"Frigidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... True, the majority of men are abashed in the presence of innocence and deal gently with it,—but others follow in a repellent way their instinct of possession. Any neurologist of experience has cases where sexual frigidity and neurasthenia in a woman can be traced back to the shock of that all-important ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... he filled were located in the medieval notion of the physical appearance of hell. By day the environment was heat and torment. By night—lunar night, of course, and lunar day—it was frigidity and horror. Once in two weeks Earth-time a rocketship came around the horizon from Lunar City with stores for the colony deep underground. Pop received the stores and took care of them. He handed over the product ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Community. Every community has its errors in its laws. No human laws, how skilfully soever framed, but give to a national character defects as well as merits, merits as well as defects. Craft, selfishness, cruelty to the subdued, inhospitable frigidity to neighbours, make the defects of the Spartan character. But," added Alcman, with a kind of reluctant anguish in his voice, "the character has its grand virtues, too, or would the Helots not be the masters? Valour indomitable; grand scorn ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... Lucetta. She depicted his impassioned manner; beheld the indecision of both between their lothness to separate and their desire not to be observed; depicted their shaking of hands; how they probably parted with frigidity in their general contour and movements, only in the smaller features showing the spark of passion, thus invisible to all but themselves. This discerning silent witch had not done thinking of these things when Lucetta ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... we can say that his were feelings founded upon interest-moving in the foremost elements of secession-arbitrary, self-willed, and easily swayed by prejudice-a man known to the public and the bar for his frigidity, bound in his own opinions, and yielding second to the wishes and principles of none-fearful of his popularity as a judge, yet devoid of those sterling principles which deep jurists bring to their aid when considering important questions, where ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... keep your engagement," she told him, and he could feel the instant frigidity which returned to her tone. A zero-like wave seemed to come right through the transmitter of the telephone and chill the perspiration of his brow ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... him. He was now particularly friendly in his manner to her, but when he spoke to her across one intermediate person, she could only answer him in monosyllables. Every one silently remarked her absence of mind and unusual frigidity. ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... at the Manor was not a very brilliant affair. Stafford did not appear, pleading that it was a Friday, and a strict fast for him. Kate was distinctly out of temper, and treated the company in general, and Eugene in particular, with frigidity. Everybody felt that the situation was somewhat strained, and in consequence the pleasant flow of personal talk that marks parties of friends was dried up at its source. The discussion of general topics was ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... you need not leave Madison Hall unless you wish to do so." Mrs. Weatherbee's frigidity had miraculously vanished. A gleam of kindly purpose had ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... made a sudden quick leap on the instant to the old hall at Montepoole and the shot dog. And then Dr. Quackenboss was presented, an introduction which Capt. Rossitur received coldly, and Mr. Thorn with something more than frigidity. ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... who, by tempering the acidity of satire with the sugar of civility, and allaying the heat of wit with the frigidity of humble chat, can make the true punch of conversation; and, as that punch can be drunk in the greatest quantity which has the largest proportion of water, so that companion will be oftenest welcome, whose talk flows out with ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... because the cold of the water penetrates their bodies and so they generally all die from haemorrhages, oppression of the chest caused by staying such long stretches of time without breathing; and from dysentery caused by the frigidity. 40. Their hair, which is by nature black, changes to an ashen colour like the skin of seals, and nitre comes out from their shoulders so that they resemble human monsters of some species. 41. With ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... PONSONBY stops belittling His country and WELLS abandons Britling: When the Ethiopian changes his hue To a vivid pink or a Reckitty blue— In fine, when the Earth has lost its solidity, Then I shall believe in "TAY PAY'S" frigidity. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152. January 17, 1917 • Various
... to be affable and kind, and (shall we say it?) he would not make Mr. Lincoln uncomfortable either by a superiority of English or the certain frigidity of manner which people in the West said he had. But he tried to imagine a Massachusetts senator, Mr. Sumner, for instance, going through the rat story, and couldn't. Somehow, Massachusetts senators hadn't this gift. And yet he was not quite sure that it wasn't ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the dance had given the last flare- up to Christine's love. It seemed to have improvidently consumed for its immediate purpose all her ardour forwards, so that for the future there was nothing left but frigidity. ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Davis's Strait is the wild, extensive, and uncivilized country of Labrador. Its coast was first discovered by the Portuguese navigators; but the frigidity of its climate is such, that no settlements of any importance have ever been fixed upon its shores. Even the extent of the country has been but imperfectly ascertained; for all the knowledge we have hitherto obtained respecting ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... after him by violent leaps and bounds (the certain signs of false mettle), others slowly and servilely creeping in his train, while the poet himself is all the time proceeding with an unaffected and equal majesty before them. However, of the two extremes one could sooner pardon frenzy than frigidity; no author is to be envied for such commendations, as he may gain by that character of style, which his friends must agree together to call simplicity, and the rest of the world will call dulness. There ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... I loaned you yesterday?" demanded Silvia in a tone far below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, while her features assumed a frigidity that would have congealed father's favorite sustenance had it ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... the dining-room, late as usual, her frigidity was not especially marked. On the contrary, her face rippled into one smile after another, and seizing Blake by both hands, she danced around ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... me. I felt that a man had the right to some slight display of tenderness from the woman who had borne him. Her frigidity wounded me. It wounded me the more in comparison with the affectionate clasp of old Gervasio's arms. With a knot in my throat I passed from the sunlight of the courtyard into the gloom of the gateway, and out again beyond, upon the ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... poetry and in song, but it pales into insignificance by the side of this girl's ride on the ice cream freezer. If the young man had exhibited foresight, and had a side saddle buckled on to the ice cream freezer, the experience would have been robbed of much of its frigidity, or if there had been a thick blanket under the saddle, but he failed to ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... instruments of music, ranged around the walls. One girl at the organ is graceful; another with a tambourine has a sort of Bassarid beauty. But the group of Apollo, Pegasus, and a Muse upon Parnassus, is a failure in its meaningless frigidity, while few of these subordinate compositions show power of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... certainly not to lead us to neglect the use of the lead; but experiments sufficiently prove, that variations of temperature, sensible to the most imperfect instruments, indicate danger long before the vessel reaches the shoals. In such cases, the frigidity of the water may induce the pilot to heave the lead in places where he thought himself in the most perfect safety. The waters which cover the shoals owe in a great measure the diminution of their temperature to their mixture with the lower ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... ashes, for for all those millions we would not have given an ounce of fish-meal. Clark grumbled something about their being meteor-stones, whose ferruginous substance had been lured by the magnetic Pole, and kept from frictional burning in their fall by the frigidity of the air: and they quickly ceased to interest our sluggish minds, except in so far as they ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... Dodd. If you like to expose yourself to ridicule, it is no affair of mine." The lady's manner was a happy mixture of frigidity and crossness. David stood benumbed, and Lucy, having emptied her flower-pot, glided indoors without taking any farther notice ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... done by; for I had two books, and the poor man looked so hungry for something to read that I couldn't resist sharing my 'goodies.' He will see that I'm a countrified little thing in spite of my fine feathers, and won't be shocked at my want of rigidity and frigidity; so don't look dismal, and I'll be prim and proper all the rest of the ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... for—with an outbreak of talk between him and Eleanor, or between him and Benecke, more eager, animated and interesting than before. But Lucy had no part in it. It was not the early neglect and incivility of the villa; it was something infinitely colder and more wounding; the frigidity of disillusion and resentment, of kindness rebuffed ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... be a great home circle of fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters. That would be a very strange home circle where the brothers and sisters did not know each other, and where the parents were characterised by frigidity and heartlessness. The Church must be a great family group—the pulpit the fireplace, the people all gathered around it. I think we sometimes can tell the people to stay out by our church architecture. People come in and find things angular ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... and misrepresentations, to accord approval only to the best speakers and the soundest arguments. But surely in a class of public speakers any such tricks and schemes should be received with stolid frigidity. Nothing is so damaging to appeals to prejudice, spread-eagleism, and fustian ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... had opened a career for him, was profound, and extended to all his family. These feelings caused him perhaps to have an exaggerated idea of the beauty of the young girl who was presented to him as a sister, and who, in spite of this title, received him with the frigidity and hauteur of a queen. Nevertheless, her appearance, in spite of her cool and freezing manner, had left a lasting impression upon the young man's heart, and his arrival in St. Petersburg had been marked by feelings till then never experienced ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... well known to exist; prominent examples being Augustus and Livia; Napoleon and Josephine. It is also a well-known fact that frigidity is a cause of barrenness. A short separation of husband and wife is often salutary ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... an inexpressible feeling of exultation that I drove off with her. At last we were alone together, and would be so for hours. The frigidity which had grown up within her during the last two months might possibly be relaxed now under the influence of this closer association. My heart beat fast. I talked rapidly about every thing. In my excitement I also ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... struggle, and throughout its course, he scorned those tactful arts and melodramatic ways which win over waverers and inspire the fainthearted. Here he showed himself not a son of Chatham, but a Grenville. The results of this frigidity were disastrous. All Frenchmen and many Britons believed that he went out of his way to assail a peaceful Republic in order to crush liberty abroad and at home. History has exposed the falseness of the slander; but a statesman ought not to owe his vindication to research in archives. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... courage to ask her. With as near an approach to frigidity of manner as she could show to a man to whom she was so indebted ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... one there is excess of sentiment, in the other the contrary vice of frigidity, and a premeditated and ostentatious use of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... in any effort which may be made, through parochial Church Councils or otherwise, to develop the spirit of fellowship in a congregation. There is very often about Anglican Church worship a stiffness and frigidity which badly needs to be broken down. Appropriated seats, where they exist, are a particular curse, and anything which can be done in the way of abandoning chosen seats, even if "bought and paid for," to strangers in the interests of charity is a real ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... the letter out and Steve accepted it. And Ross watched him all the time as he drew the note from its cover and perused it. The moment of shock had passed, and the fierce light in Steve's eyes had died out, leaving in its place a stony frigidity which gave the other a feeling of unutterable regret. He would have been thankful for some passionate outburst, some violent display. He felt it would have been more natural, and he would have known better how to deal with it. But there was none. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... perspiration formed during the day congeals, during sleep, into solid ice. Harding escaped any ill effects, but in truth, although I have said little about physical sufferings, most of that journey was terrible work. I got into a way at last of classifying the various stages of frigidity on departure from a stancia, and this was their order: (1) the warm; (2) the chilly; and (3) the glacial. The first stage of comparative comfort was due to the effect of a fire and warm food and generally lasted ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... made the best of it by claiming in consequence an utter immunity from the petite norale of the breakfast-table. Never did he lose a moment in helping anybody. Even the little Saffy he allowed with perfect frigidity to stretch out a very long arm after the butter—except indeed it happened to cross his plate, when he would sharply rebuke her breach of manners. It would have been all the same if he had not been going till noon, but now he ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... with interest or for long. . . . The dingy windows and walls, the voice of the secretary, the attitude of the prosecutor were all saturated with official indifference and produced an atmosphere of frigidity, as though the murderer were simply an official property, or as though he were not being judged by living men, but by some unseen machine, set going, goodness knows how or ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... however, might have been wafted down from Greenland's icy mountain, for I was chilled to the bone. In the flickering light of the station the natives shivered in their blankets. The atmosphere was anything but tropical yet I was almost within striking distance of the Equator. The reason for this frigidity was that I had entered the confines of the Katanga, the most healthful and highly developed province of the Congo and a plateau four thousand feet ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... chilled, would reckon friendship. In theory, the standard is raised too high; we ought not, however, to wish it much lower. The honest sensibilities of ingenuous nature should not be checked by the over-cautious maxims of political prudence. No advantage, obtained by such frigidity, can compensate for the want of those warm effusions of the heart into the bosom of a friend, which are doubtless among the most exquisite pleasures. At the same time, however, it must be owned, that they often by the inevitable ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... in a glow of triumph; satisfied, notwithstanding her frigidity, that he had compassed his immediate aim, which was that she might not be able to dismiss from her thoughts him and his persevering desire for the shadow of her face during the next four-and-twenty-hours. And his confidence was well founded: she ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Florence. Purity of taste and firmness of judgment, combined with scientific accuracy, were always distinctive of Florentines. To such an extent did these qualities determine their treatment of the arts that acute critics have been found to tax them—and in my opinion justly—with hardness and frigidity.[30] Brunelleschi in 1425 designed the basilica of S. Lorenzo after an original but truly classic type, remarkable for its sobriety and correctness. What he had learned from the ruins of Rome he ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... frowned.—"Look out! He will stick you like a prize pig," murmured Carter without moving a muscle. Shaw looked round helplessly.—"And you would enjoy the fun—wouldn't you?" he said with slow bitterness. Carter's distant non-committal smile quite overwhelmed him by its horrid frigidity. Extreme despondency replaced the proper feeling of racial pride in the primitive soul of the mate. "My God! What luck! What have I done to fall amongst that lot?" he groaned, sat down, and took his big grey head in his hands. Carter drew aside to make room for Immada, who, in obedience to a whisper ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... gave her name to the place of punishment precious to the Calvinistic mind. And because the Norseman very much disliked the bitter, cruel cold of the long winter, his heaven was a warm, well-fired abode, and his place of punishment one of terrible frigidity. Somewhere on the other side of the Tweed and Cheviots was the spot selected by the Celt of southern Britain. On the other hand, the eastern mind, which knew the terrors of a sun-smitten land and of a heat that was torture, had ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... She had never seen Pansy's guardian before (the executor had brought the child); and this extraordinary creature, whose visit she could not deny, might be ruinous to school discipline. It was therefore with an extra degree of frigidity of demeanor that she threw open the door of the reception room, and entered majestically. But to her utter astonishment, the colonel met her with a bow so stately, so ceremonious, and so commanding that she stopped, disarmed ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... century as "an aristocratic drawl," and his pronunciation was archaic. Like other high-bred people of his time, he talked of "cowcumbers" and "laylocks," called a woman an "'ooman," and was "much obleeged" where a degenerate age is content to be obliged. The frigidity of his address and the seeming stiffness of his manner, due really to an innate and incurable shyness, produced even among people who ought to have known him well a totally erroneous notion of his character and temperament. To Bulwer Lytton ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... beautiful chapel for the pensioners, in the classic style, over the altar of which hangs a picture by West. I never could look at it long enough to make out its design; for this artist (though it pains me to say it of so respectable a countryman) had a gift of frigidity, a knack of grinding ice into his paint, a power of stupefying the spectator's perceptions and quelling his sympathy, beyond any other limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience, I seize this opportunity to wreak a life-long ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... innocence, or the crosses of love. He is not long soft and pathetick without some idle conceit, or contemptible equivocation. He no sooner begins to move, than he counteracts himself; and terrour and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by sudden frigidity. ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... quarrel on that score, Mr. Chairman," assented Sir Christopher, with cutting frigidity. "I am perfectly willing to admit that practically the two vessels were built on the same lines, but with modifications which would enable my boat to sail twenty miles to windward and back in six days less time than it would have taken the Ark to cover the same distance, ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... feet on the outer steps. The light of his fire had evidently been seen, and like a beacon had attracted some wandering and possibly intoxicated mariner with American papers. The consul walked into the hall with a sudden righteous frigidity of manner. It was one thing to be lounging in one's own office on the Sabbath day, and quite another to be deliberately calling there ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte |
