"Unemotional" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... part, people who live in cities are not moved by oratory; they are unsocial, unimaginative, unemotional. They see so much and hear so much that they cease to be impressed. When they come together in assemblages they are so apathetic that they fail to generate magnetism—there is no common soul to which the speaker can address himself. They are so cold that the ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the stolid, unemotional, unawakened Thor, on whom every hope of the Championship was based, whom all Bannister came out to watch every day, practiced as he studied, doggedly, silently. It was evident to all that he hated the grind, that he wanted ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... shook as if the wintry wind outside were trying to blow them away. Rose tried not to watch them, and it teased her that she could not help doing so. The hand that held them was not visible above the table. Mr. Murray struggled to keep to the most absolutely business-like and unemotional side of his professional manner, but his obviously extreme discomfort was infectious, and Rose's calm of ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... Keats, and the rest. He liked us, so everything we did was right to him. He could not help being guided entirely by his feelings. If he disliked a thing, he had no use for it. Some men can say, "I hate this play, but of its kind it is admirable." Willie Winter could never take that unemotional point of view. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Edith Woodley, of Carstairs, but the engagement had been broken off by mutual consent some months before, and there was no sign that it had left any very profound feeling behind it. For the rest the man's life moved in a narrow and conventional circle, for his habits were quiet and his nature unemotional. Yet it was upon this easy-going young aristocrat that death came in most strange and unexpected form between the hours of ten and eleven-twenty on the night of ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I am only here for a short time in the Spring and another ten days in September. That is hardly enough, even supposing I were the sort of person to be accessible to these externals. I have passed that stage. I am too old, too unemotional. I prefer devouring a partridge EN CASSEROLE or listening to your conversation ("listening to my conversation!" thought Mr. Heard) to all the scenery in the world But I watch other people; I make it my business to study their condition; I put myself in their places. JE CONSTATE, as the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... though the whole thing was the most insoluble mystery to her. Her beautiful dark eyes retained their customary serenity. She no longer wore her nurse's uniform; and her gray gown, very simply cut and devoid of ornaments, showed her graceful figure. She was grave and unemotional as usual. ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... unaccountable. Miss Liddell was far from shy; she was well-bred and evidently accustomed to society; her avoidance had therefore made the more impression. His experience of life had hitherto been exceedingly unemotional, and Katherine's unexpected betrayal of feeling puzzled ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... appearance of his mother mercifully allowed Dink an opportunity to suffer without fear of disgrace in the eyes of the unemotional Tennessee Shad. ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... industry, honestly and delicately applied, which exist in the world. The front of Rouen Cathedral, or the most richly-wrought illuminated missal, as pieces of resolute industry, are mere child's play compared to any group of the plates of natural history in this book. Of unemotional, but devotedly earnest and rigidly faithful labor, I know no other such example. The lithographs to Agassiz's "poissons fossiles" are good in their kind, but it is a far lower and easier kind, and the popularly visible result is in larger proportion to the skill; whereas none ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the last word for Sugared, was going as deliberately as possible. There was the vivacious Cheese, in the hour of its mite, clad in deep, creamy, golden hue, with delicate traceries of mould, like fairy cobwebs. The Smoked Beef, and Doughnuts, as being more sober and unemotional features of the pageant, appeared on either side the remains of a Cold Chicken, as rendering pathetic tribute to hoary age; while sturdy, reliable Hash and Fishballs reposed right and left in their ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... and a rope were around my neck, I'd say it over again. And I thank God I've had a chance to say it to you." He paused, cleared his throat, and continued in a voice that all at once had become unemotional and natural. "I've three tin boxes of the private papers you wanted. I didn't think of 'em to-day, but I'll bring 'em up ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... her, found the night one of purification and dedication. To men of Thomas's type, slow of wit, steady and stolid and unemotional, the soil gives much of her own peaceful wholesomeness. But those like Austin, with finer intellects, higher ambitions, and stronger passions, often fare ill at her hands. Their struggles towards education and the refinements of life are balked by poverty and the utter fatigue which comes ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... country, for the accent consisted of a scarcely perceptible blur. He spoke very slowly and with a cold deliberation that was unpleasant. It was so a judge might pronounce sentence of death. It was unemotional and forbidding. Yet there were little catches in it that reminded Wilson of some other voice ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... brown eyes were fastened upon his face, eager to understand his attitude, a little defiant, a little appealing. There was nothing to be gathered from his expression, however. After that first moment he was entirely himself—well-mannered, unemotional, cold. ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is no Line of Heart whatever, it is a sign of a cold-blooded, unemotional nature. Such people can, however, be brutally sensual and especially so if the Mount of Venus is ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... inner suggested coldness. After experience assured me that all who came to know her shared this estimate, even in those days when every man on the ship was willing to be her slave. She had a compelling atmosphere, a possessive presence; and yet her mind at this time was unemotional—like Octavia, the wife of Mark Antony, "of a cold conversation." She was striking and unusual in appearance, and yet well within convention and "good form." Her dress was simply and modestly worn, and had little touches of grace and taste which, I understand, many ladies ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... table he stood, reducing to practical application the very situation which they had found so attractive, only because of its utter grotesque impossibility. It was startling, grimly thrilling. There was the sense among some about the table of struggling mentally to break the spell which this coldly unemotional creature of science had cast. At length Dane spoke as though ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... emotional motions, it engenders in the unreasoning part of the soul moral virtues, which are the mean between excess and deficiency. Not that we can say that all virtue exists in the mean, but knowledge and prudence being in no need of the unreasoning element, and being situated in the pure and unemotional part of the soul, is a complete perfection and power of reason, whereby we get the most divine and happy fruit of understanding. But that virtue which is necessary because of the body, and needs the help of the passions as an instrument towards the practical, not destroying ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Roy—for of course our readers have guessed it was they—drew closer and their dust-covered features could be plainly seen, a great shout went up from the butte. And in it mingled the voice of Alverado, the unemotional. ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... catch sight of our long-necked beasts. They have seen them often enough, and know them well, but they must keep up an appearance of panic, if only to please their masters, who never cease to jeer at the ungainly shape of the camel, until they possess one themselves. These unemotional animals watch the horses' play with lips turned up in derision, and hardly deign to move their heads from the bush or branch on which they are feeding. Many of the prospectors, though openly sneering at the camels as slow and unmanageable beasts, ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... straight up, took her arm from the sofa, folded her hands on her lap with an effort to make them look calm, and began to tell him. She spoke very simply, very steadily. She dressed nothing up. She strove to diminish nothing. Her only aim was to be quite unemotional and perfectly truthful. She began with Beryl Van Tuyn's acquaintance with Arabian, how she had met him in Garstin's studio, and went on till she came to the night when she and Craven had seen them together ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... efforts to cope with it. He had gone fully into the question, and had been slowly coming to the conclusion that Behar was hopelessly overcrowded. In his new frame of mind—unswervingly logical, utterly unemotional, and wholly unbound by tradition—he had come to connect the African and Indian troubles, and to see in one the relief of the other. The first fruit of his meditations was a letter to The Times. In it he laid down a new theory of emigration. The peoples of the Empire, he said, must ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... were of this unemotional sort, but in their voices something subtler than the electrical current vibrated. He called to her in wordless fashion and she answered in the same mysterious code, and when she said "Good-bye" and hung up the receiver her world went suddenly gray ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... said at last, with a careful unemotional deliberation. "Nevertheless—it is in the nature of things. . . . No! . . . You see, after all, we are still half brutes, Nettie. And men, as you say, are more obstinate than women. The comet hasn't altered that; it's only made it clearer. We have come into being through a tumult ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... social excitement, and whose noblest reading of the word duty was compassed in having a well ordered house, sumptuous entertainments, and irreproachable toilets. A wife to satisfy any man who was unemotional, unexacting, and prepared to give way ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... usual soft, unemotional quiet. His calm—its opposition to my excitement of disgust and horror—must, I suppose, have irritated me. I was ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of Ladysmith stirred the people of the Empire as nothing, save perhaps the subsequent relief of Mafeking, has done during our generation. Even sober unemotional London found its soul for once and fluttered with joy. Men, women, and children, rich and poor, clubman and cabman, joined in the universal delight. The thought of our garrison, of their privations, of our impotence to relieve them, of the impending humiliation to them and to ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... shrewd eyes remained studying the emotion-lit features of this usually unemotional man. He felt he was being admitted to a peep at a soul that was rarely, if ever, bared, and he wondered at the reason. Was it a calculated display, or was it the outlet for an emotion altogether too strong for the man's restraint? He inclined to ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... lightly stated that the eighteenth century was an unemotional age. What, it is asked, could be more frigid than the poetry of Pope? Or more devoid of true feeling than the mockery of Voltaire? But such a view is a very superficial one; and it is generally held by persons who have never given more than a hasty glance at the works they ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... atrocities committed by the German armies in Belgium—proofs collected by men trained in the law and presented with unemotional directness after a careful inquiry—are presented in the report of the "Committee on Alleged German Atrocities" headed by Viscount Bryce, the English historian and formerly British Ambassador at Washington. The document was made public simultaneously in London and ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... his cold, unemotional monotone. "This being so, hear now our decision. Keston and Meron, you will remain here to meet all emergencies. You others, your function is done. You have done your work well, you are now no longer needed ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... until sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence. His aversion to women and his disinclination to form new friendships were both typical of his unemotional character, but not more so than his complete suppression of every reference to his own people. I had come to believe that he was an orphan with no relatives living, but one day, to my very great surprise, he began to talk to me ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... omnipotent tyrants, have known, to some extent, the sadness and the joy of the love token. The ballad that the lover-poet addressed to one who was "just a porcelain trifle, just a thing of puffs and patches," but who was, just the same, his adored—the ballad love token pleased even that unemotional doll. "And you kept it and you read it, belle Marquise!" Silly or ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... went on in a level, unemotional tone, like one telling a tale of long ago, of which the issues and even the interests are dead ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... Steady yourself with your hands on my head," he said, and his voice was so unemotional that the girl could almost have laughed. Beyond one startled "Oh!" when the plank was ripped out she had uttered no sound, and she followed his instructions now implicitly. She was perched comfortably well above the river when ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... feverish, emaciated, excited to an intense degree, he appeared in Brandon to confront a cool, unemotional villain, who scarcely ever lost his presence of mind. Such a contest could scarcely be an equal one. What could he bring forward which could in any way affect such a man? He had some ideas in his ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... anthropomorphic romance concerning a badly treated horse, full of genuine pathos and kindly sympathy,—more sympathetic, in fact, than Hawthorne's later stories, in which he is sometimes almost too reserved and unemotional: ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... had been whipped into him by the mockery of his fellows. Then they called him cynical and callous. He had acquired calmness of demeanour and under most circumstances an unruffled exterior, so that now he could not show his feelings. People told him he was unemotional; but he knew that he was at the mercy of his emotions: an accidental kindness touched him so much that sometimes he did not venture to speak in order not to betray the unsteadiness of his voice. He remembered the bitterness of his life at school, the humiliation which he had endured, the banter ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the mansard room of the old house Falkner was figuring over stresses and strains of an unemotional sort. When past midnight he shoved the papers into the drawer, a familiar thought coursed through his brain: somehow he must sell himself at a dearer price. Living was not cheap even in Torso, and the cost of living was ever going higher, so the papers said ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... face was white and clammy, and his nerves had been numbed into a half conscious state by the long monotony of misery. But suddenly all his feelings leapt into keen life again as he heard the bedroom door open and the doctor's steps upon the stair. Robert Johnson was precise and unemotional in everyday life, but he almost shrieked now as he rushed forward to know ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... described as being "rigidly mathematical,"[53] and the picture of the man one gets from his writings is that of a cold, unemotional philosopher, dealing only with facts and caring nothing for idealism. But the real Marx was a very different sort of man. His life was itself a splendid example of noble idealism, and underlying all his materialism there was a great religious spirit, using the word "religious" ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... verse, by nature and origin emotional, encounters in dealing with ordinary unemotional narrative, to lie as a technical reason at the bottom of Horace's advice to the writer of Epic to plunge in medias res, thus avoiding flat preparative and catching at once a high wind which shall carry ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... dissipated: the vulture-shadow spread its dark pennons and wheeled down the west. A priceless thing is that friend upon whom one may shift the part of a burden. It seemed to be one of Cathewe's occupations in life to absorb, in a kindly, unemotional manner, other people's troubles. It is this type of man, too, ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... singlet.... Will that be of any use to you?... Take it, matey...." Those friendly murmurs filled the forecastle. He pawed around with his naked foot, gathering the things in a heap and looked about for more. Unemotional Archie perfunctorily contributed to the pile an old cloth cap with the peak torn off. Old Singleton, lost in the serene regions of fiction, read on unheeding. Charley, pitiless with the wisdom of youth, ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... But there remains brown, unemotional, disinclined for movement. An intermixture of red is outwardly barely audible, but there rings out a powerful inner harmony. Skillful blending can produce an inner appeal of extraordinary, indescribable beauty. The vermilion now rings ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... early hours of the afternoon, to our intense relief, Semyonov and Andrey Vassilievitch appeared. Semyonov was, as ever, short, practical, and unemotional. ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... unemotional constable. "Give 'em more work an' less corn. Wot's your name an' address? There's this 'ere lamp-post to pay for. Cavalry charges in Buckingham ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... three notes. What was in those notes, Heaven only knows! Instantly the whole banqueting hall was a scene of indescribable confusion. Tartar and Cossack shouted with glee; older Russian officers ordered the band to stop, and vainly tried to silence the disorder. The dark-visaged and apparently unemotional civilians threw off their armour of unconcern, and hurled epithets and shook clenched fists and defiance at their military fellow-countrymen. Then they all rushed out of the building in a body, hissing and spluttering like a badly constructed fuse in ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... definitions, and propositions, with a final exclusion of fact signed Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought about. And since the unemotional intellect may carry us into a mathematical dreamland where nothing is but what is not, perhaps an emotional intellect may have absorbed into its passionate vision of possibilities some truth of what will be—the more comprehensive ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... through the enemy barrage. All well," came the sergeant's unemotional monotone, repeating the voice in his ears. I knew that voice was being listened to in Washington by a little group whose every shoulder bore the stars of high command. My thoughts flashed to them, gazing breathless at the screen that imaged the ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... common with the majority of the Verity family, was animated by that ineradicable distrust of anything approaching genius which distinguishes the English country, or rather county, mind. And that Sir Charles Verity had failed to conform to the family tradition of solid, unemotional, highly respectable, and usually very wealthy, mediocrity was beyond question. He had struck out a line for himself; and, as the event disclosed, an illustrious one. This the Archdeacon, being a good Conservative, disapproved. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Sally. Better ... better. But Sally! I love you. Don't you love me a little? Sally!" There was a long silence. Consideringly, Sally looked down, faintly excited, but unemotional. He vainly sought to achieve a mutual kiss; but she kept her head turned away. Strange! Her brain was perfectly clear! She was aware of every contact with him, knew his every wish; and was unmoved. How different it was from when she ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... proved the wisdom of much doubting as to actual, literal events; but Little Miss was making me think of myself as almost raw-and-twenty credulous. In a lawyer's letter of formal conciseness, devoid of humanities, maintaining to the end an atmosphere of unemotional fact and figure that descended not even to conventional felicitations upon the result, I therefore acquainted Little Miss with the situation. So nearly perfect was this letter that it caused her to refer to me, in a later communication to Miss Caroline, as "your dry-and-dusty ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... no command. The congregation had never seen him thus moved, before, in his pulpit. They sat there and gazed at him and wondered what was the matter; because he was now reading, in this broken voice and with occasional tears trickling down his face, what to them seemed a quite unemotional chapter—that one about Moses begat Aaron, and Aaron begat Deuteronomy, and Deuteronomy begat St. Peter, and St. Peter begat Cain, and Cain begat Abel—and he was going along with this, and half crying—his voice continually breaking. The congregation left ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... the House of Representatives in the capitol at Washington, and there read out the terms of the armistice which Germany had accepted, and to the observance of which Germany was pledged with guaranties so strict that evasion was made impossible. The President is an unemotional man, but in that hour he must have felt deep satisfaction in the fact that the document in his hand had been made possible by the will and the action of the great nation whose chief magistrate he was, and is—the nation that with generous hand ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... a man who swore. He was more inclined to adhere to his rigid Presbyterian training by quoting a psalm or a proverb to emphasise displeasure or convey a rebuke. His officers did not comprehend how he could be so unemotional and yet throw so much energy and dash into the navigation of his vessel. Externally he was cool, reticent, authoritative. He gave orders peremptorily, without hesitation; and both officers and sailors like to feel that they have a strong personality commanding ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... time about five-and-thirty, though careful living and an even, unemotional temperament caused him to look much younger than ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... suave and unemotional. They were talking—as any other two people in the theatre were talking—without any great interest. After a few minutes Oakleigh returned and shook hands with noticeable warmth; there was a short triangular conversation before the lights were lowered; then Jack hurried ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... the Marseillaise sung upon hundreds of peaceful occasions; have risen when it was played in French theaters; have enthusiastically joined in singing it at students' dinners, and have been impressed by it in an unemotional and academic way. In peace times one feels that it is easily the greatest of national anthems, but fails to realize that it is primarily a battle song. This morning for the first time I heard it sung as such, and as such shall forever remember it. I was walking ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... no sign whatever of the excitement which usually fills a house on the day of a wedding. She looked up when Miss Clarence entered the shop. Then she rose and laid aside her knitting. She had clear, grey eyes, an unemotional, self-confident face, and ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... chance peasant from the province of La Kythrea into gleams of gold that a Venetian patrician might envy, or brought into sudden relief the smothered passion of some beautiful, dark Greek face. But the women were chiefly of the lower Cypriote peasant-type, heavy-featured and unemotional. There was a sprinkling of monkish cowls and of the red fez from the Turkish village of Afdimou which lay in seeming friendliness of relation close to the village of Ormodos, ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... of spur-jingling vaqueros, chosen because of their well-broken mounts, rode out in front of the adobe corral and the expectant audience, halted and dispersed to their various stations as directed by Dade, clear-voiced, steady of glance, unemotional, as if he were in charge of a bit of ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... a very unemotional reception. Its style was peculiar,—almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... us turn to the higher subject with which the Apostle is here evidently mainly concerned. What is the meaning of the exhortation 'Be sober'? Well, first let me tell you what I think is not the meaning of it. It does not mean an unemotional absence of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Here again it is instructive to compare the scene between Hedda and Thea, in the first act, with the scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden. Both are scenes of exposition: and each is, in its way, character-revealing; but the earlier scene is a passage of quite unemotional narrative; the later is a passage of palpitating drama. In the plays subsequent to Hedda Gabler, it cannot be denied that the past took the upper hand of the present to a degree which could only be justified by the genius of an Ibsen. Three-fourths of the action ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... call up the emotions you felt when first you saw the scene, and then try to reproduce those emotions in your hearers. Description is primarily emotional in its appeal; nothing can be more deadly dull than a cold, unemotional outline, while nothing leaves a warmer impression than ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... affections. A girl, without repining, will follow her four-legged dowry to the house of a man she may never have spoken twenty words to before her marriage. We praise our women for their virtue, but the general acceptance of the marriage as arranged shows so unemotional, so undesirable a temperament, that it is not to be wondered at. One ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... he cherished no sentimental feeling for the boy's mother. That had passed out of his life as everything else had seemingly passed which belonged to the old order of things. He had always been a calm, reserved, self-absorbed, unemotional type of man, glorying a little, perhaps, in his lack of dependence on human kind. In his need he had turned to his fellows and turned in vain. Now that a precious thing had come to him unsought, he did ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... was not coldness, nor yet indifference, but a sort of peculiar self-possession gave her the appearance of a very trustworthy, very capable and excellent governess; as if Fyne were a widower and the children not her own but only entrusted to her calm, efficient, unemotional care. One expected her to address Fyne as Mr When she called him John it surprised one like a shocking familiarity. The atmosphere of that holiday was—if I may put it so—brightly dull. Healthy faces, fair complexions, clear eyes, and never a frank smile in the whole ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... something of the same interest in thinking about one of the boarders at our table that I find in my waking dreams concerning the Man of the Monument. This personage is the Register of Deeds. He is an unemotional character, living in his business almost as exclusively as the Scarabee, but without any of that eagerness and enthusiasm which belong to our scientific specialist. His work is largely, principally, I may say, mechanical. ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... But as unemotional as he was, he couldn't have been more impeccably emotionless than Conseil when I told the fine lad our intention of pushing on to the South Pole. He greeted my announcement with the usual "As master wishes," and I had to be content with that. As for Ned Land, no human shoulders ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... taxicab, as though interested in watching the crowds upon the street. Peter Ruff appeared to be absorbed in his own thoughts. Yet perhaps they were both of them nearer to one another than either surmised. Their parting in the hall of the Continental Hotel was unemotional enough. For a moment Peter Ruff had hesitated while her hand had lain in his. He had opened his lips as though he had something to say. Her eyes grew suddenly softer—seemed to seek his as though begging for those unspoken ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... talked to the Governor," said Darrow, in his level voice which sounded to Stephen so unemotional, "and I think we can find ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... wish to lay bare. The death and the inquest verdict, "Suicide while of unsound mind, due to overstudy," broke his father's heart and his mother's: in the metaphorical meaning of course, because the heart is an unemotional pump and it is the brain and the nerve centres that suffer from our emotions. Sir Meldrum Fraser died a year after his son. He left a fortune of eighty thousand pounds. Half of this went at once to Honoria and the other half to the life-use of Lady Fraser with a reversion ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... careful he had been; how matter-of-fact and unemotional; never touching her; never making any sudden motion towards her; never referring to that short ten minutes at the clergyman's; never going near the two rooms the respectable English housekeeper had conducted her to that ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... completely as his marriage with me? No word of evil could be whispered of him after I had given him my hand. As to giving myself up to anything less than the shaping of a man's destiny—if I thought I could do it I would abhor myself. . . ." She spoke with authority in her deep fascinating, unemotional voice. Renouard meditated, gloomy, as if over some sinister riddle of a beautiful sphinx met on the wild road ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... standing in the doorway, waiting to take the cup when my lady had finished. Now she said in an unemotional tone— ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... turned to them now in a different spirit. Pettifer had been left by the English summaries of the trial with a vague feeling of doubt. Mr. Hazlewood respected Robert Pettifer. The lawyer was cautious, deliberate, unemotional—qualities with which Hazlewood had instinctively little sympathy. But on the other hand he was not bound hand and foot in prejudice. He could be liberal in his judgments. He had a mind clear enough to divide what reason had to say and the presumptions of convention. Suppose ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... wrappers, gave some very illuminating descriptions of the art or act, but the affair opened with the scene all set and the principal characters both ready, willing, and able. There was no conversational road map that showed the way that led two people from a calm and unemotional discussion into an area that might ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... might be approaching. He grew irritable. The darkness of the woods would sometimes hold his attention for hours, while the expression of his eyes would tell of the strange thoughts passing behind them. And Ralph, though more unemotional than his brother, was scarcely less affected. It was startling in such men, yet was it hardly to be wondered at in so ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... rounds, inspecting the damage wrought by last night's storm, she was rehearsing inwardly her first meeting with Jacqueline; planning to show her, without exciting suspicion, the depth of her love and her understanding. If only practical, unemotional Jemima were there, to act as buffer between them! She thought of consulting Philip, but decided that Jacqueline's secret was not hers ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... things in his own way; the idiomatic language, and quick, curt sentences in which he enunciated his opinions. I felt him like a strong, kind, and thoughtful elder brother, and have had abundant evidence in his deeds and in some brief unemotional words of his that he felt a great regard of the fraternal kind for me. It has often comforted me, that friendship—pure, disinterested and manly on his side, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... honestly believe, appreciates the unemotional cruelty of the Chinese. Throughout the time that Dr. Fu-Manchu remained in England, the press preserved a uniform silence upon the subject of his existence. This was due to Nayland Smith. But, as a result, I feel assured that my account of the Chinaman's deeds will, in many ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... boast more than two coaches among their whole number), and he feels sure that they are depraved. He attributes both vices unhesitatingly to their idleness and to their religion. In their singularly unemotional and coolly comparative outlook upon religion, how infinitely nearer were Fielding and Smollett than their greatest successors, Dickens and Thackeray, to the modern critic who observes that there is "at present not a single credible established religion in existence." To ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... these mediaeval rooms possess a peculiar, intimate character and mark the change of feeling which came over French artists of the time. The impersonal, unemotional and regal bearing of the thirteenth-century figures give way to a more naturalistic treatment. The Virgin's impassive features soften; they become more human; she turns to her child with a maternal smile (which later becomes conventionalised into a simper), or permits a caress. ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... If you take my advice, you will throw the packet into the fire unread. At least, if you do examine it, postpone the duty till you feel yourself absolutely impervious to any mental trickery, and—bear in mind that you are a worthy member of a particularly matter-of-fact and unemotional profession." ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... love and malice. Love and malice in alternate impulse are found latent and potent in every philosophic effort. Behind every philosophy, if we have the love or the malice to seek for it, may be found the love or malice, or both of them, side by side, of the individual philosopher. That pure and unemotional desire for truth for its own sake which is the privilege of physical science cannot retain its simplicity when confronted with the deeper problems of philosophy. It cannot do so because the complex vision with which we philosophize contains emotion ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... families which evidently existed chiefly to be subjects for philanthropic manipulation. Day by day Ashe felt her speak to him more easily and familiarly; and although their talk was strictly impersonal and unemotional, none the less did it feed ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... avers that she makes war against us without hatred, and thinks she is thereby giving proof of high civilization. It is precisely the proof of her cold-hearted baseness.... The self-controlled English gentleman, who makes unemotional war out of commercial envy, is more devilish than the Cossack. He stands to the Frenchman in the relation of the sneaking murderer for gain to the murderer from passion. The gentleman-burglar of Conan Doyle expresses the soul of the nation.—O.A.H. ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... Smith in a tone he tried to render as unemotional as possible. He sighed inwardly as he thought of his fellows at Jamestown, ill, starving, and now doubtless believing him dead. Perhaps if he bided his time he would find some way of communicating with them. In the meantime, policy, as well as inclination, urged his making friends with ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... something in the girl's face, however, that had left an impression on the mind of Jean Marot not easily effaced. It was too indistinct and unemotional, this impression, to inspire analysis, but it was there, so that, under the lamp, Jean had at once recognized the ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... obeying the law of the land, or in executing the plans of one's official superiors, or in serving one's employer or one's client or one's chief, or one's fraternity or other social union. In this sense the loyal servant may be obscure and unemotional. But he is trustworthy. Now, a word which thus so forcibly appeals to the lovers who want to express their passionate devotion, and also to the soldiers who want to name that obstinate following of the flag which makes victory ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... his head sadly. "I glanced over it," said he. "Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... killed a deer at the edge of a wood. Here they made a fire and cooked a supply which would last them for a day or two, and then on they went again. But we cannot follow them step by step. When Long-Hair at last took leave of Beverley, the occasion had no ceremony. It was an abrupt, unemotional parting. The stalwart Indian simply said in his own dialect, ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... have are for babies and the very youngest children," he said. His tone was coldly unemotional but he could not keep his fists from clenching at his sides. "You will return them at once and sleep on animal skins, as all the men and women do. And if you want grass for a mattress you will carry it yourself, as even ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... defect," says Mr Bond, "is one of passion"—a criticism which is applicable to all Lyly's dramas; and yet we must not forget that Lyly was the earliest to deal with passion dramatically. The love of Alexander is certainly unemotional, not to say callous; but possibly the great monarch's equanimity was a veiled tribute to the supposed indifference of the virgin Queen to all matters of Cupid's trade. Between Campaspe and Apelles, however, we have scenes which are imbued, if not vitalized, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... lover—he has started toward her. The orchestra leader is standing up. And the youth, with God's holiest glory in his face, has almost reached her. And there for an instant stand Neal and Jeanette mingling tears in their kisses, for the curtain, the miserable, unemotional, awkward curtain—it has stuck and so they must stand apart, hand in hand, devouring each other's faces a moment, and then as the curtain falls we see four feet close together again, and then—and then the world comes in upon us, and we smile and sigh and sigh and smile, for the journey ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... the imagination. They are entirely silent as to the qualities and idiosyncrasies of the leaders. Neither romance nor personal adventure finds any place within their pages, and fine writing is entirely foreign to their purpose. They are for the most part dry and unemotional in style, and are put together so far as possible chronologically in the order of their importance without the slightest reference to literary effect. While nothing is more untrustworthy generally ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... another—a pious one; there is the 'Cutlet and the Cabob'—a sentimental one; Timbuctoothen—a humorous one." Lord Carlisle's honesty, Lord Nugent's fun, Lord Lindsay's piety, failed to float their books. Miss Martineau, clear, frank, unemotional Curzon, fuddling the Levantine monks with rosoglio that he might fleece them of their treasured hereditary manuscripts, even Eliot Warburton's power, colouring, play of fancy, have yielded to the mobility of Time. Two alone out of the gallant company maintain their vogue to-day: ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... calling, or business, would leave little leisure for the meditation and reflection that is so large a part of the preparation necessary for entrance into that other world of which she had dreamed. Constant contact with the unemotional facts and figures of that life which sets a market value upon the sacred things of womanhood would make it ever more difficult for her to dream of love. There was grave danger that interest and enthusiasm in other things would supplant her longing for wifehood and motherhood. She feared ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... best thing about it. The watchbirds are unemotional. Their reasoning is non-anthropomorphic. You can't bribe them or drug them. You ...
— Watchbird • Robert Sheckley
... scientifically consuming griddle-cakes, jaws working, unemotional eyes watching the effect ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... I remind you, I permit myself no prejudices. I observe the workings of unemotional law and sometimes record them. You have a saying here that there are three generations between shirt-sleeves and shirt-sleeves. I observe the process of the progress. It is benign as are all processes. I have ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... not, he told himself, love Lady Ethel as a man should love the wife of his bosom. Middle-aged, worn, and unemotional though he might be, he knew that he was yet capable of a much deeper feeling than she had evoked and he had wakened to a realisation of this since he had again ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... ceremony. She, dear girl, has harbored ever since the belief that she continues to go to church almost every Sunday either in the morning or the afternoon, a harmless delusion which for some time I took no pains to dispel, knowing as I did that she meant to go every Sunday. Yet I knew also that pitiless, unemotional statistics would reveal an average attendance on her part of rather less than ten times in the course of each year. I was brute enough finally to call attention to a tally-sheet, covering a period of three calendar months, which I had kept ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... to be blown up, and he told himself that he was a fool if he were not supremely happy. The wagon stopped, and he helped her out again, her warm little hand again close in his own, and when she looked at him he was the cool, smiling John Aldous of old, so cool, and strong, and unemotional that he saw surprise in her eyes first, and then that gentle, gathering glow that came when she was proud of him, and pleased with him. And as Blackton pointed out the mountain she unknotted the veil under her chin and let it drop back over her shoulders, so that ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood |
