"Torpidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... found me prepared; I plied her with questions from start to finish. She yielded with a perfect courtesy; told of the poor lot of the few free negroes of whom she knew, and of the time-serving and shifty indolence, the thievishness, faithlessness, and unaspiring torpidity of "some niggehs"; and when I opened the way for her to speak of uncle and aunt she poured forth their praises with an ardor that brought her own tears. I asked her if she believed she could ever be ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... atmosphere, the wind having fallen suddenly as one lowers a veil, the dazzling expanse, heated white-hot, a solemn silence hovering over the landscape, all indicated that a storm was brewing in some corner of the horizon. The extraordinary torpidity of the surrounding objects gradually affected the persons. Naught could be heard save the tinkling bells of the mules as they ambled slowly along, the measured, heavy tread, through the burning dust, of the bands of singers whom Cardailhac ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... histories also. But how rarely we see squirrels in winter! The naturalists say they are mostly torpid; yet evidently that little pocket-faced depredator, the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days to his hole for nothing: was he anticipating a state of torpidity, or providing against the demands of a very active appetite? Red and gray squirrels are more or less active all winter, though very shy, and, I am inclined to think, partially nocturnal in their habits. Here a gray ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... generally associated. Nature fills her dish with the berries, then covers them with the white and yellow of milk and cream, thus suggesting a combination we are quick to follow. Milk alone, after it loses its animal heat, is a clod, and begets torpidity of the brain; the berries lighten it, give wings to it, and one is fed as by the air he breathes or ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... every year. Can you wonder that it should carry deposits of jam, egg, butter, coffee, and personal dirt? You cannot. But you are entitled to wonder why the Municipal Sanitary Inspector does not inspect it and order it to be destroyed.... That youthful miss in torpidity over that palimpsest of filth is what the Free Library has to show as the justification of its existence. I know ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... door closed behind them, the cavaliers seemed to awaken from their torpidity. They raised their heads, and looked at one another with a half-confused, half-angry gaze. They had been scolded like children, and felt that they were men. Their honor had received a sensitive wound, but their awe of the king kept them ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... of the earth's surface, where their supply of food is constant, the activity of the Bats is not known to have any intermission, but in cold and temperate countries they pass the winter season in a state of torpidity. The period of this hibernation, as it is called, varies somewhat in the different species, but few of them are to be seen flying about, except when the weather is decidedly mild. The commonest of all our British species, the Pipistrelle, has a shorter winter sleep than any of its companions, ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... Leigh said, filling an impressive pause with the first chance comment that came to him. Afterward he wondered at the obstinate torpidity of his mind, for not even the reference to her deliberate look and fine eyes gave him the clew. All this talk of early hardship and of street-cars had put the narrator for the time on another level from that he now occupied in the world, ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins |
