"Lifelessness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the 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, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... approached. He always retired to rest punctually at a certain hour, and would sleep so soundly that a cannon fired under his window would not arouse him. He never, which may seem singular, spoke or moved much in his sleep, but was peculiarly calm, almost to the appearance of lifelessness; but, discovering once that he had been watched in sleep, he was wont afterwards carefully to secure the chamber from intrusion. His victory over the natural incoherence of sleep had, when I first knew him, lasted for some years; possibly ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... its plain deal furniture, depressed me no less than the cold, forbidding appearance of the woman who stood now motionless before me. She was paler than any woman whom I had ever seen in my life. A living person, she seemed the personification of lifelessness. Her black hair was streaked with grey; her dress, which suggested a uniform in its severity, knew no adornment save the plain ivory cross which hung from an almost invisible chain about her neck. Her expression indicated neither curiosity nor courtesy. ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... example, had the most singular and varied forms. Some resembled the ruins of temples and houses, others trees; indeed, the figure of a woman with a child in her arms, was so natural, that I could scarcely help feeling a regret at seeing it turned into this dismal lifelessness. Further on, lay a gate, whose noble artistic construction so deceived me, that I long sought for the ruins of the town to which ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... note of established respectability, the suppressed voices of its young men, their obvious politeness to each other and defence to clients, their horror at anything vulgar, the quiet, the irritating quiet, Mr. Wigger's red wig—he was the engrossing clerk—the lifelessness of the atmosphere of the place, as if nothing real ever happened there, and as if the cases we prepared and tried were of interest only on account of the legal points involved. When I was there, filing papers in their dusty packages, I used to feel as though I was fumbling among the dust ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... the most elementary form of plant life to the highest form of animal life. Prana is all pervading. It is found in all things having life, and as the occult philosophy teaches that life is in all things—in every atom—the apparent lifelessness of some things being only a lesser degree of manifestation, we may understand their teachings that prana is everywhere, in everything. Prana must not be confounded with the Ego—that bit of Divine Spirit ...
— The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath • Yogi Ramacharaka
... 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 the animal ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... 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 position to another. ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow |
