse they used that elaborate, impersonal anonymity that youth engages to carry the baggage of its ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... metaphysical powers of its philosophical schools, and was searching for a more real object to revere and lean on. The people were thirsting for the living God. And in place of the gods of nature, whom they had found unsatisfying, or the impersonal world-force, with which they sought in vain to come into harmony, the Jews offered them the God of history, who had preserved their race through the ages, and revealed to them the ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... debasing inspection Raikes turned slowly to the washstand to remove the grime from his face, with an impersonal deliberation that was not only unnatural under the circumstances, but which awakened the eerie suggestion that he was expending his effort upon ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... reaction upon Buddhism of its Hinduistic surroundings. But they doubtless helped also to stimulate the growth of the more definite forms of anthropomorphism which characterised the development of Hinduism when the ancient ritual and the more impersonal gods of the Vedas and of the Brahmanas gave way to the cult of such very personal gods as Shiva and Vishnu, with their feminine counterparts, Kali and Lakshmi, and ultimately to the evolution of still more popular deities, some, like Skanda and the elephant-headed ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... is acknowledged to have originated a new type of biography. It was felt at once, and has been increasingly felt ever since, that Boswell is so direct and personal that beside him all other biographers seem impersonal and vague, that he is so intimate that he makes all others appear cold and distant, so lifelike that they seem shadowy, so true that they seem false. Now this has commonly been attributed to his habit of noting down on the spot and at the moment anything that struck ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING, the author. Because for my part, reading these, I formed the idea (entirely wrong) that the book would be in some way pretentious and affected; whereas it is the simple truth to call it the most mercilessly impersonal piece of fiction that I think I ever read. There is far too much plot for me to give you any but a suggestion of it. The story is of the lives of two sisters, Frances and Minnie; mostly (as the title implies) of Minnie. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... life from afar, are apt to interpret historical events as the outcome of impersonal forces which shape the course of nations unknown to themselves. This is an impressive theory, but it will not bear close scrutiny. Human nature everywhere responds to the influence of personality. In Greece this response ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... the great world of their day that important changes in manners and social opinion have made much less difference in the standard by which their lives are compared with their work. Their poetry, moreover, was mainly impersonal. Whereas Byron, by stamping his own character on so much of his verse, created a dangerous interest in the man himself; and his empeiria (as Goethe calls it), his too exclusively worldly experience, identified him with his particular class in society, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... shocked him to the core of his being. The Hotel Cosmopolis was his own private, personal property, and the thing dearest to him in the world, after his daughter Lucille. He prided himself on the fact that his hotel was not like other New York hotels, which were run by impersonal companies and shareholders and boards of directors, and consequently lacked the paternal touch which made the Cosmopolis what it was. At other hotels things went wrong, and clients complained. At the Cosmopolis things never went wrong, because he was on the spot to see ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... an immemorial antiquity for the legends, and for the lyrical choruses in which their musical rendering was improvised. We are still at a loss to discover the possibly mythological germs of the legends; but, at all events, some ballads may be claimed as distinctly popular, and, so to speak, impersonal in matter and in origin. It would be easy to show that survivals out of this stage of inartistic lyric poetry linger in the early epic poetry of Homer and in the French epopees, and that the Greek drama sprang from the sacred choruses of village vintagers. In the great early epics, as in popular ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... white-capped maid smiled a polite recognition of the newest arrival. A bit flustered by the calmly impersonal scrutiny with which her greeting was received, she addressed Miss Willis in a ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... glad and marveling, shone in his eyes. Indeed, Lenore felt then a break in the strange aloofness of him—in his impersonal, gentle acceptance of her ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... rainbow on the summer hills, Hidden in sea-mist down the hot coast-line, Couched on the clouds that fiery sunset fills, Blessed, remote, impersonal, divine; ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... recognisable designs of the French ateliers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. These are so frequently brought before us as to seem almost like products of our own day. The earlier ones seem (as ever) the purer art, the less sensual, appealing to the more impersonal side of man, dealing in battles and in classic subjects. Later, the drawings, becoming more directly personal, in the time of Louis XIV portrayed events in the Life of the King; in the next reign, slipping into the pleasures of the Royal Hunts, from which the descent was easy into depicting ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... murder directly attributable to this kind of gambling. It must be remembered that these public games were chiefly rouge et noir, monte, faro, or roulette, in which the antagonist was Fate, Chance, Method, or the impersonal "bank," which was supposed to represent them all; there was no individual opposition or rivalry; nobody challenged the decision ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... paternal relative? You ought to meditate upon that problem, for it is really a public question nowadays. Oh, and there was a quite lovely clipping last week I forgot to show you—all about Electra, as contrasted with Jonas Chuzzlewit, and my fine impersonal attitude, and the survival of the fittest, and ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... traveller in distress may transmit his appeal. I fill it with incoherent sounds, and sounds more incoherent yet come back to me. I gather at last their meaning; they appear to constitute a somewhat stern inquiry. A hollow impersonal voice wishes to know what I want, and the very question paralyses me. I want everything—yet I want nothing—nothing this hard impersonality can give! I want my little corner of Paris; I want the rich, the deep, the ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... man who is brightly polished inside. Spit and polish teaches a man to come out of the trenches from seeing his pals killed, and to carry on as though nothing abnormal had happened. It educates him in an impersonal attitude towards calamity which makes it bearable. It forces him not to regard anything too tragically. If you can stand aside from yourself and poke fun at your own tragedy—and tragedy always has its humorous aspect—that helps. The songs which have been inspired ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... such vast and powerful phenomena as a bolt of lightning or the flood of a river were mere impersonal things. Some one—somewhere—must be their master and must direct them as the engineer directs his engine or ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... own way through it, and to owe our insight to ourselves. The historians of former ages, unapproachable for us in knowledge and in talent, cannot be our limit. We have the power to be more rigidly impersonal, disinterested and just than they; and to learn from undisguised and genuine records to look with remorse upon the past, and to the future with assured hope of better things; bearing this in mind, that ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... with the entree that the blow fell, and I had a curious, impersonal sort of feeling that on every night to come, should I live for a hundred years, each future entree of each future dinner would recall the sensation of this moment. Something inside me, that was myself yet not myself, chuckled ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... Then a boy's voice rang out in the song of Mergellina. The obedient voice was soft and very young, though manly. And it sounded as if it sang only for one person, who was very near. Yet it was impersonal. It asked nothing from, it told nothing to, that person. Simply, and very naturally, it just gave to the night a very simple and a ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... surprise to many to find the work in sheds and quarries proceeding with its accustomed regularity; to find that to the new comers in Flamsted the affair was an impersonal one, that Champney Googe held no place among the workmen; that his absconding meant to them simply another one of the "high rollers" fleeing from his deserts. Little by little, during that first week, the truth found ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... community—from the costermonger who says 'Good Old Winston!' to the fashionable woman who says 'I do think Mr. Balfour is rather wonderful!'—and you will find the same plentiful lack of interest in the impersonal side of polities. You will find that almost every one is interested in politics only as a personal conflict between certain interesting men—as a drama, in fact. Frown not, then, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... no clear course. Whichever way he looked at it the horrible tangle grew more horrible. There was a recurring sense of unreality, a visionary feeling of detachment which enabled him to view the situation from an impersonal standpoint, as one criticises a nightmare, confident in the knowledge that it is only a dream. But in this case the confidence was based on nothing tangible and the illusion faded as quickly as it rose and left him confronted with ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... spent many months in the Colony studying with attention its politics and public temper. As his social acquaintanceships lay chiefly among the Conservatives, he had no difficulty in getting frank expressions of their views. In the following sentences he sums up the more moderate and impersonal of these, as he ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... California,[67] declared that, "arbitrary power, enforcing its edicts to the injury of the persons and property of its subjects, is not law, whether manifested as the decree of a personal monarch or of an impersonal multitude. And the limitations imposed by our constitutional law upon the action of the governments, both State and national, are essential to the preservation of public and private rights, notwithstanding the representative character of our political institutions. The enforcement of these limitations ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... with fear and trembling, that he had drawn her, so he devoutly believed, so close to reality that he felt that Mary-Clare would discover her at once and resent the impertinence. But he need not have held any such thought. Mary-Clare was far too impersonal; far too absorbed a nature to be largely concerned with herself, and Northrup had failed absolutely in his deductions, as he was soon ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... quickly and soundly made them endurable. The first night that she spent in her completed house behind barred windows and barricaded door was one of almost undiluted peace and happiness. The night noises seemed far removed and impersonal and the soughing of the wind in the trees was gently soothing. Before, it had carried a mournful note and was sinister in that it might hide the approach of some real danger. That night she ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sceptical logician has gone, and so has the imaginative dreamer for whom the world was the automatic magnifying mirror of his own childish form and environment. It has been revealed to him that there are independent personal and impersonal forces outside himself, forces with which he may come into a conscious and fascinatingly exciting relationship. It is a revelation of supreme importance, and with it comes not only the complexly emotional and ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... eyes bored into Skag with almost impersonal penetration, till the young American knew why this big Englishman's name was one to conjure with. Then ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... the idea of God or mind is both personal and impersonal. Nor in ascribing, as appears to us, both these attributes to him, and in speaking of God both in the masculine and neuter gender, did he seem to himself inconsistent. For the difference between the personal and impersonal was not ...
— Philebus • Plato
... was markedly impersonal. They spoke of stock raising, of the best breeds of beef cattle, of what had been done with irrigation and of what Rios planned for another year. It became clear that Zoraida was the sole owner of several thousand fair acres here and that Ruiz Rios stood in the position of general manager to ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... compositions of the Pura@nas the gods lost their character as hypostatic powers of nature, and thus became actual personalities and characters having their tales of joy and sorrow like the mortal here below. The Vedic gods may be contrasted with them in this, that they are of an impersonal nature, as the characters they display are mostly but expressions of the powers of nature. To take an example, the fire or Agni is described, as Kaegi has it, as one that "lies concealed in the softer wood, as in a chamber, until, called forth by the rubbing in the early morning hour, ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... his nature. Whatever suspicion of policy has surrounded the tract must be ascribed to the well-intentioned letter of the Earl of Berkeley above quoted; and the Earl would not have written thus had he felt Swift's motive to be any other than a purely impersonal one. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... later a slender, dark skinned man with impeccably waxed moustaches entered, regarded Bell with an entirely impersonal interest, took one of the revolvers from one of the six frock-coated gentlemen, and seated himself comfortably. He waved his hand and they filed uneasily from the room. So far, not ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... I must call universal—a quality which appeals with equal force to readers of every rank, and which will procure for them as wide a popularity five hundred years hence as they enjoy to-day. I call them novels, but they are really prose-poems. The novel,' he continued, rising for an instant to impersonal heights, 'the novel is the literary form or expression of my period, as the drama was that of Shakespeare's, the epic of Homer's. Do you follow me? Ah, here is a copy of "Crispin Dorr"—here is "The Card Dealer." Take them and read them, and return them when you have finished. Being author's ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... The impersonal character of the Homeric poems has left us entirely in the dark as to the birthplace, the history, and the date, of their author. So complete is the darkness which surrounds the name of Homer that his very existence has been disputed, and his works have been declared ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal devotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact, punctual. She must ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... I praised her, as I had all along, but instead of saying, "Iss dat so?" when I remarked that the muffins were delicious or the dessert a great success, her face began to light up, and a smile take the place of the impersonal comment. The furious temper began to wane, or, at least, to be under better control. Guests occasionally inquired, "What have you done to ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... I felt, however, so awkward that I could find no words to express my fears; moreover, I hardly dared say anything at all regarding herself after the haughty way in which she had received my well-meant protest. Manifestly I was but to her as a sort of refuge and provider of heat, altogether impersonal, and not to be regarded in any degree as an individual. In these humiliating circumstances what could I do but ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... no other union which Germans ought to deem more holy. None have ever been entered into with less selfishness, with higher impersonal sentiments. It united the great homeless one, who had suffered so much and so long under the heartlessness and unappreciative neglect of his contemporaries, to a wife, who stood beside the friend of her father, the ideal of her husband, with cheerful encouragement (mit ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... one said nothing. In his eyes there was no rebuke, no question. His eyes were as impersonal as stars. ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... his case in any petty, or in any party, spirit; he did not seem to look on himself as just a half-starved child that should have cried its eyes out till it was fed at least as well as the dogs that passed him; he seemed to look on himself as that impersonal, imperial thing—the ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of.... Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... others are stenographers. The former, I was told, by the way, make it a practice to avoid first-hand business contacts with their guests by sending them their bills through the mail, and requiring that response be made by means of the same impersonal channel. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... bad news, I want to know it, right slam-bang out," I told him. And for the first time he turned and looked at me, in a meditative and impersonal sort of way that brought the fish-hook tugging at my thorax again. He looked at me as though some inner part of him were still debating as to whether or not he was about to be confronted by a woman in tears. Then ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... and dissatisfactions, impersonal and unpractical, we can receive, or in reality, give ourselves, in ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... In an impersonal way she described the life of a teacher in a great American school system: its routine, its spying supervision, its injustices, its mechanical ideals, its one preeminent ambition to teach as many years as it was necessary ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... life-drama of the streets, of the pot-house; she shows you the seamy side of life behind the scenes; she calls things by their right names. But there is not a touch of sensuality about her, she is neither contaminated nor contaminating by what she sings; she is simply a great, impersonal, dramatic artist, who sings realism as others ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... but an idealist whose dreams and visions were inspired by the play of his sensibility upon his intellect and imagination, and therefore he was the least impersonal of thinkers. Generous of heart, he was filled with bitter suspicions; inordinately proud, he nursed his pride amid sordid realities; cherishing ideals of purity and innocence, he sank deep in the mire of imaginative ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... common with all medical men, that science is impersonal, and that the high aim of relief to suffering humanity sanctifies all duties: and we repel, as derogatory to the science of medicine, the assertion that the physician who has risen to the level of his high calling need be embarrassed, in treating general diseases, by the presence of earnest women. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... ourselves a good deal. You see that's just what we've got to do. We've got to hammer it in." But the fact is that she doesn't repeat herself, that she's always fresh and stimulating, because—I suppose it's because she's always thinking of the Great Impersonal Object, and talking about it out of her own eager heart. Ernestine? She's as unhackneyed as a ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... points in his story Betty Jo asked straightforward questions, or made short, matter-of-fact comments; but, always with her businesslike air of competent interest. Indeed, she managed to treat the situation as being wholly impersonal; while at the same time the man was never for a moment made to feel that she was lacking in sincere and genuine sympathy. Only when he told her that his name was Brian Kent, and mentioned the Empire Consolidated Savings Bank, did she for the ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... principle which is both ancient and absolute, tracing the line of duty for all men, clear and indisputable, without any possibility of hesitation or compromise—against and in the face of all comers. And this principle is one which calls forth the proudest devotion, seeing it is impersonal, for the king is not the elected leader of conquerors, oppressing the conquered, but a living flag, the national rallying-point for all the defenders of the mother country against her enemies, whether within ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... health and comeliness! You do not want them for yourself, perhaps not even for your son, but you look on smiling; and when you recall their images—again it is with a smile. I defy you to see or think of them and not smile with an infinite and intimate but quite impersonal pleasure. ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and left early; often he did not come at all. She began to question seriously if she had been right to remain in the cottage. Her heart told her no, but her pride said yes, and her pride was strong; also, it was backed by reason. Her steady brain, which was capable of quite impersonal thinking, told her that Stefan would be actively discontented just now in company with his family, and that this discontent would eat into his remaining ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... predecessor's hostility had been so formidable. "But," added the prudent Rohilla, "it must be remembered that the recollection of the past will make the Vazir timorous and suspicious. The negotiation will be as delicate as important. It should not be entrusted to ordinary agency, or to the impersonal channel ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... which I live is a constant thing. And I still keep looking for my enemy. In a strange, impersonal way it has become my enemy for though it does not hate, it threatens my life. My waking hours are hell and my sleep is nightmare. Strange how a man clings to life and sanity. It would be so easy to lose either. Of one thing I am certain—this cannot ...
— The Issahar Artifacts • Jesse Franklin Bone
... ended also what had been a happy period for Sears Kendrick. He made no more informal daily visits to the Fair Harbor. Twice a week, at stated times, he and Elizabeth met in the office and conferred concerning bills, letters and accounts. She was calm and impersonal during these interviews, and he tried to be so. There was no reference to other matters and no more cheerful and delightful chats, no more confidences between them. It did seem to him that she was more absent-minded, less alert ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... the highest type of social response in the recognition of impersonal evil, in the quest of knowledge, or in free discussion. Almost two centuries of dogma-worship, with its contemplation of selected facts, has made it now impossible to secure from one thoroughly socialized in the spirit ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... that—and it was clear that she was not finding it easy to appraise and place him. The Governor had given him no hint of the possible trend of the table talk but the woman took the matter into her own hands. As though by prearrangement she touched upon wholly impersonal matters, recent movements in European affairs, a new novel, the industrial situation; things that could be broached without fear of embarrassment were picked up and flung aside when they had served their purpose. The Governor was often inattentive, ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... that God is the object of happiness, we must remember that He is no cold, impersonal Beauty, but a living and loving God, not indeed in the order of nature our Father and Friend, but still our kind Master and very good Lord, who speaks to His servants from behind the clouds that hide His face, and assures them of His abiding favour ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... behind the kitchen stove, was keenly alive to the fact that supper was being served. He had had his own supper, so that his interest was purely impersonal. ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... natives when, after unsheathing the steel gaffs on the roosters' legs, the birds were allowed to make their preliminary dash at one another. For a moment they walked around the ring with an excessively polite air, each keeping a wary lookout on his antagonist, but frigidly impersonal and courteous. One might almost fancy them shaking hands before the combat should begin, so ceremonious was their attitude. Then there would come a simultaneous onslaught of feathered fury. Again and again they flew ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... the decisive difference between those peoples whose patriotic affections center about the fortunes of an impersonal commonwealth and those in whom is superadded a fervent aspiration for dynastic ascendency. The latter may be counted on to break the peace ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... not sorry; she was just as glad to go on thinking of her trouble-maker as the man who mended the boats. There was something freeing about keeping him impersonal. ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... that is what he means. He figures to himself the nation as a vast hierarchy of liberties, an autonomy of States within the empire, of provinces within the State, of communes within the province, of proprietors within the commune. Equality is equality of rank, of worth, of wealth, of force, but impersonal equality before the law is for him an unnatural thing, an invention of the professors ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... enough, I should prefer to think of you like that. Impersonal, nameless—I only do know one of your names. I'd like to christen you myself—let me see, what ought you to be called? I've got it. Eve! (With a gesture towards the wings.) Trumpets! (The funeral march is heard again.) There it is again! Now I must invent your age, for I don't know ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... impersonal considerations the girl was brought back to the vital phases of her life by the harsh voice of one of the men. "Lize Wetherford is goin' to get jumped one o' these days for sellin' whiskey without ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... I did not paint well. The impersonal state of mind in which alone good artistic work can be ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... would be that day. Lying in bed that morning, she found herself caught by her old impersonal whimsy. "I'm a fever, and on the ninth day of me the man comes out in a rash proposal." Ah, but this time she was in a tertian, too. What a difference from those other proposals—proper or improper. Her mind ran over half a dozen, ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... this excessive proximity into wholesome neighbourhood, in order that true neighbourly feelings may have room to grow and thrive, and eventually to ripen into the flower of a fair civic life. "A modern city," it has been well said, "is probably the most impersonal combination of individuals that has ever been formed in the world's history."[288] To evoke the personal human qualities of this medley of city workers so as to reach within the individual the citizen, to educate the civic feeling until it ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... gentlemen who belonged to that period of the South when men not only gambled and rode and drank, but found leisure to cultivate poetry, and Greek, and music, all the fine things of life. He talked to her about such matters as had interested them, large impersonal matters, taking for granted her intelligent understanding. This flattered the girl, though she had no ambition to ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... a month." No affectation in that even friendliness. He laughed suddenly in tolerant, all but impersonal, self-analysis. "And I'm tired—tired until the marrow of my bones aches." He laughed again. "It seems as though I never was ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... of the Holy Spirit comes out more tenderly and touchingly than in Eph. iv. 30, "And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption." Here grief is ascribed to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not a blind, impersonal influence or power that comes into our lives to illuminate, sanctify and empower them. No, He is immeasurably more than that, He is a holy Person who comes to dwell in our hearts, One who sees clearly every act we perform, ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... hours I still did not know; nor did I know, though I was beginning to guess, the relation between these mechanical colossi and the sluggish lumps I had seen disgorged from the cylinder. With a queer feeling of impersonal interest I turned my desk chair to the window, sat down, and stared at the blackened country, and particularly at the three gigantic black things that were going to and fro in the glare about ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... perfection! A million of perfectly formed creatures in a drop of water! I do not doubt that it is this overwhelming immensity of things that leads some minds to find a sort of relief, as it were, in the idea of an Infinite Impersonal Force working in all things. But it is a child's thought. Nay, does not the very fact that my mind can take in so vast a range of things lead me better to conceive of what the Infinite Mind can do? An ant's mind, if it had one, might find it just as ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... busied himself among his men and personally superintended them, but the large factory tends to displace the small workshop, the corporation takes the place of the individual employer, and the employee becomes as impersonal a cog in the labor system as is any part of the machine at which he works. It used to be the case that a thrifty workman might hope to become in the future an employer, but now he has become a permanent member of a distinct class, for the large capital required for manufacturing ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... made their whole relation so impersonal that they hadn't the rules or reasons people found in ordinary friendships. They didn't care for the things it was supposed necessary to care for in the intercourse of the world. They ended one day—they ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James |
