"Lifelessness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be gainsaid that the lifelessness and emptiness of the State Church, with its hireling and often ignorant priesthood, fails to satisfy the great mind of Russia—the peasant mind—but now awakening from its long infant slumber, as did the mind of Western Europe three centuries ago. Next perhaps to the extreme literalness ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... 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 ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... are being passed around him; so that however wide, searching and vigorous may be his powers of observation, thought and intellect, he cannot liberate these from contemporary associations; any endeavour to do that must end in failure, ending, as it must, in artificial coldness and unemotional lifelessness. Bracciolini never made the attempt; he gave way to Nature, and never did his genius shine so brightly, and never was it more prolific, than when dealing with the diversity required of it by the history ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... anguish and plight, she led the pony this way and that, up and down, listening, trying to force a shout through her swollen lips. At length, in despair, she knew she could search no more. A lifelessness of feeling was creeping upon her. Mechanically she walked beside her pony, and it was ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... all that had been bitter between them vanished, and much as she had used to do, when as a child she sought the shelter of those dear arms, she ran forward, and, kneeling by the couch, pressed her warm cheek against the lifelessness of the other's hand. "I have come home, Aunt Janet," she said, "I ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... arresting his growth. As such, it has not even the merit of being sordidly useful; for unless stupidity is a better thing than intelligence, slowness than alertness, helplessness than initiative, lifelessness than vital activity, the child who has passed through that dreary mill will be far less effective, even as a day-labourer, than the child whose school-life has been one of continuous and many-sided growth. It is strange that the reactionary members of ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... animal concrete, they have become one of the deadest tissues in the body. They are tools of the muscles, the levers by which the muscles move the limbs and body about; they never do anything of their own accord. On account of their lifelessness and lack of vitality, they are rather easily attacked by disease, or broken by a blow or fall. There are such a large number of bones (two hundred and six, all told), and they resist decay and last so much longer after death than any other parts of the body, that they fill our ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... good eyes, of the sort that look life straight in the face, and their pupils were such as impress the beholder with a conviction of fearless integrity. Now they were preoccupied, and a little annoyed. Even in the lifelessness of black and white the face he studied was one of remarkable beauty, and it pleased him to imagine the wonderful difference and illumination which color and swift play of expression ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... placidity which her brow and cheeks displayed. During those two hours she did not stir, she did not speak, but from time to time she opened her clear eyes, fixing them on some vague, distant point, and remaining thus for a moment, then closing them again, and relapsing into the lifelessness of fine marble, with the mysterious fixed ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... service. Such a purpose the Society emphatically disavowed, and insisted that there was no desire on the part of its members to encroach upon the simplicity of Presbyterian worship, but claimed rather the desire to redeem the same from lifelessness and lack of a devotional spirit with which they declared it is so likely to be characterized. So effectively have the fears of those who first uttered their objections been allayed, that the Society is said to comprise in its membership, at the present time, more than one-third ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston
... 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
... black bowlders on the horizon. It cleared the dotted line and rose, an oval orange-hued strange moon, not mellow nor silvery nor gloriously brilliant as Hare had known it in the past, but a vast dead-gold melancholy orb, rising sadly over the desert. To Hare it was the crowning reminder of lifelessness; it fitted this world of ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... Renaissance period being one of return to formalism on the one side, of utter licentiousness on the other, so that sometimes, as here, I have to declare its lifelessness, at other times (Chap. XXV., Sec. XVII.) its lasciviousness. There is, of course, no contradiction in this: but the reader might well ask how I knew the change from the base 11 to the base 12, in Plate XII., to be one from temperance to luxury; ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... quality is synonymous 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 the chief natural ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... of the air seemed prophetic of more snow. The Reverend Allan Telford looked across the bare wastes and cold white hills and shivered, as if the icy lifelessness about him were slowly and relentlessly creeping into his ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... was due to the light through the colored awning, I was not sure, but I was suddenly attracted by a dull vacancy that seemed to be forming in his countenance. It stole upon the features as if they were being slowly sprinkled with fine dust, blotting their expression into a flat lifelessness. Then the rush of a train passing over the bridge disturbed him. With a fleeting look of pain he sat up, glanced first furtively at me, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... physical and 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 render ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
