"Perfunctorily" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in. a perfunctorily kind manner and offered her a chair, which she took gratefully. She sat for a quarter of an hour almost without moving, leaning against the back of the high chair. At last the child began to get restless and troublesome, and she spent half an hour helping ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... there a second or two, Wickersham an inch or more taller and inches narrower in shoulder and girth of chest. Perfunctorily they nodded, each to the other, and wheeled ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... papers," he kindly corrected, and seating himself at his desk he examined the minor transfers perfunctorily and ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... perfunctorily. He nodded assent to all the garrulous old man said. It was quite true, the beasts looked ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... this knowledge for their speech making, while in conversation it all faded away into the misty realms of the imagination. "Positively," writes Mr. Gompers, "I never found one man in my trip ready to go further into constructive Socialism than to repeat perfunctorily its time-worn generalities. On the other hand, I met men whom I knew years ago, either personally or through correspondence or by their work, as active propagandists of the Socialists' theoretical creed, who are now devoting ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... embarrassed eyes, tried to see some resemblance, in the little blue-red oval, to the sad, wistful face of his brother, which even then was haunting him from some mysterious distance. He kissed the child's forehead, but even then so vaguely and perfunctorily, that the mother sighed, and drew it ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Russian Fleet, which had characteristically annihilated the Turkish Fleet in the harbour of Sinope. We did not do much in the Black Sea beyond running the Tiger on shore, where her crew were captured by the Muscovites. We bombarded Odessa perfunctorily, and precisely in that portion of the city where our shot and shell could do the least harm. We did not destroy the Russian Fleet, for the sufficing reason that the Russian Commander-in-Chief sank all his three-deckers full fathom five in the ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... now the average dreary American parlor. "Dear me," the fascinating Mr. X would say, "but do you know, love, in this very room I remember meeting the distinguished Marquis of Monte Pio;" or perhaps the fashionable Jones of the State Department instantly crushed the decayed friend he was perfunctorily visiting by saying, "'Pon my soul, YOU here;—why, the last time I was in this room I gossiped for an hour with the Countess de Castenet in that very corner." For, with the recall of the aforesaid ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... perfunctorily, as he helped her down the stairs of the cave-dwellers' rock-house. Mary had a vague idea that he meant to interest her in a "sad case," as he had done once or twice before, when he thought she needed to be "taken out of herself." She expected to hear a tale of some poor girl who had "lost ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... we've had an awful rush to-day,' he said, as he perfunctorily shook hands. 'There was some big fighting on the Somme, the night before last, and the casualty trains have been coming in all day. I'm only able to get away for ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... driver," said one passenger. She held up her dollar bill, indignantly, to dismiss him. He lifted his hat, perfunctorily, and ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... inning really settled the outcome of the contest. After the Giants had made five runs Boston played through the other eight innings perfunctorily. The crowd of Boston enthusiasts, which had come to New York to see the finishing touches put on the Giants, was bitterly disappointed, while the New York enthusiasts, not over hopeful on account of the disposition of the Giants to blunder badly at vital moments, were at least in a ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... governor and a governor in time of war. One is enthusiastic, resourceful, with ability to organise victory by filling languishing patriotism with new and noble inspiration—the other simply performs his duty, sometimes respectably, sometimes only perfunctorily. George Clinton illustrated, in his own person, the difference between a great war governor and a governor in time of war. If he failed to win renown on the battlefield, his ability to inspire the people with confidence, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... his part of the task of slaughter coolly, leisurely, almost perfunctorily. His training in the Regular Army was against the likelihood of his displaying zeal in anything. He instituted certain measures, and let things take their course. That course was a rapid transition from bad to worse, but it was still in the direction of his wishes, and, ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... he answered quietly, and hitched nearer to her along the bench to make room for a new-comer who was thrusting in beside him. He turned perfunctorily to see who it might be. It ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... grew. How trivial it was, after all. The men and women she had calmly and even gratefully accepted as types were nothing more than marionettes, which the author behind the booth manipulated not badly but perfunctorily. The diction was exquisite; there was style; but now as she read there was lacking the one thing that stood for life, blood. It did not pulsate in the veins of these people. Until now she had not recognized this fact, and she was half-way ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... What have you been doing?" Mrs. Willoughby asked, perfunctorily. Though it was late in the morning she was still in bed, sitting up in a dressing sack, and turning the pages of a weekly publication that dealt in news of local high life. Its chief item, to-day, was the announcement of a dance ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... for "the life." But it is reassuring to find that the reactions of "the life" upon them always quicken them to a deeper respect for intellectual values. The "academic" holds first place in the Wellesley life, not perfunctorily but vitally. The students themselves are swift to recognize and rebuke, usually in the "Free Press" or the "Parliament of Fools", of the College News, any signs of intellectual indifference or laxity. Wellesley, like Harvard and other large colleges, has ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... was treated by Schlegel with urbane condescension as a gifted playwright who had tried to imitate Shakspere and met with but limited success. The early plays were dismissed with a mere cry of pain, and the later ones were discussed very briefly and perfunctorily with ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... was rather grave and formal, even a little stiff. The Marchesino paid Vere two or three compliments, and she inquired perfunctorily after his health, and expressed ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Mr Canvasser Bloom for instant submittal to Mr Coadjutor Deacon Dedalus. Hitherto silent, whether the better to show by preternatural gravity that curious dignity of the garb with which he was invested or in obedience to an inward voice, he delivered briefly and, as some thought, perfunctorily the ecclesiastical ordinance forbidding man to put asunder what God ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... that I have already given that I am not managing to express my personal feeling about Roosevelt. Yet he is the last man of whom I want to write perfunctorily or even ceremoniously. Therefore, for the time I shall bring my recollections of him to a close by merely noting certain ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... or friends to support them in a fight for their rights. On behalf of these, with my usual piece of smuggled lead pencil, I soon began to indite and submit to the officers of the institution, letters in which I described the cruel practices which came under my notice. My reports were perfunctorily accepted and at once forgotten or ignored. Yet these letters, so far as they related to overt acts witnessed, were lucid and should have been convincing. Furthermore, my allegations were frequently corroborated by bruises on the ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... old-fashioned; if one may say it of a French farce, it is Victorian. Apart from a few topical allusions worked in rather perfunctorily there is scarcely anything said or done that might not have been said or done in the 'eighties. But for a certain type of Englishman there is a perennial attraction in feeling that at any moment the proprieties may be outraged. That ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... men had to do upon the knoll ten miles from the Bar L-M was done perfunctorily and in gloom. Little by little, man by man, they drew away from Hume, leaving him standing alone. They looked at his horse, by long odds the finest animal they had seen this day, and from Endymion they looked to his master. Now and then a quick glance ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... mourner might notice a stained-glass window in a church while a funeral was in progress. It was the side-light of grace on affliction involuntarily comprehended, from long training, by the exterior faculties. Carroll even said, half perfunctorily: ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman |
