"Insouciance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of curiosity.] Incuriosity — N. incuriosity, incuriousness &c adj.; insouciance &c 866; indifference, lack of interest, disinterest. boredom, ennui (weariness) 841; satiety &c 639; foreknowledge (foresight) 510; V. be incurious &c adj.; have no curiosity &c 455; take no interest in &c 823; mind one's own business. Adj. incurious, uninquisitive, indifferent; impassive ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... never seen any one at all like Terriss, and my father said the same. The only actor of my father's day, he used to tell me, who had a touch of the same insouciance and lawlessness was Leigh Murray, a famous ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... business and the excitement of responsibility are indispensable to me, and I believe that I am never happier than when I have more to think of and to do than I can manage in a given period'. Idleness and insouciance had few temptations for them, cynicism was abhorrent to them. Even Thackeray was perpetually 'caught out' when he assumed the cynic's pose. Charlotte Bronte, most loyal of his admirers and critics, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... her as he leaned gracefully on the foot of the bed, and that she admired him. He did not know, or rather he absolutely did not realize, that she was acquainted with aught against his good fame. He forgot his sins with the insouciance of an animal. ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... insouciance gaining with his discomposure, her eyes widening and then a dolly kind of glassiness seeming to set in. "You ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... not but be struck by the strangeness of his demeanour: his distracted silence, his efforts to speak to Ephie alone, and the expression with which he had watched her. And Ephie?—what of her? Now that Johanna thought of it, a change had also come over Ephie's mode of treating Maurice; the gay insouciance of the early days had given place to the pert flippancy which, only the night before, had so pained her sister. What had brought about this change? Was it pique? Was Ephie chafing, in secret, at his prolonged absences, and was ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... that cool, crude, direct insouciance so unpleasant to some men. Sylvia was attentive, curious, and instinctively shrinking by turns, secretly dismayed at the overplainness of terms employed in kennel lore by the girl at ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... between a groan and a scream the Colonel staggered, and would have fallen had not Carrington caught him. "Gone! Impossible!" cried Sir Charles vehemently, all his studied insouciance thrown to the winds. "She was with the women behind the barrier that we made. She ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... were closing in around him, that the box itself was surrounded, that notwithstanding all his ingenuity and all his resource, a crisis had come which seemed insuperable. She was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the pity of it. All the admiration she had ever felt for his strange insouciance, his almost bravado-like coolness, his mastery over events, seemed suddenly to resolve itself into more definite and more clearly-comprehended emotion. It was the great pity of it all which suddenly appealed to her. She ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... support. North was lazy, yet this defect added strength to the combination of king and minister. Behind the scenes George was active and anxious, while in parliament the weapons of indignation and sarcasm with which North was assailed failed to pierce the impenetrable wall of his amiable insouciance. The king's policy was triumphant. The combination between the obedient responsible minister and the imperious irresponsible king lasted for twelve years, during which George ruled ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... venerable impostor fresh from the steps of the Piazza di Spagna, who, in the leisure moments that he can spare from his customary organ, makes the round of the studios and is waited for in Holland Park? Do we not all recognise him, when, with the gay insouciance of his nation, he reappears on the walls of our summer exhibitions as everything that he is not, and as nothing that he is, glaring at us here as a patriarch of Canaan, here beaming as a brigand from the Abruzzi? Popular ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... the mind of all of them except Yeager himself. The extra was being trained to meet Harrison. It was apparent to all of them that the prizefighter was nursing a grudge. The jaunty insouciance of the young range-rider irritated him as a banderilla goads ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... course. Here at least Solivet agreed with me, for he had as great a horror of Mademoiselle de Gringrimeau as I had, and knew, moreover, that she wrote spiteful letters to the Count d'Aubepine about his poor little wife, which happily were treated with the young gentleman's usual insouciance. Solivet was of my opinion that the old demoiselle had instigated this attack. He thought so all the more when he heard that she was actually condescending to wed the intendant of Chateau d'Aubepine. But he said he had no doubt that my proceedings ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... carefully with the lower side of his sleeve, round and round. He placed it on his head, jauntily. He stepped to the kitchen, took a tooth-pick from the little red-and-white glass holder on the table, and—with this emblem of insouciance, at an angle of ninety, between his teeth—strolled indolently, nonchalantly down the front steps, along the cement walk to the street and so toward town. The two old people, left alone in the sudden silence of the house, stared after the swaggering figure until the dim ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... which has scarce its equal in the history of crime; and priest, as he was, he proved that he did not yield to the Marquis himself in the Rabelaisian amplitude of his vocabulary. He brought charges against the weird world of Presles with an insouciance and brutality which defeated their own aim. He described the vices of his master and the sins of the servants in a slang which would sit more gracefully upon an idle roysterer than upon a pious Abbe. And, his story ended, he leered at the Court with the satisfaction ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... that was not centred in her. Take away his love for her, and what remained? Nothing—though only in the past twenty-four hours had this love been added to him. Ah, why had he ever seen her? He thought of his past, its cold splendour and insouciance. But he knew that for him there was no returning. His boats were burnt. The Cytherean babes had set their torches to that flotilla, and it had blazed like match-wood. On the isle of the enchantress he was ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... his face was like marble in its melancholy. He had lived the delicate and luxurious life of a young man of birth and fortune, a life exquisite in its freedom from sordid care, its beautiful boyish insouciance; and now for the first time he became conscious of the terrible mystery of Destiny, of the awful ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... haunting the fair autumn evening. She also bore relation to the chill haunting the stream-side and the deep places of the woods. And her immediate action emphasised this last likeness in his mind. When he first beheld her she was bright, with a certain teasing insouciance. Then, for a minute, even more, she stood at gaze, as a hind does suddenly startled on the edge of the covert—her head raised, her face keen with inquiry. Her expression changed, became serious, almost ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... worlds are for," I told her, "——that, no matter how far apart we are, our spirits may come and meet; live again, as we've lived here; be happy again—as I've been." I turned, saying with a laugh that was meant to convey an impression of insouciance—yet failing rather miserably: "These two big pines here, Princess, actually make the gateway to my pool—which is, in fact, my Secret world, because you helped me build my home there. So, you see, it wouldn't be very difficult, as you were about to enter ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... ornaments of green jade, blue porcelain, and elaborate brass-work, denote the important status of the wealthy community. A busy passer supplies the usual pictures of native life, but the people of the Minahasa, here as elsewhere, lack both the gay insouciance of the South, and the strenuous energy of the Northern mind, the residuum of apathetic dullness, deprived of all the salient characteristics which constitute charm and interest. European houses of Dutch officials stand in ideal ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings |
