"Lifelessness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... minds; and I am in hopes that you may have a little pleasure in examining the plates in the volume of Sibthorpe's "F. Graeca" which I send to-day, in comparison with those of "F. Danica." The vulgarity and lifelessness of Sibthorpe's plates are the more striking because in mere execution they are the more elaborate of the two; the chief point in the "F. Danica" being the lovely artistic skill. The drawings for Sibthorpe, by a young ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... with the reality of life. The human mind ostensibly has an aversion to lifelessness. We turn instinctively from the dead and withered branch to the blossoming flower; from the stagnant pool to the dashing cataract, and every healthy mind finds delight in such terms as vim, vigor, energy, and activity, which are ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... evidently Old Man Hooper loved whitewash. Cottonwood trees showed their green heads; and to the right I saw the sloped shingled roof of a larger building. Not a living creature was in sight. I shook myself, saying that the undoubted sinister feeling of utter silence and lifelessness was compounded of my expectations and the time of day. But that did not satisfy me. My aroused mind, casting about, soon struck it: I was missing the swarms of blackbirds, linnets, purple finches, and doves that made our ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... and lifelessness is the result of forcing your mind to one set of thoughts and feelings. You become worn out—your feelings exhausted—deadness and depression ensues. Now, turn your mind off from these subjects—divert it by a cheerful and animated ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... think, distinctly suggestive. If one tries to correlate and group the death ideas, one sees that they are all delusions of death or of loss of energy or complaints of hysterical symptoms that look like sham death. If the lack of energy complained of be looked upon as lifelessness, one can conceive of these explanations being variations of one theme, namely, that of death. In the last chapter it has been shown that a delusion of dying, being dead, or having been dead is extremely frequent ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... distorts it from its natural functions; but the energy itself, although "possessed" by the abysmal malice, is living and intense; and therefore cannot be regarded as so entirely the opposite of love as that inert condition of malignant lifelessness which inevitably ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... His brown hair, considerably tinged with rusty gray, grew thinly upon that beautiful head. His skin was dry and smooth and dead white. This, taken with the classic regularity of his features, gave him an air of lifelessness, of one burnt out by the fire of too much living; but whether the living had been done by Keith himself or by his immediate ancestors appearances did not disclose. This look of passionless, motionless repose, like classic sculpture, was sharply and startlingly belied by a pair of really ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... She wanted to ask Nels. Strange as anything on this terrible ride was the absence of speech. As yet no word had been spoken. Madeline wanted to shriek to Link to hurry. But he was more than humanly swift in all his actions. So with mute lips, with the fire in her beginning to chill, with a lifelessness menacing her spirit, she watched, hoped against hope, prayed for a long, straight, ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... proceeding which her own delicacy rendered improper for her utterance. Still the youth was not marble exactly: and, as he spoke, his arm gently encircled her waist; and her form, as if incapable of its own support, hung for a moment, with apathetic lifelessness, upon his bosom; while her head, with an impulse not difficult to define, drooped like a bending and dewy lily upon his arm. But the passive emotion, if we may so style it, was soon over; and, with an effort, in which firmness and feebleness strongly encountered, she freed herself ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... weaker, and he felt emboldened to venture nearer, so as to fulfill to the utmost the wishes of Hilda. Her image drove out from his thoughts the frowning face of Obed Chute, and the white form of that phantom whose aspect had once crushed him into lifelessness. He thought that it was but a feeble devotion to wait in ambush at such a distance, when, by venturing nearer, he might learn much more. Hours passed, and there was no sign of any one belonging to the villa ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... way the pictures of the Madonna, we may array before us, and learn to compare, the types which distinguished in a more particular manner the separate schools, caught from some more local or individual impulses. Thus we have the stern, awful quietude of the old Mosaics; the hard lifelessness of the degenerate Greek; the pensive sentiment of the Siena, and stately elegance of the Florentine Madonnas; the intellectual Milanese, with their large foreheads and thoughtful eyes; the tender, refined mysticism of the Umbrian; ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... is not only flawless in its execution, but is animated with a pensive beauty of expression. The former, though praised by Winckelmann, as among the two or three most precious masterpieces of antique art, must be criticised for a certain vacancy and lifelessness. Of the heroic statues, the two noblest are those of the Capitol and Naples. The identity of the Capitoline Antinous has only once, I think, been seriously questioned; and yet it may be reckoned more than doubtful. The head is almost certainly not his. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... and he had neither coals nor wood. But his feet were frozen into lifelessness. Impossible to go to bed like this; he must take another turn in the streets. It would suit his humour to ramble a while. Had it not been so late he would have gone to see Reardon, who expected the communication ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... consequence of which the nose looked larger, and more pinched. The chin-lines were sharpened, the eyes more sunken, while the shadows beneath them were as dark as though they were plastered on with bistre. But it was chiefly the expression of the face that had altered: the lifelessness of the eyes was new to it, and the firm compression of the mouth: now, when she smiled, no thin line of white appeared, such as he had been used to ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... this. She said she would come to Wiggiston. She would now let fate do as it liked with her, since there was nothing remaining to be done. Tom Brangwen also saw Ursula's intention. He too was at the end of his desires. He had done the things he had wanted to. They had all ended in a disintegrated lifelessness of soul, which he hid under an utterly tolerant good-humour. He no longer cared about anything on earth, neither man nor woman, nor God nor humanity. He had come to a stability of nullification. He did not care any more, neither about his body nor about ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... out, but Anna did not begin dressing, and sat in the same position, her head and hands hanging listlessly, and every now and then she shivered all over, seemed as though she would make some gesture, utter some word, and sank back into lifelessness again. She repeated continually, "My God! my God!" But neither "God" nor "my" had any meaning to her. The idea of seeking help in her difficulty in religion was as remote from her as seeking help from Alexey Alexandrovitch himself, although she had never had doubts of the faith in which she had ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... important client he happened to glance up. And between the edge of the door frame and his client's automobile-fattened and carefully dressed body, he caught a glimpse of the "poor little forlornness" who chanced to be crossing the outer office. A glint of sunlight on her hair changed it from lifelessness to golden vital vividness; the same chance sunbeam touched her pale skin with a soft yellow radiation—and her profile was delicately fine and regular. Thus Norman, who observed everything, saw a head of finely wrought gold—a startling ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... outward self were concerned, absolute perfection. No ornament was amiss, no line or curve of her figure other than perfectly graceful. Yet even the fire's glow which she had seemed to dread brought no flush of colour to her cheeks. Her appearance of complete lifelessness remained. It was as though some sort of crust had formed about her being, a condition which her very physical perfection seemed to ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... rapid changes in the appearance of solid masses are marvellous. All day we have been slowly sailing westward, new prospects of distant hills ever opening up as we passed headland after headland. Presently the barren rocks began to be clothed with firs here and there, but the lifelessness of the scene was striking. Once we caught sight of two or three Eskimo tents on a little island, but no human beings were visible. Only a solitary grampus made the circuit of ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... to produce suspension of cardiac movement at will. Cheyne speaks of a Colonel Townshend who appeared to possess the power of dying, as it were, at will,—that is, so suspending the heart's action that no pulsation could be detected. After lying in this state of lifelessness for a short period, life would become slowly established without any consciousness or volition on the man's part. The longest period in which he remained in this death-like condition was about thirty minutes. A postmortem ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... few years there has been a reaction from this extreme view of the lifelessness of the moon. Observers tell us of clouds suddenly appearing and then melting to invisibility over volcanic craters; of evidences of an atmosphere, rare as compared with ours, yet manifest in its effects; of variations of color witnessed in certain ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... had been delightful, then, little by little, her stiffness and seeming lifelessness had communicated themselves to him. It seemed to him that he had never met a duller or more awkward schoolgirl. His mind was of that quick order which requires to be caught in the uptake rapidly in order to shine. Slowness, coldness, dulness or hesitancy in others ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... education, the teaching of languages struck me with especial force as defective, on account of its great imperfection, its capriciousness and lifelessness. The search for a satisfactory method for our native language occupied me in preference to anything else. I proceeded on ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... unusualness when you see it thus that you have when you look on the House of Lords with benches teeming with multitudinous life which you have seen so often empty, lifeless, and ghostly. Thus splendid was the scene, and yet it gave you a prevailing and unconquerable impression of gloom and lifelessness. In the House of Commons, the member addressing the assembly is like the wind which passes through an AEolian harp. You cannot utter a word which does not produce its full and immediate response. You say a thing ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... building. Where this cannot be, the device of external colouring may indeed be employed without dishonour—but it must be with the warning reflection that a time will come when such aids will pass away and when the building will be judged in its lifelessness, dying the death of the dolphin. Better the less bright, more enduring fabric. The transparent alabasters of San Miniato and the mosaics of Saint Mark's are more warmly filled and more brightly touched by every return of morning and evening rays, while the hues of ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... needed for adding to her meagre agricultural resources. The cottage industry, so vital for India's existence, has been ruined by incredibly heartless and inhuman processes as described by English witnesses. Little do town-dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of Indians are slowly sinking to lifelessness. Little do they know that their miserable comfort represents the brokerage they get for the work they do for the foreign exploiter, that the profits and the brokerage are sucked from the masses. Little do they ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... a change! The glimpse he had caught of Wabi's bloodshot eyes, the terrible thinness of the Indian youth's face, the chilling lifelessness of his hands, made him shiver with dread. Was it possible that a few short hours could bring about that remarkable transformation? And where was Mukoki, the faithful old warrior from whose guardianship Wabigoon and Minnetaki were ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... still for a time, then moving, hiding, whispering between the clouds in the sky and the deeper shadowed earth below. A night of uneasiness, of unseen forces chained and stifled, of impending doubt and oppressive lifelessness. ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... hours after He was crucified, but lingered on for days, before being relieved from his sufferings by death. Jesus' legs were not broken by the soldiers, because they believed Him to be dead, but—say those who deny the reality of the death—the soldiers were mistaken, the seeming lifelessness was not real, and recovery soon followed, so complete that He was able to appear in public on the ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... that should be Albert Werper. They traced out the figure of a man, and then an arm shot upward, poised for an instant and descended. Again and again it rose and fell, and each time the long blade of the knife buried itself in the thing beneath the blankets. But there was an initial lifelessness in the silent bulk that gave the assassin momentary wonder. Feverishly he threw back the coverlets, and searched with nervous hands for the pouch of jewels which he expected to find concealed upon his ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... quivering form clinging to me, that pallid face, those despairing eyes, that expression of piteous and agonizing entreaty, those wild words of horror and of anguish. There came before me the phantom of that form which I had upraised from the ice when it had sunk down in lifelessness, whose white face rested on my shoulder as I bore it away from the grasp of death; and that vision, with all its solemn, tragic awfulness seemed out of keeping with this. Miss O'Halloran? Impossible! But yet it must be so, since she thus confessed it My own memory had been at fault. The ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... apparent control of blind and irresistible forces? This is a practical question because nothing could be more pertinent to our choice of ideals. Nothing could make more difference to life than a belief in the life or lifelessness of its environment. The faiths that generate or confirm our ideals always refer to this great issue. And this is but one, albeit the most profound, of the many issues that arise from the desire to obtain ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... her hands in his own. But the fingers lay with unanswering coldness and lifelessness for a second in his clasp and then were drawn away and took determinate hold of the chair-back. Again the flush came to Fleda's cheeks, brought by a sharp pain,—oh, bodily and mental too!—and after a moment's pause, with a distinctness of utterance ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... mechanical environment. Life is essentially an assertion, not against life, but against death. Interests that expend their energies in destroying or crippling one another, slip back toward that primeval lifelessness from which they emerged. Restraint for the sake of organization is therefore only a developed and ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... is what Zola himself described as tout ce milieu ouvrier, ce coin de misere et d'ignorance, de tranquille ordure et d'air naturellement empeste. And with it all there is a heavy sense of stagnancy, a dreary lifelessness. All that is good in the book reappears, in vastly better company, in En Menage (1881), a novel which is, perhaps, more in the direct line of heritage from L'Education Sentimentale—the starting-point of the Naturalistic novel—than any other ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... we went up over the hill to the plain of Sartilmont, the battlefield of Wednesday night. All along the road were heaps of uniforms, some quite new, probably taken from the dead. Those horrid limp things made me shiver with their lifelessness, and the spirit of death, everywhere, seemed to close us in. Countless numbers of haversacks were strewn about, doubtless cast away by the soldiers to disencumber themselves in falling quickly back from one ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... found a grave amidst this scene of desolation. Frankenstein has daily declined in health; a feverish fire still glimmers in his eyes, but he is exhausted, and when suddenly roused to any exertion, he speedily sinks again into apparent lifelessness. ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... not an insect; even the flies which exist in all the lands of the earth are not found. While the deserts of the sea contain vital wealth in profusion, here are sterility and death. Yet one is intoxicated with the stillness and lifelessness of it all, and the air is pure and virginal, blowing from the world before ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... surprised by her presence. She came over and knelt beside him. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted. His wet hair was plastered in straight locks about his face. She lifted one of his hands. It was very heavy, and the lifelessness of it shocked her. She looked suddenly at the faces of the seconds and of the men about her. They seemed frightened, all save one, and he was cursing, in a low voice, horribly. She looked up and saw Silverstein standing ...
— The Game • Jack London
... will lay aside its purple to receive at your hands the pale immortality. Is there anything in common life too mean,—in common too trivial,—to be ennobled by your touch? As there is nothing in life, so there is nothing in lifelessness which has not its lesson for you, or its gift; and when you are tired of watching the strength of the plume, and the tenderness of the leaf, you may walk down to your rough river shore, or into the thickest markets of your thoroughfares, and there is not a piece of torn cable that will not ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... with his surroundings. His head drooped upon his bent shoulders, and his dark, weary eyes were fixed upon the rising sea fog in a vacant gaze. Warmly clad as he was, he seemed chilled through his whole being by the raw lifelessness of the air. Yet he did ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a peculiarity in a certain type of speaking, which, while not strictly a mannerism, is detrimental to the highest effect. It manifests itself in physical weakness. The speaker is uniformly tired, and his speaking has a half-hearted tone. The lifelessness in voice and manner communicates itself to the audience, and prevents all possibility of deep and enduring impression. Joseph Parker said that when Sunday came he felt like a racehorse, and could hardly wait for the time to come ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... chair. His red face became tinged with a sudden grey pallor. His eyes, now bloodshot, half closed like those of a prostrate doll with the eye mechanism in its stomach. There was witheredness, almost lifelessness, in Ostrov's voice: ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... possibility of converting his uncle, and spent the Sunday evening before term began in framing inexpugnable arguments to be preceded by unanswerable questions; but always when he was on the point of speaking he was deterred by the lifelessness of his uncle. No eloquence could irrigate his arid creed and make that desert blossom now. And yet, Mark thought, he ought to remember that in the eyes of the world he owed his uncle everything. What did he owe him in the sight of God? Gratitude? Gratitude for what? Gratitude for spending a certain ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... will into the houses—such is the picture of the motley life in the inland villages. Strange was the contrast between human poverty and natural wealth. We were on the borders of a virgin forest, and the overpowering beauty of the vegetation soon erased all memory of the squalor and lifelessness of La Mona. Our road—a mere path, suddenly entered this seemingly impenetrable forest, where the branches crossed overhead, producing a delightful shade. The curious forms of tropical life were all attractive to one who had recently rambled over the comparatively ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton |
