"Fixedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... paper put it. He was a young man, younger than his cousin, but he looked older. He had a handsome face, under the most complete control as to its muscles. When he laughed he gave the impression of the fixedness of merriment of a mask. He looked keenly at Nahum Beals with that immovable laugh on his face, and spoke with perfectly good-natured sarcasm. "All very well for the string-pieces of the bridge from oppression to freedom," he said, "but you ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a row of curtained windows from stem to stern, and a drowsy face at every one. Once we encountered a boat of rude construction, painted all in gloomy black, and manned by three Indians, who gazed at us in silence and with a singular fixedness of eye. Perhaps these three alone, among the ancient possessors of the land, had attempted to derive benefit from the white mail's mighty projects and float along the current of his enterprise. Not long after, in the midst of a swamp and beneath a ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sensation of fixedness. He had expected when he went to sleep that the dream would, in sleep, end, and that he would wake to find himself alone in the empty house at New Cross. But he had wakened to the same dream once more, and now he began to wonder whether he really belonged ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... within yards of him. It happened once, however, that he looked through a temporary break in the crowding people and saw a dark strong-featured and remarkably intent boy's face, whose vivid scrutiny of him caught his eye. There was something in the fixedness of its attention which caused him to look at it curiously for a few seconds, and Marco ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... nature, two essential laws, which produce, by counterbalancing each other, the universal equilibrium of things. These are fixedness and movement, analogous, in philosophy, to Truth and Fiction, and, in Absolute Conception, to Necessity and Liberty, which are the very essence of Deity. The Hermetic philosophers gave the name fixed to everything ponderable, to everything that ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... life, ceased to be mobile and became fixed, but even so it was none the less impossible to render; it was a drill sounding the heart of whosoever he looked upon, the deepest, the most secret thought of which he meant to sound. Marble or painting might render the fixedness of that look, but neither the one nor the other could portray its life—that is to say, its penetrating and magnetic action. Troubled ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... speedily induced in the muscles, grasp the end of the twig yet more rigidly, and thus is produced the mysterious bending. The phenomena of the divining-rod and table-turning are of precisely the same character, and both are referable to an involuntary muscular action resulting from fixedness of idea. These experiments with a divining-rod are always made in a district known to be metalliferous, and the chances are, therefore, greatly in favour of its bending over ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... northward, was the mountain range I had scanned in my descent. On our right the plain dipped below the horizon while still but a few feet above the level of the river; but in the distant sky we discerned some objects like white clouds, which from their immobility and fixedness of outline I soon discovered to be snow-crowned hills, lower, however, than those to the northward, and perhaps some forty miles distant. The valley is one of the richest and most fertile portions of this continent, and ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... summer time. A Negro porter passing through a coach set apart for white passengers noted the fixedness with which a young woman with a pretty face and a pair of beautiful blue eyes was regarding him. Her head was inclined to one side, her hand so supporting her face that a prettily shaped ear peeped out from between her fingers. ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... regiment escorted him to the beach down the winding path, which was now lined on both sides by Cuban soldiers standing about a yard apart and presenting arms. The scene made a strong impression on all in the party, there seemed to be such an earnestness and fixedness of purpose displayed that all felt these soldiers to be a power. About fifty per cent. were blacks, and the rest mulattoes, with a small number of whites. They were very poorly clad, many without shirts or shoes, but every man had his gun and a ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... daily increase, and the fixedness of our position in the Far East hourly becomes more definite. The public man wears a scarf about his eyes who does not see that our historic statesmanship during this century will deal with our growing mastery of the Pacific, and the weaving backward and forward across that ocean ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... move forward compactly, exposing no detachment in front or rear; so that the course of his administration might have been explained as the calculating policy of a shrewd and watchful politician, had there not been seen behind it a fixedness of principle which from the first determined his purpose, and grew more intense with every year, consuming his life by its energy. Yet his sensibilities were not acute; he had no vividness of imagination ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... sat, no one coming near her, through several dances, trying to maintain the smile of delighted interest upon her face, though she felt the muscles of her face beginning to ache with their fixedness, her eyes growing hot and glazed. All the other girls were provided with partners for every dance, with several young men left over, these latter lounging [v]hilariously together in the doorways. Ariel was careful not to glance ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... minutes I found that she breathed more regularly and distinctly—presently her eyes lost that fixedness which had made them so painful to look upon. Then she recognised me, and took hold of my hand, regarding me with the sweet smile with which I ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... peaks of the distant mountains. The movement fixed her attention instantly. It was the instinct of one who lives in a country where the eyes and ears of a horse are often keener and more far-reaching than those of its human masters. The horse was gazing with statuesque fixedness across a waste of partially-melted snow. A stretch of ten miles lay flat and smooth as a billiard-table at the foot of the rise upon which the house was built. And far out across this the beast ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... there is given opportunity for crosses that nature occasionally delves into, and in the additional eccentric types getting mixed, tending to offer in rare instances special merit. We have then through mixture, not that fixedness that usually stands in the way, but a getting away from set types where once in thousands of offerings a more useful specimen is made, one nature herself cannot handle to our advantage, but for which we should have our eyes open, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... given his stout legs and heavy body credit for, he climbed upon the altar and plumped himself down on the head of the figure almost in a moment. But again he was disappointed, for the idol did not stir. As we examined it closely we perceived that its fixedness was not unreasonable; for the figure, and the altar on which it rested, were one solid mass of rock that itself was a part of the cliff—left standing here when the niche around it was hollowed out. A very prodigious ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... They cannot hope to secure the respect of the industrious sectaries who own and till the soil, and who are taught to count them aliens and persecutors. Irrigation is here the only means of successful agriculture. It involves great outlay of capital and labor, and creates great fixedness of tenure. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... the sudden stress Of passion is resistlessness, It drags the flood that sweeps away, For anchorage, or hold, or stay, Or saving rock of stableness, And there is none,— No underlying fixedness to fasten on: Unsounded depths; unsteadfast seas; Wavering, yielding, bottomless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... language of the human countenance which we all understand without an interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect. By the stillness of the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its windows and putting out its fires.—Such was the aspect of the face upon which the divinity-student ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... some of her friends, who stood near her, observed a more than ordinary earnestness and fixedness in her countenance; they said one to another, "Look how earnestly she looks, ...
— Stories of Boys and Girls Who Loved the Saviour - A Token for Children • John Wesley
... extinguishes in the cold darkness of death. His energy survives but to vent itself in wild gusts of reckless passion, or aimless indignation. There is a touching poignancy in his expression of the bitter melancholy that oppresses him, in the fixedness of misery with which he looks upon the faded dreams of former years, or the fierce ebullitions and dreary pauses of resolution, which now prompts him to retrieve what he has lost, now withers into powerlessness, as nature and reason tell him that it cannot, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... (b) The fixedness of impressions of sense furnishes a link of connexion between ancient and modern philosophy. The modern thinker often repeats the parallel axiom, 'All knowledge is experience.' He means to say that the outward and not the inward is both ...
— Theaetetus • Plato |
