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Frigid   /frˈɪdʒəd/   Listen
Frigid

adjective
1.
Sexually unresponsive.  Synonym: cold.  "A frigid woman"
2.
Extremely cold.  Synonyms: arctic, gelid, glacial, icy, polar.  "A frigid day" , "Gelid waters of the North Atlantic" , "Glacial winds" , "Icy hands" , "Polar weather"
3.
Devoid of warmth and cordiality; expressive of unfriendliness or disdain.  Synonyms: frosty, frozen, glacial, icy, wintry.  "Got a frosty reception" , "A frozen look on their faces" , "A glacial handshake" , "Icy stare" , "Wintry smile"



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"Frigid" Quotes from Famous Books



... lifted his hand to remove his hat, but did not do so, and, saying "Goodnight," again in a frigid voice, departed with visible stiffness from that house, to ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... hear it." Keith had frozen instantly into frigid aloofness. Stern lines had come to ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter

... to the office straight from school, at the age of sixteen; and, though classrooms breathe an air sufficiently frigid and suggestive of inhuman interests and unmeaning discipline, the icy air of that office had at first almost taken his breath. The place was so ridiculously serious! There might conceivedly be interests in the world worthy of so abject an absorption, so bleaching an obeisance ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... superb it is, this majestic calm and solemnity; how Donatello triumphs over the lack of giving tension to what is quiescent! The Penseroso also sits and meditates, but every muscle of the reposing limbs is alert. So, too, in the Moses, with all its exaggeration and melodrama, with its aspect of frigid sensationalism, which led Thackeray to say he would not like to be left alone in the room with it, we find every motionless limb imbued with vitality and the essentials of movement. The Moses undoubtedly springs ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... Sakyas will make a hard fight, great King, and the war will cost blood. These northern settlers are taller and stronger than other races and possess the courage of the inhabitants of their former frigid homes. It would be easier to take possession of their state if I married Princess Yasodhara and gradually assumed the government under your protection. Your mighty friendship would support me on the throne and you could ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus

... where to find that happiest spot below, Who can direct, when all pretend to know? The shudd'ring tenant of the frigid zone Boldly asserts that country for his own, Extols the treasures of his stormy seas, And live-long nights of revelry and ease; The naked Negro, panting at the line, Boasts of his golden sands and palmy wine, Basks ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... that desireth to be wash'd in cold water, goeth down into a River, 1. Qui cupit lavari aqu frigid, descendit ...
— The Orbis Pictus • John Amos Comenius

... being raised by an uproar on deck that filled my mind with dire apprehension, the lee bulwarks of the vessel were in five minutes thronged with half-naked passengers, who had been roused unexpectedly from their slumbers, staring in terror at the frigid masses which we momentarily feared would overwhelm the ship. The helm being put up, we were soon out of the threatened danger of a collision, which would have consigned us to a grave in the wide wide waters, without the remotest chance of escape. This ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell

... act diplomatically, so as to overcome the bad luck which had recently set in. Her brother the Cardinal had told her how irritated he was by the attitude of the Congregation of the Council; he had little doubt that the frigid reception accorded to his niece's suit had been due in part to the desire of some of his brother cardinals to be disagreeable to him. Personally, he desired the divorce, as it seemed to him the only means of ensuring the perpetuation of the family; for Dario obstinately ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... vault. He questioned Dorsey concerning each of the cash memoranda—certain checks, charge slips, etc., carried over from the previous day's work—with unimpeachable courtesy, yet with something so mysteriously momentous in his frigid manner, that the teller was reduced to pink cheeks and ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... CANYNGE. [Suavely frigid] I'm not aware of using any tone, as you call it. But this is a private house, Mr De Levis, and something is due to our host and to the esprit de corps ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... reproached governor Harrison for having marched against his people during his absence. The agent made a long speech to him, presenting reasons why he should now become the friend and ally of the United States. To this harangue, Tecumseh listened with frigid indifference, made a few general remarks in reply, and then with a haughty air, left the council-house, and took his departure for Malden, where he joined ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake

... what is necessary for the support of its species, and does not even extend its haunts to any great distances, unless it also finds all these circumstances conjoined. Thus, although the Wolf and the Fox inhabit all the climates from the torrid to the frigid zone, we hardly find any other differences among them, through the whole of that vast space, than a little more or less beauty in their furs. The more savage animals, especially the carnivorous, being confined ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey

... altogether sensation. Flashingly I was conscious here of incredibly swift transitions, from cold to deeper wells of frost; thence down through a stratum of death and negation, between mere blind walls of frigid inhumanity, to have been stayed a moment by which would have pointed all our limbs as stiff as icicles, as stiff as those of frogs plunged into boiling water. But we passed and fell, still crashing upon no obstruction; and thought ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... the forest as a background is the highest point of Mont Saint Jean: and here beneath an overhanging elm—all day on horseback—anxious, frigid and heroic, is Wellington—with a rain of bullets all round him, watching, ceaselessly watching that horizon far away, wrapped now in fog, anon in smoke and soon in gathering darkness: watching for the ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those, whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I, therefore, dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... features gradually relaxed; and, believing it useful to his projects to hide his disappointment, he walked up to the soldier, and said to him, with a tolerably good grace: "Well, I give way to these gentlemen. I own I was wrong. Your frigid air had wounded me, and I was not master of myself. I repeat, that I was wrong," he added, with suppressed vexation; "the Lord commands ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... day, and come in so bone-tired that she would drop on to the tiger skin before the fire, rather than face the stairs. Life at Mildenham was lonely, save for Winton's hunting cronies, and they but few, for his spiritual dandyism did not gladly suffer the average country gentleman and his frigid ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... the eagerness of the mother, it was no wonder that the General strove to win to his withered heart so fair a flower. He had been a great traveler, and had feasted his eyes on the beautiful women of the East, and the more frigid beauties of northern climes. He had been courted rather than courting, and had gone through life dreading to take to his heart a wife, lest, when too late, he should find his wealth had been the ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa

... middle stage of his career, the vivifying shafts of poetry no longer pierced through, and transmuted with their vibration of true passion, the fair realities of life. He could never have been guilty of the frigid and calculated indecency of a Giulio Romano; he could not have cast aside all conventional restraints, of taste as well as of propriety, as Rubens and even Rembrandt did on occasion; but as Van Dyck, the child of Titian almost as much ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips

... are quite glad she is going to be married at last," Lady Emily said in a confidential tone to Clarissa; "for she has kept up a kind of frigid atmosphere at home that I really believe has helped to frighten away all our admirers. Men of the present day don't like that sort of thing. It went out of fashion in England with King Charles I., ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... have waited till you got back, to see a house and a tree." And in still more — frigid axents, I added, "Or a barn." And I sez, kinder sarkastikly, "You enjoyed your ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley

... hardened with a frigid hatred as he spoke. He had only been paid for the work hitherto. Now ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... unaccountably, warned again by Diana's chaff. He knew quite well she was right. He was a man, or a bear if she preferred it, with two faces; but the trouble was that she should so thoroughly have grasped the fact. He had only intended to show one face, the uninviting, frigid one; and yet unconsciously she had won from him more than one glimpse of ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page

... failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed...." And so on to the close: "I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wish to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise." Yes, tranquillity; but not frigid! The whole passage, one of the finest in English prose, is marked by the heat of emotion. ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett

... merriment, for you don't laugh idly at Harry Champion. His gaiety is not the superficial gaiety of the funny man who makes you laugh but does nothing else to you. He does you good. I honestly believe that his performance would beat down the frigid steel ramparts that begird the English "lady." His songs thrill and tickle you as does the gayest music of Mozart. They have not the mere lightness of merriment, but, like that music, they have the deep-plumbing gaiety of the love of life, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... Arthur and Aurelie (so completely happy until now) to a phase of domestic warfare produced in the bosom of all homes by some secret and alien interest in one of the partners. The next day when Arthur awoke he found Madame Schontz as frigid as that class of woman knows how ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... have condescended to pay men for applause. But custom regulates our sense of honor. The claque is an institution so openly recognized in French theatres that the proudest dramatic or lyric temple in Paris would not know what to do without it. Even the classic Theatre Francais and the frigid Odeon, which are in great part supported by the government, and about which hangs the purest odor of high art, have each a regularly organized claque, which is paid to applaud, and which holds its rehearsals with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... remarkable among so fierce and unsusceptible a people as the ancient Scandinavians—was entirely unconnected with those strong attaching ties, which are the natural consequence of the warm temperaments of more southern nations; for love was numbered with the base inferior passions, in the frigid and hardy composition of the warrior of the north. It was the offspring of reasoning and observation, not of instinctive sentiment and momentary impulse. In the wild, poetical code of the old Gothic superstition ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... bearing very frigid. Keith was naturally not in the least deceived by this assumption of injured innocence, but ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... to awareness. There were some foul-smelling hides draped over him that retained a little of his body heat. He pulled away the stifling fold that covered his face and stared up at the stars, cold points of light that glittered in the frigid night. The air was a stimulant and he sucked deep gasps of it that burned his throat but seemed to clear his thoughts. For the first time he realized that his disorientation had been caused by that crack on the head he had received when the ship crashed; ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey

... with Montreal's hot genius and John di Vico's frigid villany, your Holiness may live to envy, if not the quiet, at least the revenue, of ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... to find the pipes warm and a fine fire blazing in the great fireplace in the lobby. The chambermaid explained the astonishing phenomenon: the week before several Americans had complained frequently of the frigid atmosphere of the place without exciting much sympathy from the management, but after they had left the hotel, it was taken as an evidence of good faith and the heat was turned on. But this digression has taken me so far away from Penzance ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy

... because each fulfilled the respective duties of their station, possessed all that life could give. Raised sufficiently above abject poverty not to be obliged to weigh the consequence of every farthing they spend, and having sufficient to prevent their attending to a frigid system of economy which narrows both heart and mind. I declare, so vulgar are my conceptions, that I know not what is wanted to render this the happiest as well as the most respectable situation in the world, but a taste for literature, to throw a little variety ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]

... colors? Here was an opportunity to save the honor of the Jewish name and also ameliorate the material condition of the Russian Jews. The permission given to them by Alexander I to establish themselves as farmers in the frigid yet free Siberian steppes was greeted with enthusiasm by all. Nicholas's ukase was hailed with joy. Elias Mitauer and Meyer Mendelssohn, at the head of seventy families from Courland, were the first to migrate to the new region (1836), and they were followed by hundreds ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... in frigid and gray. The unseasonable numerals which the meteorologist recorded in his tables might have provoked a superstitious lover of better weather to suppose that Monsieur Danny, the head imp of discord, had been among the ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... stiff with embroidered silk, swam majestically into the lounge, bowed with a certain frigid and deferential surprise to the early guest, and proceeded to an inquiry into dust. In a moment she called, sharp ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... kiss as a rule, having long ago given up such a messy form of greeting; but certainly we wouldn't under these circumstances lest we could be seen from the opposite windows and thought to be 'engaged'; but though I may seem a little frigid in greeting you, it is only because of the clothes you are wearing'—You ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... But when he got his chair, he had to preach a good deal in the college chapel; and by way of accommodating his discourses to an academic audience, he rewrote them carefully, rubbed off all the salient points, cooled down whatever warmth was in them to frigid accuracy, toned down everything striking. The result was that his sermons became eminently classical and elegant; only they became impossible to attend to, and impossible to remember; and when you heard the good man preach, you sighed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... like the vanilla custard over which Dolly had toiled all day, her soul aglow with creative delight, sipped but half of his demi-tasse (as though the coffee were bitter, which it wasn't), and went off to bed early with a good-night so frigid that Dolly's little nose ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper

... removed his mittens and wiped away the drops, then watched them congeal upon his fingers. Yes, it was all of thirty below, and a bad morning to hit the trail, but—Folsom's face set itself—better thirty below in the open than the frigid atmosphere ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach

... should miss me after waiting so long. However, I don't see him"; and she turned away towards Fleet Street. It was an unpleasant surprise to me that her sharp eyes had detected the secret spy upon her movements; and the dry, sardonic tone of her remark pained me, too, recalling, as it did, the frigid self-possession that had so repelled me in the early days of our acquaintance. And yet I could not but admire the cool unconcern with which she ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... had been laid out. Some beefsteaks and half-cold potatoes were set before me; and while I dined upon these, she sat opposite, watching me (as I thought) and endeavouring to sustain something like a conversation—consisting chiefly of a succession of commonplace remarks, expressed with frigid formality: but this might be more my fault than hers, for I really could NOT converse. In fact, my attention was almost wholly absorbed in my dinner: not from ravenous appetite, but from distress at the toughness of the beefsteaks, and the numbness of my hands, almost palsied by their five-hours' ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte

... calibre can write of him as they do, brings a feeling not only of entire disagreement, but of almost personal distress. Strange as it may seem to those who have been accustomed to think of that great artist merely as a type of the frigid pomposity of an antiquated age, his music, to ears that are attuned to hear it, comes fraught with a poignancy of loveliness whose peculiar quality is shared by no other poetry in the world. To have grown familiar with the voice of Racine, to have realised once and for all its ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... Lustre of one Word leads a Writer out of his Road, and makes him wander from his Subject for a Page together. I remember a young Fellow, of this Turn, who having said by Chance that his Mistress had a World of Charms, thereupon took Occasion to consider her as one possessed of Frigid and Torrid Zones, and pursued her from the one Pole to the other. I shall conclude this Paper with a Letter written in that enormous Style, which I hope my Reader hath by this time set his Heart against. The Epistle hath heretofore received great Applause; but after what ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... sight of Mathieu, he began to apologize, evincing much politeness and striving to accentuate his air of frigid distinction. When the young man, whom he called his amiable tenant, had acquainted him with the motive of his visit—the leak in the zinc roof of the little pavilion at Janville—he at once consented to let the local plumber do any necessary soldering. But when, after fresh explanations, he understood ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... his fellows as over intercollegiate jealousies; and, as he left the college distantly alone, the college sought him out, elected him to clubs which he seldom attended and to banquets which he overlaid with baffling and frigid aloofness. ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna

... near Florence, or rather, he had four. He himself occupied the great house of his race, the Palazzo Giraldi, a magnificent pile, built by Muchelozzo, on the Lung' Arno. The Villa Felice, also, on the hillside below Fiesole was reserved for himself and his friends. His wife, a frigid, devout, elderly lady, had her own establishment, the splendid Palazzo Manfredi, in Oltr' Arno, and received him with great ceremony once a week for an hour in the afternoon. Never, so long as I had any familiarity ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... conscience towards God; and to think I ought to sacrifice my pride, and renew my efforts once again to make his home agreeable and lead him back to the path of virtue; not by false professions of love, and not by pretended remorse, but by mitigating my habitual coldness of manner, and commuting my frigid civility into kindness wherever an opportunity occurred; and not only was I beginning to think so, but I had already begun to act upon the thought—and what was the result? No answering spark of kindness, no awakening penitence, but an unappeasable ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... face of the earth was a myth. He asks how was it possible to save two of every animal, bird and creeping thing on both continents and get them safely into the ark and back again to their respective localities. How could they make their way from South America up north through the frigid zone and cross over the polar ices to the eastern continent and carry with them the necessary food to which they had been accustomed, they would all have perished with the cold before reaching the Arctic circle. While the animals from the northern latitudes would all perish with heat ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... fail. All our power would be drained struggling to maintain it. This brigand who had unwittingly committed suicide by his daring act had accomplished more than he perhaps had realized. I could envisage our weapons, useless from lack of power. The air in our buildings turning fetid and frigid: ourselves forced to the helmets. A rush out to abandon the camp and escape. The buildings exploding—scattering into a litter on the ledge like a child's broken toy. The treasure abandoned, with the brigands coming up and loading ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... be seen how rapidly I had dropped all hope of interesting the frigid British bear. He, on his side, was plainly on thorns at my insistence; I judged he was suffering torments of alarm lest I should prove an undesirable acquaintance; diagnosed him for a shy, dull, vain, unamiable animal, without ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... drunk with pride. Even Boileau, hurried along by the prevailing enthusiasm, forgot the good sense and good taste to which he owed his reputation. He fancied himself a lyric poet, and gave vent to his feelings in a hundred and sixty lines of frigid bombast about Alcides, Mars, Bacchus, Ceres, the lyre of Orpheus, the Thracian oaks and the Permessian nymphs. He wondered whether Namur, had, like Troy, been built by Apollo and Neptune. He asked what power could subdue a city stronger than that before which the Greeks lay ten years; ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... were run in the beds just before the retiring hour. As the antecedent of the modern American electric blanket, they enticed the drowsy to bed. Retreating from the cheerful hearth, the would-be sleeper, then as now, had no fear of being aroused by the clammy chill of frigid bed-linen. ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester

... his difficulties, until party came athwart him with its promises of boundless honour and rapid fortune. His sanguine nature embraced the temptation at once; but the parliamentary opposition was too deliberate and too frigid for his boiling blood; he plunged into the deeper and wilder region of conspiracy, took the lead, which is so soon assigned to the brilliant and the bold, and became the soul of the tremendous faction which was ready to proclaim the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... The frigid fount with violence and spray By Shiyoun's town upcasts its watery store; Though full seven sons she give to life and day The mother's heart is but ...
— Targum • George Borrow

... as the historian of Charles V., and as the author of other historic works. The chair of Belles Lettres was filled by the accomplished Dr. Hugh Blair, whose lectures remain one of the best samples of the correct and elegant, but narrow and frigid style, both of sentiment and criticism, which then flourished throughout Europe, and nowhere more than in Edinburgh. Another still greater ornament of the University was Dugald Stewart, the Professor of Moral Philosophy, whose works, if they have often been ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... come from evading or looking askance at them or trying to make them out something else than what they really are. No artistic aim or ambition can suffice to stand instead of them or to refine them away. That way lies only cold artifice and frigid lacework, and sometimes Stevenson did go a little too much on ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... returned from his ride the next day, he found Leonore reading the papers in the big hall. She gave him a very frigid "good-morning," yet instantly relaxed a little in telling him there was another long telegram for him on the mantel. She said nothing of his reading the despatch to her, but opened a new sheet of paper, and began to read its columns with much apparent interest. That particular page ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford

... "she was born up north here, in the Frigid Zone; but she isn't so much relation to me as my father is, for her name wasn't Clifford. She wouldn't have been any relation to me if she ...
— Captain Horace • Sophie May

... principle was, in effect, that of common sense, good taste and instinct. Tasso meant to say: there is no vital discord between classical and romantic art; both have excellences, and it is possible to find defects in both; pedantic adherence to antique precedent must end in frigid failure under the present conditions of intellectual culture; yet it cannot be denied that the cycle of Renaissance poetry was closed by Ariosto; let us therefore attempt creation in a liberal spirit, trained by both these influences. He could not, however, when he put ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... bent her head in assent. Philippe gave her a last glance, hoping for some softening; but she remained inert and frigid. He slowly opened the door, and closed it, pausing again to listen if a cry or a sigh would give him—wounded as he was—a pretext for returning and offering to forgive. But all ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various

... breach between them remained unhealed. Trina only spoke to the dentist in monosyllables, while he, exasperated at her calmness and frigid reserve, sulked in his "Dental Parlors," muttering terrible things beneath his mustache, or finding solace in his concertina, playing his six lugubrious airs over and over again, or swearing frightful oaths at his canary. When Heise paid his bill, McTeague, in a fury, sent ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... after each disturbance of the water. When he got home, he found, to his surprise, that his wife was still sitting up. She had been to the weekly prayer-meeting, and was not in a very pleasant temper. She was not spiteful, but unusually frigid. She felt herself to be better than her husband, and she asked him if he could not arrange in future that his political meetings might not interfere with his ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford

... this brow Throned thee King Ferdinand and Tenerife; To be of sulphur grough and frigid ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... men on deck had lived since their childhood upon the frigid seas, in the very midst of their mists, which are vague and troubled as the background of dreams. They were accustomed to see this varying infinitude play about their paltry ark of planks, and their eyes were as used to it as those ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... puzzled by your frigid manner. Have you any personal prejudice against me? Walter Raymond wrote me before he sailed, to look you up, and do what I could for you, as you were quite a favourite on the Eastern coast, and any kindness shown to you would be ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn

... of Anthony's library, filling a wall amply, crept a chill and insolent pencil of sunlight touching with frigid disapproval Therese of France and Ann the Superwoman, Jenny of the Orient Ballet and Zuleika the Conjurer—and Hoosier Cora—then down a shelf and into the years, resting pityingly on the over-invoked shades of Helen, Thais, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... the capitalist felt lingered in his voice when he said good night. It was both gentle and husky with emotion and the lad fell asleep marvelling that the men employed at the mills should assert that the Fernalds were frigid and snobby. ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett

... particular, were rather astonished at the new-comer. Laura was frigid and remonstrant, Zell and Mr. Van Dam satirical, but Edith wilfully tossed her head and said he was clever and well off, and she liked him well enough to talk to him a little. Society had made her a good actress. Meanwhile on the Tuesday following (and ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... are already given," Lady Kingsland said, with frigid hauteur. "My jointure house is to be fitted up. Before you return from your honey-moon I will have quitted Kingsland Court with my daughter. Permit Mildred and me to retain our present apartments unaltered until ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming

... see him myself, if you won't," said her ladyship firmly. There was frigid silence at the table for a full minute, relieved only when his lordship's monocle dropped into the glass of water he was trying to convey to his lips. He thought best to treat the subject lightly, so he laughed in his ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... sagacity which earned him fame in diplomacy. He was not depressed by the King's frigid reception of him at St. James's on 1st February, or by the Queen refusing even to notice him. Even the escapades of Biron did not dash his hopes. That envoy ran up debts and bargained about horses avec un nomme Tattersall, qui tient dans sa main tous les chevaux ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... subject you need not suspect any deception on your feelings. It is a spectacle of horror which cannot be overdrawn. If you have nature in your hearts, they will speak a language compared with which all I have said or can say will be poor and frigid. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... the great woods overhanging the rolling Jumna are tilting forward as if to join the girl in her agonized advances while around her rise the bleak and empty slopes, their eerie loneliness intensified by frigid moonlight. ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer

... impatiently, "Max, the politico-economic system we have today is an outgrowth of what went earlier. The welfare state, the freezing of the status quo, the Frigid Fracas between the West-world and the Sov-world, industrial automation until useful employment is all but needless—all these things were to be found in embryo more than fifty ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... the one beloved voice. His whole body and his whole intelligence form together an instrument of exquisite sensibility whereby the perceptions of his inmost soul are hourly tortured, delighted, caught up into ecstasy, torn and crushed by jealousy and fear, or plunged into the frigid waters of despair. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford

... a somewhat frigid gathering until Nasmyth rose. We had all dined with our respective hosts, and then repaired to this business in cold blood. Many were lukewarm about it in their hearts; there was a certain amount of mild prejudice, ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung

... indolence; but the Moslem would see in it the hand of Destiny bringing good out of evil. Amongst other meanings of "Khwajah " it is a honorific title given by Khorasanis to their notables. In Arab. the similarity of the word to "Khuwaj"hunger, has given rise to a host of conceits, more or less frigid ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... atonement, justification, and grace were expounded on his authority, as if he had been a religious philosopher or theological professor like Origen and Thomas Aquinas. The name of the apostle came to be associated with angular and frigid disquisitions which were rapidly losing their connexion with vital religion. It has been left for the scholars of the present century to give us a picture of St. Paul as he really was—a man much nearer to George Fox or John Wesley ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... Inimical to religion Fraught with peril I venture to ask Attributed to mental decrepitude A strange phenomena It argues a blind faith Insatiable whirl of excitement A substratum of truth Under some conceivable circumstances Bubbling over with infectious joy Frigid dignity and arrogant reserve A profound contempt The fine art of hospitality Grim morsels of philosophy A tinge of sorrowness and jealousy Due to ignorance and barbarism Grave and monstrous scandal A splendid instance of self-devotion Amusingly ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser

... found in women. Such abnormal individuals are almost certain of social disaster, and when married their conduct usually leads to divorce or desertion. Then there is a wide range of types down to the almost sexless persons,[1] the frigid, who are much more commonly found among women than men. In fact, with many women active sex desire may never occur, and for others it is a rarity, while still others find themselves definitely desirous only after pregnancy. Not ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... put down one letter and opened another, the Major was seen to stiffen and the Junior Sub. to wilt. The attention of the table became as fixed and frigid as that of the midnight sentry at a loophole. The Colonel toyed happily with another letter (while the Senior Captain made a careful census of the grounds at the bottom of his coffee-cup), took the range of the manure-heap outside the window from the angles ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various

... music of the groves, the music of the heart, Would barter for the city's din, the frigid tones of art? The virtues flourish fresh and fair, where rural waters glide. They shrink and wither, droop and die, where rolls ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... thirsty man. The oars were shipped, and one man was left to fend off the boat while the others clambered up the swaying rope-ladder, crossed the scorching decks on the run, and went below. In two minutes they were in the hold of the refrigerator-ship, gathering the frost from the frigid cooling-pipes and snowballing each other, while the boat-keeper outside of the three-eighth-inch steel plating was fanning himself with his hat, almost dizzy from the quivering heat-waves that danced before his eyes. The great sides of beef, hung ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday

... and Sarah almost longed for dinner-time, so that that meeting also should be over. 'She won't like him, I know,' she murmured, with a recollection of a scene at school when a visitor had been presuming in Horatia's opinion, and she had rather surprised her companions by the frigid air she assumed. 'He'll offend her, and she will say something, and, oh dear! I'm sure there will be a scene,' ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin

... for having spoken in so trifling a manner. The frigid politeness of her brother's speech, too, had not escaped her notice. It seemed to her now, that she had been wantonly rude. She hastened, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... noiseless it wuz goin' to be, and how luxurious and almost enervatin' would be the warmth. And I sez, rubbin' my cold hands and pullin' my heavy woolen shawl closter round me, "It would be a little different than it is now if it wuz still, or if it wuz warm." And agin I shivered in the frigid air and sez: ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley

... there were no two names of men more known or more generally celebrated. If we engage into a large acquaintance and various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of our time: we expose our life to a Quotidian Ague of frigid impertinences, which would make a wise man tremble to think of. Now, as for being known much by sight, and pointed at, I cannot comprehend the honour that lies in that. Whatsoever it be, every mountebank has it more than the best doctor, and the hangman more than the Lord Chief Justice ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley

... the stairs, working up my temper all the way. When I got to the parlor I was in a fine frenzy concealed beneath a veneer of frigid courtesy. And when I looked in the door, sure enough he had a Russia leather case in his hand. But I didn't happen to notice that it was our Russia ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... my relations with Sylvester Berkley had been of a frigid and formal description. I had met him two or three times with his hearty old relation, and had borne away the distinct impression that he was a prig. While the uncle would breakfast in his tub, like Diogenes, off simple bones and cutlets, Sylvester ate some ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various

... thunderous. He hears it through the window—hears it perforce, since the streets are ringing with that music, and you cannot close your ears. He listens, growing hotter and more restless every moment. He thinks.... That splash of waters! Those frigid wavelets and cascades! How delicious to bathe his limbs, if only for a moment, in their bubbling wetness; he is parched with heat, and at this hour of the night, he reflects, there will not be a soul abroad in the square. So he hearkens to the seductive melody, conjuring up the ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... These frigid regions are the constant abode of two of the finest birds that are known, the Manal {95a} and Damphiya. {95b} To me both seem evidently to have the closest affinity with each other, in size, manners, and form, and the females of the two species are not easily distinguishable; ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton

... were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me, and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona! [Footnote: ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... limits to their utmost edge. It is one of the greatest parts in poetical drama, and it is written with a sense of the stage not less sure than its sense of dramatic poetry. There was a time when Racine was looked upon as old-fashioned, as conventional, as frigid. It is realised nowadays that his verse has cadences like the cadences of Verlaine, that his language is as simple and direct as prose, and that he is one of the most passionate of poets. Of the character of ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... a good-looking, pleasant-spoken gentleman. The wife was a pretty, dark little woman, but I never liked her from the first; she was one of those perfectly proper, frigid women, who always give me the idea that they were born in a church, and have never got over the chill. However, she seemed very fond of him, and he of her; and they talked very prettily to each other—too prettily ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome

... darkened. What meant this unimpressed and frigid behaviour? He was the first of the successive politicians sent out from the capital to rule the Occidental Province whom the manner of Charles Gould in official intercourse was to strike ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... a frigid silence during which the three ladies, sinking for a time their differences, eyed him with every sign of strong disapprobation, Mrs. Banks giving vent to a sniff which disparaged ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs

... the husband must submit to be ruined, or, at the very least, to see half the fruit of his labour snored and lounged away. And, is this being rigid? Is it being harsh; is it being hard upon women? Is it the offspring of the frigid severity of age? It is none of these: it arises from an ardent desire to promote the happiness, and to add to the natural, legitimate, and salutary influence, of the female sex. The tendency of this advice is to promote the preservation of their health; ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett

... stretching away from the north pole on all sides for many degrees south, and buy Greenland and Iceland at the best figure you can get now while they are cheap. It is my intention to move one of the tropics up there and transfer the frigid zone to the equator. I will have the entire Arctic Circle in the market as a summer resort next year, and will use the surplusage of the old climate, over and above what can be utilized on the equator, to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... From this frigid interior Mr. Gladstone made his way to the genial company of Milnes Gaskell at Thornes and had a delightful week. Thence he proceeded to spend some days with his sick mother at Leamington. 'We have been singularly dealt with ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... if the north-and-south lines were to be strengthened the world over, as the occupied and exploited north temperate zone reaches north toward the frigid zone, now grown warmer by the very opening of the lands to the sun and the long burning of coal, and south toward the tropics, now made more habitable by the new knowledge of tropical medicine, and even across the tropics to the sister temperate zone of ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... dramatis personae are like so many statues "stept from their pedestal to take the air." They come on the stage only to utter pompous sentiments of morality, turgid declamation, and frigid similes. Yet there is throughout, that strength of language, that heavy mace of words, with which, as with the flail of Talus, Johnson lays every thing prostrate before him. This style is better suited to his imitations of the two satires ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... proceed more or less directly from a reading of Hebrew poetry, like the numerous paraphrases of the Psalms or the choruses of RACINE'S biblical plays. The typical lyric product of the time was the ode, trite, pompous, and frigid. Even ANDR CHNIER, who came on the eve of the Revolution and freed himself largely from the narrow restraint of the literary tradition by imbibing directly the spirit of the Greek poets, hardly yielded to a real lyric ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

... to render the nights bitterly cold. The birds, having brought forth and brought up their young, were betaking themselves to more temperate regions, leaving only such creatures as bears, seals, walruses, foxes, wolves, and men, to enjoy, or endure, the regions of the frigid zone. ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne

... approaching marriage relations and asked him to be kind to her in this respect. She was married a year before admission. For two and a half months she refused intercourse and visited her mother's home a great deal. She finally submitted. She was quite frigid but became pregnant at once. Her abnormality then became apparent. She kept the fact of her pregnancy to herself for several months and then when she told her mother wanted to have an abortion performed. Neurotic symptoms ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch

... of Caesar." Fifty years later, in the kind, passionate, poetical days of St. Francis, Heloise might have given this loving fervour to Christ, and been a happy, if a deluded, woman; but in those frigid monkish days, there was no one for her to love, save this frigid monkish Abelard. As it is, therefore, she loves Christ and God in obedience to Abelard; she passionately cons the fathers, the Scriptures, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... brought up never to be demonstrative—that was one thing. But that wasn't the main trouble—the main trouble was her most curious, most frigid self-sufficiency. Until her children came she was the most wholly self-sufficient person I've ever known. She was really only happy when she was entirely alone, always. It wasn't egotism exactly—she's always had a very-well-mannered conviction of her own relative unimportance—it ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet

... seeing the ground covered by snow and hardened by a very sharp frost, thought that this frigid weather would give the men from the north a great advantage over those from the south, unaccustomed to the severe cold. They resolved therefore to attack us, and in order to do this they moved, screened by the immense forest which lay between us, the greater part of the troops who faced us ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... tops and in high latitudes that the effects of frost are most plainly seen. "Every summit" says Whymper, "amongst the rock summits upon which I have stood has been nothing but a piled-up heap of fragments" (Fig. 7). In Iceland, in Spitsbergen, in Kamchatka, and in other frigid lands large areas are thickly strewn with sharp-edged fragments into which the rock has been shattered ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... before Colonel Belford, it was to meet with a welcome so frigid and an address so reserved that a douche of cold water could not have quenched his verbosity more entirely. For our great man had no notion to submit to the continued infliction of the West Indian's presence. Accordingly, after the first words ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle

... the doctrine of the Gospel becomes the reason of our mind, it will be the principle of our life." "It ill becomes us to make our intellectual faculties Gibeonites.[360]" How far this teaching differs from the frigid "common-sense" morality prevalent in the eighteenth century, may be judged from the following, which stamps Whichcote as a genuine mystic. "Though liberty of judgment be everyone's right, yet how few there are that make use of this right! ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... unlike the Arcadia of sir Philip Sidney, and unlike, what I have just taken the trouble of running over, the Daphnis of Gessner. It neither on the one hand leaves behind it the laws of criticism, and mixes together the different stages of civilization; nor on the other will it perhaps be found frigid, uninteresting, and insipid. The prevailing opinion of Pastoral seems to have been, that it is a species of composition admirably fitted for the size of an eclogue, but that either its nature will not ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin

... from her and shot rapidly through the paragraph which she indicated. There was no denying that it completely knocked the bottom out of his own article. He threw it down, and with another frigid bow he made for the door. As he took the reins from the groom he glanced round and saw that the lady was standing at her window, and it seemed to him ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle

... passing up the avenue of dark, sombre evergreens, to the broad piazza of the historic old mansion, were received by the hostess, the wife of General Jackson's adopted son. Our reception, while not uncivil, was certainly frigid, and we had expected nothing more cordial from those who called us their enemies. After a short, constrained conversation, we were shown the General's room, and some portraits of distinguished people on the walls, and were ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve

... piece of embroidery from her lap, Virginia met her friend's tearful caress with a frigid and distant manner. "There was nothing to tell. What do you ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... leaves his clothes here and his portmanteau when he goes away. Ah! George, George! One day will come when he won't go away," groaned Mountain, who, of course, always returned to the subject of which she was forbidden to speak. Meanwhile Mr. George adopted towards his mother's favourite a frigid courtesy, at which the honest gentleman chafed but did not care to remonstrate, or a stinging sarcasm, which he would break through as he would burst through so many brambles on those hunting excursions in which he and Harry Warrington rode so constantly together; whilst George, retreating to ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... constitutional melancholy by the steady, yet not oppressive, employment it secured him." In its unity, too, and gigantic size, the task seemed fitted for the powers of so strong a man; and although he says he dismissed it at last with "frigid tranquillity," he had no doubt felt its influence during the time to be at once that of a protecting guardian and of an inspiring genius. In 1749, he published his "Vanity of Human Wishes," for which he received the sum of fifteen guineas,—a ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... excel a Raphael? Yes, art was magic; and as he owned the truth of the aphorism, he could comprehend that in magic there may be religion, for religion is an essential to art. His old ambition, freeing itself from the frigid prudence with which Mervale sought to desecrate all images less substantial than the golden calf of the world, revived, and stirred, and kindled. The subtle detection of what he conceived to be an error in the school he had hitherto ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... them protests against the same thing, both of them attempted answers to the same problem, and the Tracts perhaps did more than Sartor to quicken spiritual life, to shatter 'the Clapham church,' and to substitute a mystic faith and not unlovely hope for the frigid, hard, and mechanical lines of official orthodoxy on the one hand, and the egotism and sentimental despair of Byronism on the other. There is a third school, too, and Harriet Martineau herself was no insignificant ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley

... on the very ground of honor. A wife led from affluence to frigid penury and neglect; from leisure and luxury to toil and want; daughters, once courted as rich, to be disesteemed when poor,—this is the gloomy prospect, seen through a magic haze of despondency. Honor, love and generosity, strangely bewitched, plead for dishonesty as the only alternative ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher

... Loo. She knew about the fire in Beverly Square and its incidents, Willie having often related them to her during his visits; and she knew Mr Auberly by name, and was interested in him, but his frigid manner had repelled her, until he spoke of Loo having sent him ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne

... first-fruits of all her increase; and they were sacred to his service, as in his providence he should call for them. No shuffling pretences, no pitiful evasions, when a fair demand was made upon the hallowed store; and no frigid affectation in determining the quality of the demand. A sense of duty was the prompter, candor the interpreter, and good sense the judge. Her disbursements were proportioned to the value of the object, and were ready ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham

... as he was, and patient under it, too, somehow his case excited as little compassion as his oratory now did enthusiasm. Still, pathetic to the last, he continued his appeals, notwithstanding the frigid regard of the company, till, suddenly interrupting himself, as if in reply to a quick summons from without, he said hurriedly, "I come, I come," and so, with every token of precipitate dispatch, out of the cabin ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... Reif's face was as frigid as the Earthman's. He said, "I am afraid not, Joseph Chessman. You are Number One. It is your statue that is in every commune square. It is your portrait that hangs in every distribution center, every messhall, every schoolroom. You are the Number One—as you have so often pointed ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... disturbed his six hours' sleep, or kept his ambition out of mind. He would rather have hugged an attorney any day than have kissed Polly, though she was one of the prettiest creatures in the world; and while she was pining alone upstairs, reading over the stock of half-a-dozen frigid letters that the confounded prig had condescended to write to her, HE, be sure, was never busy with anything but his briefs in chambers—always frigid, rigid, self-satisfied, and at his duty. The marriage trailed on year after year, while Mr. ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray

... thought to suffer least from such drawbacks. But yet in order to listen to Homer's accents with the ears of an ancient Greek, we must be able, among other things, to enter into a view about the gods which is as far removed from what we should describe as religious sentiment, as it is from the frigid ingenuity of those later poets who regarded the deities of Greek mythology as so many wheels in the supernatural machinery with which it pleased them to carry on the action of their pieces. If we are to accept Mr. Herbert ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... over the gentleman's face, together with the expression of stern disapprobation which instantly drove all the kindness out of his hitherto genial eyes. "A Christian Scientist!—indeed!" he said, in a tone as frigid as his look. "It is a matter of regret to me that you did not state that fact when you made application for admission ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... when they are looking for him, they mistake him for the gardener. They can only be loved and served. They cannot love—as yet. They exact love and miss it. They feel their urgent need of its warmth in their stiffening, frigid lives. Sometimes they gain it, lay their cold hand on it, analyse it, foresee that it may become an incubus, and decide that there is nothing to be got out ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... bewildering in its wealth of shape and colour. But an icy breath had petrified it all; it had sunk down out of sight; it needed a soul like her own, feminine and sympathetic, a soul that had experienced the same things as her own, that knew the tenderness and love of the Saviour, to melt that frigid covering and draw out the essences and sweetness again, that lay there paralysed by this ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson



Words linked to "Frigid" :   unloving, frosty



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