"Passionless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... instead of pagan poetry, or heard their voices chanting godly psalms rather than the old love-ballads. She did not object openly to the pious form of speech which was known as the "language of Canaan." She was a passionless woman, self-seeking but not revengeful, and adopted a certain degree of tolerance, no doubt, from her patriotic counsellor, L'Hopital, who resembled the Prince of ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... and Kiryakov himself comes quietly and stolidly into the room. He sits down in the chair and strokes his whiskers. Silence reigns. Marya Petrovna looks timidly at his handsome, passionless, wooden face and waits for him to begin to talk, but he remains absolutely silent and absorbed in thought. After waiting in vain, the midwife makes up her mind to begin herself, and utters a phrase ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... room there arose suddenly the sound of many feet shuffling, as if men were carrying a heavy weight, and presently the smell of ether began to come to them through the key-hole. And they heard groans, and a dull, passionless voice that spoke words of ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... which she neglected and from the total of which, as she flattered herself, the air of distinction almost mathematically resulted. This air corresponded superficially with her acquired Calabrian sonorities, from her voluminous title down, but the colourless hair, the passionless forehead, the mild cheek and long lip of the British matron, the type that had set its trap for her earlier than any other, were elements difficult to deal with and were at moments all a sharp observer saw. The battle-ground then ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... grandfather's adoring authority remained, the last will and testament of Anthony Seagrave had provided a marvellous, man-created substitute for the dead: a vast, shadowy thing which ruled their lives with passionless precision; which ordered their waking hours even to the minutest particulars; which assumed machine-like charge of their persons, their personal expenses, their bringing-up, their schooling, the ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... shape of a corpse dimmers up through deep water, In his eye lit the passionless passion of slaughter, And men who had fought with O'Neil for the life Had gazed on his face with less ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... some sort solved. That Carlyle was haunted by these questions, and by the pitiless Sphinx herself who guards the portals of life and death,—that he had to meet her face to face, staring at him with her stony, passionless eyes,—that he had to grapple and struggle with her for victory,—there are proofs abundant in his writings. The details of the struggle, however, are not given us; it is the result only that we know. But it is evident that the progress of his mind from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... distance we could hear him approaching as usual, the passionless monotone of his voice growing ever nearer and more distinct, as he flapped methodically first one rein, then the other, over the unhurried action of his horse, sagely admonishing him to "G'long! ye old fool! ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... very gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world in slow and passionless excitement. ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... Morning shall become the wife of the Young Pine," was the courteous answer; but stern revenge lay deep hidden beneath the unmoved brow and passionless lip. ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... to read any admission of fraud in that handsome passionless face? If she did, she found herself ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... have liked to linger, but Sansome threaded his way toward the farther corner. As Keith passed near one of the close groups around a gambling table, it parted momentarily, and he looked into the eyes of the man in charge, cold, passionless, aloof, eyes neither friendly nor unfriendly. And he saw the pale skin; the weary, bored, immobile features; the meticulous neat dress; the long, deft fingers; and caught the withdrawn, deadly, exotic personality of ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... sense of helplessness when he heard that soft mechanical voice. He remembered it now. The passionless voice knew all, understood all, and forgave nothing. That artfully manufactured voice had spoken to him, had listened, and then had judged. In his dream, he had personified the robot-confessor into the ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... accustomed place. I kept close upon him; and, with a fluttering heart, seated myself at his side. My cheek burned with nervous agitation, but I did not look towards my adversary. His eye, however, was upon me. I felt it, and was sensible of his steady, long, and, as it seemed, passionless gaze. He did not move, or betray any symptom of surprise. As on the previous occasions, he proceeded solemnly to prayer; and when the ceremony was completed, he, as usual, offered up his alms. As the service drew to its close, my own anxiety became ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... Letters; three hundred and seventy-four Lawyers; (Bouille, Memoires sur la Revolution Francaise (London, 1797), i. 68.) and at least one Clergyman: the Abbe Sieyes. Him also Paris sends, among its twenty. Behold him, the light thin man; cold, but elastic, wiry; instinct with the pride of Logic; passionless, or with but one passion, that of self-conceit. If indeed that can be called a passion, which, in its independent concentrated greatness, seems to have soared into transcendentalism; and to sit there with a kind of godlike indifference, and look ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... arching vines, and arrived at the broad and spacious portico. Before it, on either side of the steps, reposed the image of the Egyptian sphinx, and the moonlight gave an additional and yet more solemn calm to those large, and harmonious, and passionless features, in which the sculptors of that type of wisdom united so much of loveliness with awe; half way up the extremities of the steps darkened the green and massive foliage of the aloe, and the shadow of the eastern ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... are very much alike too—more alike than they would care to think themselves for they eye each other with cold, mistrustful, deprecating looks. They are both specimens of the emancipated young American girl—practical, positive, passionless, subtle, and knowing, as you please, either too much or too little. And yet, as I say, they have a certain stamp, a certain grace; I like to talk with them, to ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... musician once said of a promising but passionless cantatrice—"She sings well, but she wants something, and in that something everything. If I were single, I would court her; I would marry her; I would maltreat her; I would break her heart; and in six months she would be the ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... physician, though externally the same, was really of another character than it had previously been. The intellect of Roger Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain path before it. It was not, indeed, precisely that which he had laid out for himself to tread. Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... never wholly satisfied. Then, when the darkness had shut down over the land, he crept to Kria's house, and bade Chep follow him. She came without a word, for women whose ancestors have been slaves for generations have very little will of their own. She wept furtively when Ku-ish told her, in a few passionless sentences, that he had killed Kria and his son, and she bewailed herself aloud when, at their first halting-place, she received the severe chastisement, which Ku-ish dealt out to her with no grudging hand, as her share in the general punishment. ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... Saint. We will call her Agatha. I used to think she could be painted for Mary Mother, her face is so passionless and pure and good. I used to want to make her wrap a blue cloth round her head, as if she were in a picture I have a print of, and then, if we could only find the painter who was as pure and good as she, she should be painted as Mary Mother. Well, ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... are changed," said she, in that strange, passionless tone, "quite changed; your eyes are cold, your face cruel and hard and yet—O dear God!" she cried, "O dear God, I cannot believe your love is truly dead—how can I? O dear, dear Peregrine, tell me you do love me still—if only just a little—oh, be ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... who spoke first; and she did so in as calm, deliberate, passionless a tone as if she had been devising the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... a new doctrine for her. How rarely in her young, passionless, sorrowless life, she had thought of the few words, oft used in cant, and Agatha hated all cant—"the will of God." She ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... heart, is the action by which Thou, Lord, hast proved Thy speech. Thy life has given Thee the right to speak of what Thou givest as Thy peace. So quiet wast Thou that, but for the wrong-doers that crossed Thy path, Thou wouldst have seemed to be passionless; yea, some have even spoken of Thee as the "cold Galilean," because of the marvellous rest of Thy soul in ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... rule with her wonderful spirits, chatted inconsequently. But Angelica's unnatural quietude could not escape the attention of the rest of the party, and inquiring glances were directed to Lady Fulda, in the calm of whose passionless demeanour, however, there was no consciousness of anything unusual to be read; and of course no questions ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Vermont exploded the inflamed nervous system of the country, he had made an address which had been copied in every State in the Union and been hopefully commented on abroad. In this speech, which was a passionless, impersonal, and judicial argument against interference in the domestic affairs of a friendly nation seeking to put down an insurgent population whose record for butchery and crime equalled her own, as well as a brilliant forecast of the evils, foreign and domestic, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... experimented on the poor the treatment which he applied afterward to his rich patients, never hazarding on the last any new cures before having first tried and retried the application in anima vili, as he said, with that kind of passionless barbarity which a blind love for science produces. Thus, if the doctor wished to convince himself of the comparative effect of some new and hazardous treatment, in order to be able to deduce consequences favorable to such or such system, he took a certain number ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... thunder in my ears. By some effort, I knew not how, I managed to restrain myself, and her cold, passionless voice ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... Ever since the previous day he had not been able to rid himself of that stern, hard look with which Raeburn had so terribly rebuked him; it had persistently haunted him. There was nothing stern in this dead face. It was still and passionless, bearing the look of repose which, spite of a harassed life, it had always borne in moments of leisure. He hardly looked as though he were dead. Erica could almost have fancied that he was but resting after the toils of a hard day, having fallen asleep for a few minutes, as she had often ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... in his even, passionless tone. "The fraud has been worked by Frank. He had access to the books. He was the only person who saw Rex Holland; he was the only official at the bank who could possibly falsify the entries and at the same ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... detection and transmit their inferiority to their descendants. He feared that the removal of the present pressure might cause a degeneracy of the human race, and indeed that the whole body might become purely rudimentary, the man himself being nothing but soul and mechanism, an intelligent but passionless principle ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the lingering Indian Summer, Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing, Never a bird, but the passionless chant of ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... the dead calm and passionless on the one hand, to the violent and maniacal on the other. The nation is still convalescent, its development is slow, and it is impossible to say how far new Greece will develop. But its strength lies in ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... up a song, words of Ronsard to a pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as the shades embarked for the passionless land. Yet a little while, sang the poet, and there shall be no more love; only to sit and remember loves that might have been. There is a falling flourish in the air that remains in the memory and comes back in incongruous places, on the seat of hansoms or in the warm bed at night, ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with their array of bottles, no hypocrites snuffling sympathy while dreaming of fat legacies, no pious mummeries, only the innocent things direct from the hand of God, unstained by human sin and training, trees and bushes and flowers, the tender living things about, the voiceless and passionless music of lonely nature, the hearty sun, and the maternal embrace of the sweet waters. It was dying as the wild animals die, without ceremony; as the flowers die, a gentle weakening of the stem, a rush of perfume to the soft earth, and the caressing winds to do ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... wasted his fine features, but had detracted nothing from their strength and regularity of outline. His lips were closely set, and his expression, though painfully eager, was not otherwise displeasing. There was none of the fear of death there; nor was there anything of the passionless resignation of the man who has bidden farewell to life, and made his peace with God and man; nor, in those moments of watching, had his face any of the ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the dark listening, and it seemed to her half awakened consciousness that this voice in the April dawn was like Creed Bonbright. These notes, lucid, passionless, that yet always stirred her heart strangely, and the selfless personality, the high-purposed soul that spoke in him, they were akin. The crystal tones flowed on; Judith harkened, the ear of her spirit alert for a message. Yes, Creed was like ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... to appreciate the sorrow, the indignation and the love of these friends of a ruined institution. Passionless logic will never enable one to do justice to the sentiments of those who cannot restrain their tears as they stand uncovered before the majestic remains of a Melrose Abbey, or properly to estimate the motives and methods of those ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... emotions of the parties! The brothers paced the lodge in agitation. The civilized sister was in tears. The other, obedient to the affected stoicism of her adopted race, was as cold, unmoved, and passionless ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... every detail of his method. It may be that his playing will be more spirited one night than another. But the actor who combines the electric force of a strong personality with a mastery of the resources of his art must have a greater power over his audiences than the passionless actor who gives a most artistic simulation of the emotions ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... a shade of human passion in his temperament have been contented with her forehead. Her mouth had all the richness of youth, and the full enticing curves and ruby colour of Anglo-Saxon beauty. Caroline Waddington was no pale, passionless goddess; her graces and perfections were human, and in being so were the more dangerous to humanity. Her forehead we have said, or should have said, was perfect; we dare not affirm quite so much in praise of her mouth: there was sometimes a hardness there, not in the lines of the feature ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... awhile; there was no emotion on either side. It was strange to see them so passionless, so antagonistic, like St. ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... between earth and sky, and sacrificing their birthright of either cloudship or foghood, were accompanying a warm sea-wind towards the north. Out beyond, and quite clear of all responsibility for them and theirs, was a flawless heaven with the stellar and planetary universe in it, pitiless and passionless eyes perhaps—as Tennyson calls them—and strange fires; but in this case without power to burn and brand their nothingness into the visitors to St. Sennans, who laughed and talked and smoked and took no notice; and, indeed, rather than otherwise, considered that Orion's Belt ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... misgoverned, misguided, splendidly reckless boyhood and early manhood of Fox Pitt opposed the gravity and stillness of his youth. The exuberant animal vitality of Fox, wasting itself overlong in the flame of aimless passions, was emphasized by the solid reserve, the passionless austerity of Pitt. The one man was compact of all the heady enthusiasms, the splendid generosities of a nature rich in the vitality that sought eagerly new outlets for its energy, that played hard as it worked hard, that exulted in extremes. ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... is true." His voice was altogether passionless, but something had come into his face, into his whole attitude, which denied the calm passivity of his reply. The soul of the man—a soul in ineffable extremity of suffering—was struggling for expression, striving ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... instrument of the future? If the answer to these questions be affirmative, the evidence of the poets, of our own preferences, of religions ancient and modern, is of merely secondary concern as corroborative, and as serving curiosity to observe how far the teachings of passionless science have been divined or denied by past ages and by other modes of perception and inquiry. Therefore this is to be in its basis none other than a biological treatise; for the laws of reproduction, the newly gained knowledge regarding the nature of sex, and the facts of physiology, afford ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... my wife's conduct, this passionless change—for I felt instinctively that warm humanity had nothing to do with the transformation—took place three nights ago. These three last days Mar-got has been playing a part. With ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... passionless atmosphere, so little accustomed to such scenes, Roma sat in her wounded pride and humiliation, with her head down, and her beautiful ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... seemed to be saints, kings, priests, or generals, even the inmates of the dosshouse spat and rubbed their eyes in astonishment at the imagination of the Deacon, who told them shameless tales of lewd, fantastic adventures, with blinking eyes and a passionless expression of countenance. ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... magnitude of the sacrifice which the young novice was making appealed irresistibly to her admiration of the morally sublime. There was in that relinquishment of all the joys of earth a self-surrender to a passionless life of mortification, and penance, and prayer, an apparent heroism, which reminded Jane of her much-admired Roman maidens and matrons. She aspired with most romantic ardor to do, herself, something great and noble. While her sound judgment ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... means the arrival of a beau on Sunday; a big or little tea leaf means a tall or a short caller, and so on. There is a book of dreams kept on one table in the mill, and the girls consult it to find the interpretation of their nocturnal reveries. They are fanciful, sentimental, cold, passionless. The accepted honesty of married life makes them slow to discard the liberty they love, to dismiss the suitors who would attend their wedding ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... away and his head grew steadier, he wondered at himself. Yet he trembled in every limb and the only clear idea that struggled out of his confused thoughts was an overmastering desire to take that cold face between his hands and kiss it until its passionless marble glowed into ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... stripping off all the qualities and attributes which veil Him; He can only be reached by divesting ourselves of all the distinctions of personality, and sinking or rising into our "uncreated nothingness"; and He can only be imitated by aiming at an abstract spirituality, the passionless "apathy" of an universal which is nothing in particular. Thus we see that the whole of those developments of Mysticism which despise symbols, and hope to see God by shutting the eye of sense, hang together. They all follow from the false notion ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... don't, sermons. The entire volume is one of denial and prohibition. He proclaims the act, even for the one purpose he allows to be right, as low, and in itself degrading, to be engaged in only after "prayer and fasting" and "mortifying the flesh," and even then, in the most passionless, and only done-because-it-has-to-be manner; as a mere matter of duty; to be permitted by sufferance; joyless, disgusting in itself; a something to be avoided, even in thought, other than it is a necessity for the continuance of ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... and he began to speak, but she stopped him, and went on in a passionless sort of voice. "Some one is coming," she said, "and we must say good-bye; and since you wish it, it is Good-bye.' But I'm not a child, to change my fancies in a day, so I won't promise to forget. And I think you have treated me very badly, so neither will I promise to ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... the passionless character of Iago. It is all will in intellect; and therefore he is here a bold partizan of a truth, but yet of a truth converted into a falsehood by the absence of all the necessary modifications caused by the frail nature of man. And ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... pillow, and he saw that she was smiling faintly. Her face bore no trace of the tragic truth she had uttered. But the tragedy was plain enough to him, even without her passionless words of revolt. The situation of this young, educated girl, aglow with youth, bettered, body and mind, to the squalor of Clinch's dump, ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... and travel, grown tall and graceful, and "ideally beautiful," a veritable "Prince Charming," he came over the sea, out of fairyland, via Rotterdam, to seek his fortune—to attempt, at least, to wake the grandeur-enchanted Princess from her passionless dream of lonely, loveless sovereignty. He came, was seen, and conquered! But not at once; ah, no; for this charming royal idyll had its changing strophes, marking deepening degrees of sentiment—admiration, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... with his eyes fixed on the face of Sir Oswald's wife. But during the whole of his speech she had never once looked at him. She had never withdrawn her eyes from the eastern horizon. Passionless contempt was expressed by that curving lip, that calm repose of eye and brow. It seemed as if this woman's disdain for the plotting villain into whose power she had ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... terror, we lose our accustomed pride or indifference, we speak in whispers, and we tread softly in the presence of the visitor who smites but once and then smites the body only: but in the awful presence of the living image of God we go our ways careless, indifferent, cold, passionless, selfish. ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... rustling through the dark; Fragrance and passionless music woven as one; Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace Gently and slowly ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... think the coldness of women has been greatly exaggerated. Men's theoretically ideal woman (though they don't care so much about it in practice) is passionless, and women are afraid to admit that they have any desire for sexual pleasure. Rousseau, who was not very straight-laced, excuses the conduct of Madame de Warens on the ground that it was not the result of passion: an aggravation rather than a palliation of the offense, if society ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... absolute rules. But there are unalterable facts. And the supremely important one here is that sexual intimacy is only a perfect experience when it is a mutual experience. I think the delusion is nearly dead that woman is a passionless creature, who will never actively desire her husband but who ought to be willing to receive him whenever he desires. Happy marriages can only be built upon the grave of that misconception. It was held to be a view honoring to women. As a matter of fact it led to a great deal of ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... that, hung on high, Roof'd the world with doubt and fear, [9] Floating thro' an evening atmosphere, Grow golden all about the sky; In thee all passion becomes passionless, Touch'd by thy spirit's mellowness, Losing his fire and active might In a silent meditation, Falling into a still delight, And luxury of contemplation: As waves that up a quiet cove Rolling slide, and lying still Shadow forth the banks at will: [10] Or sometimes they ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... she looked at him, and was beyond the power of his sounding. She grew vehement, full of still, passionless rage. She was like a goddess pronouncing ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... should have marked this shade of what I was, for most unwittingly I, uncommanded, find myself in your Grace's presence." He bent lower, touched the hem of her magnificent robe, and his voice, which had been quite even and passionless, changed in tone. "For the rest—whether I am yet to hold myself at your Grace's pleasure, or whether you give me sentence now—God save your Majesty and prevent your enemies at home and abroad—God bring downfall and confusion upon ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... not to speak too suddenly at the next encounter, the two cheerful derelicts drifted along the sunny coast of Grand Avenue. A shining and passionless peace presided over the streets. A gentle clop-clop of hooves came trotting down the way: here was a man driving a white horse in a neat rubber-tired buggy without a top. He leaned back and smiled to himself as he drove along. Life did not seem to be the ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... was the silence, so dreadful seemed that inhuman, snake-like man, so strange his aged, passionless councillors, and the place of council surrounded by a dizzy gulf, that fear took hold of them like the fear of an evil dream. Godwin wondered if Sinan could see the ring upon his breast, and what would happen to ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... coat in St. Louis last fall," he said. His voice was quiet, even passionless. Then from the pocket of the coat he took a revolver and laid it on the table. Marsden ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... winning. It seemed as if she and not the pink mountain blossoms must be responsible for all that haunting redolence in this landscape of passionless gray. Her brown eyes burned with glorious luminosity. Her color pulsed with health and the joyance of existence. Her red lips quivered with unuttered ecstacies that surged in the depths of her nature. Even the bright brown strands ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... is ended:—no word From Alice's white, breathless lips has been heard; Till, rousing herself from her passionless woe, She simply and quietly ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston
... your brethren? What victory will ye gain?—none other than weeping!" The words fell on deaf ears, and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, and exile forced Dino to look to the stranger. There is something strangely touching in the dry, passionless way in which he tracks Henry of Luxemburg from city to city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here and there in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the Emperor finds. The weary waiting came to nothing. ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... shadows that told of the dreamtide; Loved still for the longing whereby I remember That I was lone once in the world of thy making; Lone wandering about on thy blind way's confusion, The maze of thy paths that yet led me to love. All is passed now, and passionless, faint are ye waxen, Ye hours of blind seeking full of pain clean forgotten. If it were not that e'en now her eyes I behold not. That the way lieth long to her feet that would find me, That the green seas delay yet her fair arms enfolding, That the long leagues of air will not bear the cry ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... oblivious of, the plain fact which every beat of our pulses might preach, and the slow creeping hands of every parish clock confirm. How awful that silent, unceasing footfall of receding days is when once we begin to watch it! Inexorable, passionless—though hope and fear may pray, 'Sun! stand thou still on Gibeon; and thou moon! in the valley of Ajalon,'—the tramp of the hours goes on. The poets paint them as a linked chorus of rosy forms, garlanded, and clasping hands as they dance onwards. So they may ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... without obscuring the fountain or breaking the glassiness of its surface. It appeared as if some living creature were about to emerge—the naiad of the spring, perhaps, in the shape of a beautiful young woman with a gown of filmy water-moss, a belt of rainbow-drops and a cold, pure, passionless countenance. How would the beholder shiver, pleasantly yet fearfully, to see her sitting on one of the stones, paddling her white feet in the ripples and throwing up water to sparkle in the sun! Wherever she laid her hands on grass and ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... MILDRED—[In a passionless tone.] I detest you, Aunt. [Looking at her critically.] Do you know what you remind me of? Of a cold pork pudding against a background of linoleum tablecloth in the kitchen of a—but the possibilities are wearisome. [She ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... I've looked on you as my wife; if you ran away from me and lived with another man, I couldn't keep on a flat next to yours. . . . I felt it at the theatre; I felt I must clear out; I couldn't sink back to any passionless friendship. So I arranged to go away and stay away. After three months I shall say that I'm going for a holiday in South America—or Japan. I've been moving quickly the last few days. This morning—and this afternoon—I knew that everything ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... public-house, and next day resumed his idle search for employment. The weather was mild and beautiful, his wants were simple, a cup of coffee and a roll, a couple of sausages, and the day passed in a sort of morose and passionless contemplation. He thought of everything and nothing, least of all of how he should find money for the morrow. When the day came, and the penny to buy a cup of coffee was wanting, he quite naturally, without giving it a second thought, engaged himself as a labourer, and worked all day carrying ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... character of the Indian mind—if, indeed, it was thought the Indian had any mind at all. It was still supposed that the Indian was, at all times and in all places, "a stoic of the woods," always statuesque, always formal, always passionless, always on stilts, always speaking in metaphors, a cold embodiment of bravery, endurance, and savage heroism. Writers depicted him as a man who uttered nothing but high principles of natural right, who always harangued eloquently, and was ready, ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... be made in Nevada, so lofty and flawless is the azure sky, so utterly transparent is the atmosphere, so huge, gray, and passionless ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... overhead the immovable stars, like the unpitying gods, hung above the city and were reflected in the water, and wounded the soul of the lonely man with the terrible sense of power inimitably removed, of passionless strength which served to humanity but as a measure of its own weakness and triviality. The misfortunes of life might be endured; its disappointments, its anguish, even its inviolable loneliness might be supported, but a sense ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... seemed to be near me, still seemed to be watching me with his cool half smile. If his voice, pleasant, level and passionless, had broken the silence about me, I should not have been surprised. Strange how little he had changed, and how much I had expected to see him altered. I could still remember the last time. The years ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... possible joys in order to avoid sure sorrows. Existence is short, but I made up my mind to spend it in the service of others, in relieving their troubles and enjoying their happiness. By having no direct experience of either one or the other, I would only be conscious of passionless emotions. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... credit Hinduism with the idea of incarnation, we regard it as only showing this to be a necessity of human thought, and as far from satisfying man's longings for union with God. Gautama Buddha, passionless and lost in the contemplation of his own excellence, is not the Christian Redeemer, who daily bears our burdens and takes upon himself, in order that he may take away, the sin of the world. And what shall ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... without speaking, and throwing back her veil revealed her pale, sad face, with its look of passionless woe. ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... give her up to the cold embraces of that passionless egotist, who, as he perceived plainly enough, was casting his shining net all around her? Clement read Murray Bradshaw correctly. He could not perhaps have spread his character out in set words, as we must do for him, for it takes a long apprenticeship to learn to describe analytically ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... stopped to kiss and say good night as usual, but the excitement of a new experience had stirred Caroline's emotions, and Wilf's pride in her had also roused the possessive instinct in him, so that the kiss they exchanged was a little different from the almost passionless salute to which they had long grown accustomed. Wilf's eyes shone and Caroline's cheeks were flushed when they drew back from each other. She began to speak quickly, nervously. "Well, so long! ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... lazaret, and the boatswain had attached importance to the action. But he was disappointed. There was not the hint of an emotion in Charley Bo Yip's moon-like face; not the ghost of an encouraging recognition. Not even Ichi's passionless countenance could match Yip's serene, blank face for lack of expression. The Chinaman might have been pouring the coffee down a hopper, rather than down a man's ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... offence which makes the dwellers within its boundaries outlaws. For one reason or another, they have all revolted against the rule of the world, and the world has cast them out. They have offended smug respectability, with its passionless devotion to deportment; they have outraged conventional usage, that carefully devised system by which small natures attempt to bring great ones down to their own dimensions; they have scandalised the orthodoxy which, like Memnon, has lost ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... utterances. In some coarse, rude fashion they are useful, it may be indispensable, to the world's work, which is not ours, save in a transcendental sense and operation. We have to strip ourselves of all that, and to seek perfect passionless tranquillity. Then we may hope to die. Meditation, if it be deep, and long, and frequent enough, will teach even our practical Western mind to understand the Hindu mind in its yearning for Nirvana. One infinitesimal atom of the great conglomerate of humanity, who enjoys the temporal, sensual ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... a cold, passionless, merciless tone, just as a lawyer might speak of a criminal condemned to die by the ordinary process of the law, and as Arnold heard him he shuddered. But at the same time the picture in the Council-chamber came up before his mental vision, and he was ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... It was like a clock—passionless, regular, meditative. Weldon shrugged his shoulders distastefully; he had never been able to conquer his dislike of steady, measured sounds. It was an unreasonable weakness, but incurable. He twisted uneasily in his white flannels as the bird ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... on a flannel table-cloth, a row of such apparel hanging on a clothes-horse by the fire. Her face had been pale when he encountered her, but now it was warm and pink with her exertions and the heat of the stove. Yet it was in perfect and passionless repose, which imparted a Minerva cast to the profile. When she glanced up, her lineaments seemed to have all the soul and heart that had characterized her mother's, and had been with her a true index of the spirit within. Could ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... The leader of one of these singular parties was the venerable Niccolo Poussin! The air of antiquity which breathed over all his works seemed to have infected even his person and his features; and his cold, sedate, and passionless countenance, his measured pace and sober deportment, spoke that phlegmatic temperament and regulated feeling, which had led him to study monuments rather than men, and to declare that the result of all his experience ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... singularly handsome, even for the beautiful race to which he belonged, with a countenance very manly in aspect for his years, and with a more vivacious and energetic expression than I had hitherto seen in the serene and passionless faces of the men. He brought me the tablet on which I had drawn the mode of my descent, and had also sketched the head of the horrible reptile that had scared me from my friend's corpse. Pointing to that part of the drawing, Taee put to me a few questions respecting the size ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a dreary and a passionless existence, will find that in the past, more than in the future, his thoughts have found their resting-place; memory usurps the place of hope, and he travels through life like one walking onward; his eyes still turning towards some loved ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... any show of embarrassment. Her exquisite repose would rival madame's; indeed, she might almost be a statue with fine, clear complexion, proudly curved lips, and long-fringed lids that make a glitter of bronze on her rose-leaf cheek. How has this girl of eighteen achieved this passionless grace? ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... was the best thing he could do, in that awful waste of water. But its effect on the seamen was bad. It was like giving in. They got a little disheartened and flurried; and the cold, passionless water seized the advantage. It is possible, too, that the motion of the ship through ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... word pronounced a sober "thank you, aunt Gary." But it was so very sober and passionless ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... "Histoire de l'Astronomie," speaks of Kepler with the heat of a pamphleteer, and cannot repress a frequent sneer at his contemporary, Galileo. We know the splendor of the Newtonian synthesis; yet we do not find ourselves affected by Newton's character or discoveries. He touches us with the passionless love ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... their centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery[672] (the only great affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the Virgin and child. Nevertheless it awakens a deeper impression than the contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For, beside all the resistless beauty of form, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... till her husband's absence had stretched to years, and there could be no longer any doubt of his death. A passionless manner of renewing his addresses seemed no longer out of place in Lord Uplandtowers. Barbara did not love him, but hers was essentially one of those sweet-pea or with-wind natures which require a twig of stouter fibre than its own to hang ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... idolatry, ancient or modern, have the rites been administered by such a multitude of priests as assist in the passionless ceremonial of Buddhism. Fa Hian, in the fourth century, was assured by the people of Ceylon that at that period the priests numbered between fifty and sixty thousand, of whom two thousand were attached to one wihara at Anarajapoora, and three ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... but of good sense. Her aims were simple and obvious: to preserve her throne, to keep England out of war, to restore civil and religious order. Something of womanly caution and timidity perhaps backed the passionless indifference with which she set aside the larger schemes of ambition which were ever opening before her eyes. In later days she was resolute in her refusal of the Low Countries. She rejected with a laugh the offers of the Protestants ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... she continued: "Is it not charming here? The quiet is absolute. It is always still. We are absurdly contented here; we have no servants, you see, and we all plough and harrow and sow and reap—not many acres, because we need little. It is one kind of life, quite harmless and passionless, monsieur. I have been raking hay this morning. It is so strange that the Emperor should be troubled by the silence of ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... fell silent under the cold glare of the other's eyes, the voice that answered him was level and passionless. ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... not restrain a movement of angry impatience, but he continued silent. The cardinal was not a man to be discouraged by so little; he again shook the arm of the Jesuit, somewhat more roughly, repeating, with a passionless tenacity that would have incensed the most patient person in the world: "My reverend and very dear father, since you are not asleep, listen to me, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... as he first had stood up, expressed the utmost amazement, and this gradually, under the lion glance, became more and more of dismay, quailing, collapsing visibly under the passionless gravity of that look. Even the tall form seemed to shrink, the eyes dilated, the brows drew closer together, and the chest seemed to pant, as the relic was held forth. There was a dead silence throughout the court as the King ceased to speak; only he continued to bend that searching ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Passionless as algebra, the genius of Maurice was ready for the task. Strategic points of immense value, important cities and fortresses, vital river-courses and communications—which foreign tyranny had acquired during the tragic past with a patient iniquity almost ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... all seas,—surely none among the Immortals can escape Thee, nor indeed any among men who live but for a little space; and he who is possessed by Thee, there is a madness upon him." And when I had re-read that delicious chant, the face of Antigone appeared before me in all its passionless purity. What images! Gods and goddesses who hover in the highest heights of Heaven! The blind old man, the long-wandering beggar-king, led by Antigone, has now been buried with holy rites; and his daughter, fair as the fairest dream ever conceived by human soul, resists the ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... summer drooped beneath the mid-day sun, She sat within the shade of a great rock, Dreamily listening to the streamlet's song. Ripe were the maiden's years; her stature showed Womanly beauty, and her clear, calm eye Was bright with venturous spirit, yet her face Was passionless, like those by sculptor graved For niches in a temple. Lovers oft Had wooed her, but she only laughed at love, And wondered at the silly things they said. 'Twas her delight to wander where wild-vines O'erhang the river's brim, to climb the path Of woodland streamlet to its mountain-springs, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... Public curiosity was roused to its wildest height—every public sentiment had its full expression; and whether the acclamation was louder when Fox's corpulent frame was seen toiling its slow way through the pressure, or when Pitt's slender figure and passionless face was recognised, is a question which might have perplexed the keenest investigators of popular sentiment. All was that uproar in which the Englishman delights as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... one word or syllable of all this. The dead, passionless look had fallen over the powerful features, and the deep-set eyes were gazing, not on the actual Loch Roag before them, but on the stormy sea that lies between Lewis and Skye, and on a vessel disappearing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... settled by legislators and laws—it is in the Soul; It cannot be varied by statutes, any more than love, pride, the attraction of gravity, can; It is immutable—it does not depend on majorities—majorities or what not come at last before the same passionless and exact tribunal. ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... that wound, the pains that bless, Were all, were all departed, And he was wise and passionless And happy ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... The man had looked into a woman's wide, blue eyes. He had gazed upon softly rounded cheeks, as perfect as physical well-being could make them. He had contemplated rich, ripe lips that tempted him well-nigh to distraction. Thus it was that the passionless life of the outworld had no longer power before the stirring of a soul at last awakened from its ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... curse, For I then should have wrong'd you!" "Wrong'd! ah, is it so? You could never have loved me?" "Duke!" "Never? oh, no!" (He broke into a fierce, angry laugh, as he said) "Yet, lady, you knew that I loved you: you led My love on to lay to its heart, hour by hour, All the pale, cruel, beautiful, passionless power Shut up in that cold face of yours! was this well? But enough! not on you would I vent the wild hell Which has grown in my heart. Oh, that man! first and last He tramples in triumph my life! he has cast ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... thinking of the tragic circumstances amid which she stood. From that short trance of feeling even the piteous figures of the dead father and son faded away. Warkworth entered into it, but already invested with the passionless and sexless beauty of a world where—whether it be to us poetry or reality—"they neither marry nor are given in marriage." Her warm and living thoughts spent themselves on one theme only—the redressing of a spiritual balance. She was no longer a beggar to her husband; she had the wherewithal ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... unlimited power to create and control in whatever is comparatively near at hand and changeable. But Caliban had been affected by the mystery of the starry heavens. The remoteness and fixedness of the stars had suggested a quiet, unalterable, passionless force beyond Setebos, who must, therefore, have limitations. He did not make the stars (l. 27), he cannot create a mate like himself (ll. 57-8), he cannot change his nature so as to be like the Quiet above him (ll. 144-5). Hence, like the fish, Setebos had a dissatisfied ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... depth of the man's love. It became impossible to bid him not be of a broken heart, or even to allude to those fresh hopes which Time would bring. He spoke to her often of his future life, always speaking of a life from which Marion would have been withdrawn by death, and did so with a cold, passionless assurance which showed her that he had almost resolved as to the future. He would see all lands that were to be seen, and converse with all people. The social condition of God's creatures at large should be his study. The task would be endless, and, ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... forms of olden time, in their strange beauty white, Stood round the chamber solemnly, robed as in ghostly light; All passionless and still they stood, and shining through the gloom, Like watchers of another world, stern angels of ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... to be humoured accordingly. She is extremely fantastic—full of strange ideas and unnatural conceptions of life. Her temperament is studious and dreamy—self-absorbed too at times—and she is absolutely passionless. That is why she will make ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... her calm exterior, than is often to be found under the wilder mirth of merrier beings. Ever ready to yield her wishes to those of her friends or companions, many persons imagined that she had little will, and no fixed wishes, or deliberate aspirations—passionless and pure as the lily of the vale, many supposed that she was cold and heartless. Oh! ignorant! not to remember that the hearts of the fiercest volcanos boil still beneath a head of snow; and that it is even in the calmest and most moderate characters that ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... of these kegs," she ordered, and her voice forced Pearse's attention; it was so cold, passionless, utterly controlled. The keg was burst, and a trickle of coarse cannon powder ran on ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... important questions of his time, away from the shrill contact with contemporary disputes, into the harmonious domain of the Muses. He, and his friends and patrons, did not look upon the subjects discussed in this tragedy with the passionless, indifferent eyes of our century. Many men, no doubt, were filled with the thought, to which Bacon soon gave a scientific form, that the human mind can only make true progress if it turns towards the inquiry into Nature, keeping far ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... brown people sought to lift him in their arms and carry him to his house; but his strength was not all gone, and he thrust them aside. Then he spoke, and even the cold, passionless Captain W——— felt his face flush ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... excuse, nor would it silence the cold still voice in his mind that kept repeating sodomite—sodomite—sodomite with a passionless inflection that was even ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... and the tumult it arouses in the men who chance to cross your path. You seem to be absolutely without feeling. Yet I don't believe you devoid of temperament. I think I know women. I have met a good many. You do not belong to the type of cold, passionless women." ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... great sorrow. That absorbed her whole mental life. It was the house in which her soul dwelt, the chamber of affliction wherein she lived, and moved, and had her being—so darkly draped that no light came in through the windows. Very still and passionless she sat here, refusing ...
— The Son of My Friend - New Temperance Tales No. 1 • T. S. Arthur |
