"Unresponsive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of her great property, in which her capacities and abilities had taken for so long an imperious and instinctive delight, had become a mere burden. She longed to creep into some quiet place, alone with Oliver, out of reach of this army of servants and dependents, these impassive and unresponsive faces. ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... both of them, and let it weigh in the scale already tipped far off its balance by coincidences which a better man than myself would have found it embarrassing to explain. I recognised all this, I say, in the momentary glance I cast at their stern and unresponsive figures; but the courage which had served me in lesser extremities did not fail me now, and, kneeling down before my dead betrothed, I kissed her cold white hand with sincere compunction, before attempting the garbled and ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... amazement. Her thin, sensitive lips were drawn back at the corners, enough to make her mouth look a trifle wider—and enough to suggest dimly that their motion was the start of a vindictive grimace. Otherwise, she was unmoved, unresponsive to the open threat ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... use can possibly be made of an apparently non-operative piece of apparatus. It must be borne in mind, however, in considering a duplex system, that a differential relay is used AT EACH END of the line and forms part of the circuit; and that while each relay must be absolutely unresponsive to the signals SENT OUT FROM ITS HOME OFFICE, it must respond to signals transmitted by a DISTANT OFFICE. Hence, the next figure (4), with its accompanying explanation, will probably make the matter clear. If another battery, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... first meeting with White Nose, he found her most unresponsive to his advances, considering the fact that they had come and gone together all through the autumn. The reason for her indifference was soon discovered, for Black Bruin saw that she had two little fuzzy cubs in tow;—one with a smutty white nose like her own, and the other with a dark muzzle like ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... he should like it above all things, and looked the scraps gloomily over. One Elfrida had called "A Street Minstrel." Seeing him unresponsive, Golightly read ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... glued her beauteous lips to the slender blowpipe of the bassoon, and, having inflated her lungs to their capacity, breathed into it a respiration that seemed to come from her very soul. But no sound issued from the cold, hollow, unresponsive bassoon. Aurora repeated the effort with increased vigor. There came ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... the door for some time, waiting until he could wait no longer. He faced Caffyn now, unflinchingly enough to outward appearance; but the hand Mabel held in a soft close clasp was strangely cold and unresponsive. ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... the more surely. The sound was repeated, but more faintly, and it was followed by a noise like the closing of a door. I drew back from the house, keeping an eye upon the upper storey, for I thought it possible the woman might reconnoitre me thence. But the windows stared at me blind, unresponsive. To the right and left lights twinkled in the scattered dwellings, and I found something very ghostly in the thought of this woman entombed as it were in the midst of them and moving alone in the shuttered gloom. The twilight deepened, and suddenly the gate behind ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... Miss Bentley, "I liked him. He turned out to be altogether different from my first impressions. That afternoon at the Country Club he seemed rather stiff—nice, assured manners, of course, but unresponsive. But then the way in which we bounced in upon each other was enough to break any amount of ice." She laughed at the recollection, clasping her hands ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... she passed to kiss the unresponsive lips, and walked from the room carrying a heavy heart in her breast. "If she had only spoken! If she had even looked up and smiled!" Such was the wounded mother cry; and all the time Rowena's heart was speeding unspoken messages after her as ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... early in the tropics, and at fourteen Rachael Fawcett was the unresponsive toast from Basseterre to Sandy Point. Her height was considerable, and she had the round supple figure of a girl who has lived the out-door life in moderation; full of strength and grace, and no exaggeration of muscle. She had a fine mane of reddish ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... the side of the White Hand Laundry, his head fallen forward, when Bowers and the drug clerk got to him. The collie was licking his face for attention, but the warm caressing hand—now red and sticky—was lying in the snow, limp and unresponsive. ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... for her cherished possessions,—a sickening roar, broken, now and then, by the hollow tap of the auctioneer's cruel hammer. And, each time the clamouring voices rose, she shivered, and every blow of the cruel hammer seemed to fall upon her quivering heart. Thus, she was unwontedly deaf and unresponsive to Small Porges, who presently fell into a profound gloom, in consequence; and thus, she held in the eager mare who therefore, shied, and fidgeted, and ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... martial May in his armor of flowers. The fields were quivering voluptuously under the rays of the moon; and they, two young hearts, feeling the flutter of Love's wings about their hair, why should they sit unresponsive there, blind to the beauty of the night, deaf to the infinite caress that was ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... but sat in front of him, unresponsive as the sphinx. The rigor of her flat back told him that, though she might have to keep his shameful secret for the sake of her own, he could not presume upon it the least ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... was too stubbornly businesslike; regarded her, she detected, merely as someone who had a lot to learn about the game. And the going of her little friend had taken a zest from the pursuit of this determinedly golfing and unresponsive male. He was relieved when she abandoned the sport and when he knew she had gone back to school. Sometimes on the course when he watched her wild swings a trick of memory brought her back to him as the bony little ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... consternation fell upon the unresponsive night and was swallowed up in blackness, solitude, dead heavy silence. The windows were ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... and wide-eyed, as his head had bent closer down over hers. She had drooped back, bewildered and unresponsive, as his heavy lips had closed on hers that were still wet and salty with tears. When she had left the office, at the end of that strange hour, she had gone with the promise ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... allowed him, allowed herself to be pressed there, while within her the dull fire smouldered, and the deep, slow resentment gathered like clouds about the sun. But he held her face now between his two hands and forced to meet his own her unresponsive eyes; and when with ardour he had kissed her grave lips, the flippancy of a fool ruined him, and his triumph was flattened into dust, as when ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... exchange rate, a moderate inflation rate, and continued support by international organizations. President JAGDEO, the former finance minister, is taking steps to reform the economy, including drafting an investment code and restructuring the inefficient and unresponsive public sector. Problems include a shortage of skilled labor and a deficient infrastructure. The government must persist in efforts to manage its sizable external debt and ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... now, but I fancy my unresponsive attitude must have exasperated him at last, for he judged it necessary to inform me he feared neither God nor devil, let alone any mere man. I said I could see that very well, but what I wanted was a certain quantity of rivets—and rivets were what really Mr. Kurtz wanted, if he ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... have put into writing. Dictating is not an easily acquired accomplishment in business—as many a man will testify. Modern office practice has intensified the difficulty. It may be rather disconcerting to deliver well-constructed, meaningful sentences to an unresponsive stenographer, but at any rate the receiver is alive. But to talk into the metallic receiver of a mechanical dictaphone has an almost ridiculous air. Men have to train themselves deliberately to speak well when they first begin to use these time-saving ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... I took my dear lady in my arms, and holding her against my heart, I kissed her hair, her closed eyes, her pale, unresponsive lips, and bearing her to the door, contrived to open it and stepped forth of the cave. And here I found Adam, pistol in hand, with divers of his fellows and the three gentlemen who scowled amain, yet, eyeing Adam's weapon, did ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... admitted, are not beautiful at all. In order to be beautiful, they should be alive, and alive all over, as a piece of sculpture is alive; there should be no unresponsive surfaces or details; but most of our buildings are dead—dead walls, dead lines, oblong boxes, neat and commodious, but dead. The practical problems which the architect has to solve are so complex and difficult, and the materials which he uses are so refractory, that ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... discovery from its silent pickets. When within a hundred yards, in response to the commanding war-cry of the Fire Eater, they rose like ghosts from the sage and charged fast on the stockade. The gray logs stood stiffly unresponsive and gave no answering shots or yells as the Indians swept upon them. The gate was high, but the attacking force crept up on each other's bent backs as they strove for the interior. A tremendous commotion arose; rifles blazed inside and out. ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... clinching talk for waverers. Speech No. 4, to parents. Speech No. 5, rebuttal to argument that victim already has enough reading matter. Speech No. 6, general appeal to patriotism and love of progress. Then on Commencement day the hopeful young collegians would go forth to argue with the calm and unresponsive farmer's wife and sell her something that she had never needed and had never wanted, until hypnotized by the classic eloquence of a bright-eyed young man with his foot in the ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... passion was the sight of the beautiful world about him, which appealed to him day by day with a hundred delicate surprises, unnumbered novelties of rapture. He realised that the one thing that he dreaded was a cold tranquillity, uncheered by hope, unresponsive to beauty. ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... army. Each had a brown bandolier over his chest and his rifle held across his thigh. A large man with a drooping black moustache and a pair of binoculars in his hand was riding at the side of them. "Hulloa, Archer!" croaked the Colonel. The officer looked at him with the vacant, unresponsive eye ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... unusual performance for her. In the midnight solitude of her chamber she regularly gave rein to the feminine side of her nature. By day she was the severe, matter-of-fact, businesslike Eliza Appleton, deaf to romance, lost to illusion, and unresponsive to masculine attention; but deep in her heart were all the instincts and longings of femininity, and at such times as this they came uppermost. Her bedroom had none of the Puritanical primness which marked ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... there in front of the blaze, her eyes fixed upon that unconscious portrait, her hands extended over the flames. What speaking eyes the girl had! What would be the words the soft, rosy lips were framing? With all her soul she was gazing straight into that unresponsive, soldierly, handsome face. With all her heart she was murmuring some inarticulate appeal, lavishing some womanly caresses upon the dumb and senseless picture. Then the little hands were upraised, and the next instant, frame ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... staring at her queer, unresponsive little face. She did not say any more for a few moments ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... guided by unweighed, unanalysed phenomena, and governed by conviction alone—the latter being based simply, though solidly, upon itself. These men are deaf to the symphony of the Silences; blind to the horizonless areas of the Unknown; unresponsive to the touch of the Impalpable; oblivious to the machinery of the Moral Universe—in a word, indifferent to the mysterious Motive of Nature's all-pervading Soul. In such mental organisms, opinion, once deflected tangentially from the central Truth, acquires an independent and ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... bewildered. Then his face darkened. "You mean Dick—the affair with that girl." His voice was at once hard and unresponsive. "What about it?" ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... Korak's eyes sparkled in anticipation—and now the old man stood behind the little girl. His stern old face was still unrelaxed. The child was yet unconscious of his presence. She prattled on to the unresponsive Geeka. Then the old man coughed. With a start the child glanced quickly up over her shoulder. Korak could see her full face now. It was very beautiful in its sweet and innocent childishness—all soft and lovely curves. He could see her great, dark eyes. ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... own powers of intrigue, she smiled to herself, and dismissed Lester's cold face and unresponsive manner from ...
— The Trader's Wife - 1901 • Louis Becke
... with the utmost deliberation and skill better to ensure absolute repulsion and horror on the part of the bride. I think that any man who would consider this from the bride's point of view would see that she need not necessarily be cold or unresponsive because, in such circumstances, she needs rest and consideration more than passion. But I wish men could know a little more than this, and understand that to enforce physical union when a woman's psychical and emotional nature does not desire it, is definitely and physically ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... conscious of the shock which had so thrilled her, but whether it had been caused by pleasure or repugnance he could not tell. He feared the latter, for his sweet bride-elect had, thus far, been very unresponsive ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... war a plumb mistake, Copenny," plained an elder man, whose rifle had not been fired. There was a regretful cadence in his voice akin to tears, and he held his long, ragged red beard in one hand as he peered down into the unresponsive depths. ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... make friends easily. I think you are the sort of man to have hosts of acquaintances and only one or two real friends. You know, you rather scare people. I think it is partly your manner and greatly your monocle; you have such a detached air, and often I have noticed you very unresponsive when people were trying to be amusing. Oh, I don't mean you are ever rude, but you are sometimes chilling. If I hadn't known from Boggley that you were, as he puts it, a perfect jewel, I think I should have ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... the open sash. They leaped out, and plunged up the mountain, tempting the assassin's fire, but the assassin was satisfied. The mountain was again as quiet as it had been at dawn. Its impenetrable mask of green was blank and unresponsive. Somewhere in the cool of the dewy treetops a squirrel barked. Here and there, the birds saluted the sparkle and freshness of June. Inside, at the middle of the store, Jesse Purvy shifted his head against his daughter's knee, and said, as ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... Shall we, shall you and I, before That world's unsympathetic eyes Lay other relics from our store Of tender memories? What could it know of the joy and love That throbbed and smiled and wept above An unresponsive thing? And who could share the ecstatic thrill With which we watched the upturned bill Of our bird at its living spring? Shall we tell how in the time gone by, Beneath all changes of the sky, And in an ordinary home Amid the ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... and woman stood side by side, motionless, unresponsive. It was as though a sword had suddenly descended, cleaving ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... self-contempt she lay back in the comfortably upholstered corner of the brougham, staring straight before her, sullen red mouth unresponsive to the occasional inconsequent questions of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... Ford acquiesced, in the unresponsive tone of one who says what he must, rather than what he would like to say. "It is all the things you have been saying, and more—when one has the time and the mind to be enthusiastic ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... was not of very old duration. Rateau would, no doubt, have protested loudly, but the fresh outer air had evidently caught his wheezy lungs, and for a minute or two he could do nothing but cough and splutter and groan, and cling to his unresponsive comrade for support. Then at last, when he had succeeded in recovering his breath, he said dolefully and with a ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... could not betray herself unreservedly to anybody with the hope of being found innocent. The knowledge made her at first full of terror; and the terror and the successive elaborate self-explanation, given to an unresponsive silence which she could easily suppose to be hostile, made her obstinate; then she became the more passionately afraid. She could have stormed, lied, wriggled; but she could never hope to escape the consequences that ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... small hand and smoothed the hair and stroked the dead face lovingly. After a bit he brought his other hand up from behind him and laid three or four fresh wild flowers upon the breast, bent over and kissed the unresponsive lips time and time again, and then turned away and went out of the house without looking at any of the company. The old ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... the walls with her small fists,—kicked the unresponsive stone with her thin little shoes,—her blows gave out no sound. If she only had something to ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... seem to have been generally accepted), the immense number of languages and dialects still preserved, or known by early recorded fragments to have once existed, so subdivided it that only the dwellers in a very few villages could talk together with ease. They were all interdistributed among unresponsive vernaculars, each to the other being bar-bar-ous in every meaning of the term. The number of known stocks or families of Indian languages within the territory of the United States amounts now to sixty-five, and ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... separated from it by a low wall. A lane lies along one side of the churchyard and leads from the street to the vicarage gates. The garden, which was Emily's care, where she tended stunted shrubs and borders of unresponsive flowers and where Charlotte planted the currant-bushes, is beautiful with foliage and flowers, and its boundary wall is overtopped by a screen of trees which shuts out the depressing prospect of the graves from the vicarage windows and makes the place seem less "a churchyard ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... enveloped Iscariot in the deep silence of secrecy, when he was in one of his reveries, that one would have preferred that he should begin to speak, to move, nay, even, to tell lies. For a lie, spoken by a human tongue, had been truth and light compared with that hopelessly deep and unresponsive silence. ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... There was neither ecstasy nor dreaming. He was anxious and beset. As he bore her along he spoke to her, encouraging her with gentle words of sympathy and hope. But her fainting condition left him no reward, and her half-closed eyes, filled with unshed tears, remained dull and unresponsive. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... was so unresponsive that I could have beaten him. "Why, you're duller than you used to be," I thought to myself, and wondered how I could have suspected, in those days, subtle depths and mysterious comprehensions. Vera Michailovna asked him questions about France and London ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... the town, a shameless crew, Over the way he sees Propitiate with lavish purr An unresponsive customer, Or, meek with sycophantic fur, Caress the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... the figures wheeling past them, blankly unresponsive to casual stares and smiles. They seemed to hear the rotten flood-gates, shut so long ago, ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... to wonder if he had called them here just to ask about Sindy, and for an instant they were sullenly unresponsive. But the heavy lines on their master's face soon reassured them. "Over Buckshot Dan's—just where you ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... since that kiss at their first interview, which threw her into such a paroxysm of weeping. But one evening, when she had been more silent and dull than usual, and more unresponsive to his efforts to interest her, as he rose to go he drew her a moment to his side and pressed his lips to hers, as if constrained to find some expression for the tenderness so cruelly balked of any outflow in words. He went quickly out, but she continued ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... the matter with pursed lips. "I wish it hadn't happened," he mused, as unresponsive to his wife's relief as he had been to her anxiety. "At first, I mean—last ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... not changed, and the first tones called up the long-cherished record of childish years; for scent and sound can span the wastes of years and the deserts of separation, when sight is dull and even touch is unresponsive. ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... her, calmness agitated. She wished her beloved to be spared from a disappointment, thinking he deserved all successes, because of the rigours inflicted by her present tonelessness of blood and being. Her unresponsive manner with him was not due to lack of fire in the blood or a loss of tenderness. The tender feeling, under privations unwillingly imposed, though willingly shared, now suffused her reflections, owing to a gratitude induced by a novel experience of him; known, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... flirtations; predicted seeing him yet brought up with a round turn in a breach-of-promise case; seemed highly edified by Frankie Taliaferro's efforts to appear unconcerned at these pleasantries; railed openly at Clinton Frost's being so unresponsive to the general mirth around him; shivered visibly at that gentleman's icy retorts; playfully called attention to his wife's endeavors to frown him into silence; and, in spite of Sallie's angry glances, really saved her dinner from proving a dismal failure. Indeed, the cases were too real, and ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... to me, Love's mendicant,—ah, believe me, Matthiette, that atones for aught which follows now. Come what may, I shall always remember that once in old days you loved me, and, remembering this, I shall always thank God with a contented heart." He bowed over her unresponsive hand. "Matthiette," he whispered, "be happy! For I desire that very heartily, and I beseech of our Sovereign Lady—not caring to hide at all how my voice shakes, nor how the loveliness of you, seen now for the last time, is making blind my eyes—that you may never know ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... paid little heed to the sights that so interested his fellow passengers. To his fellow passengers, themselves, he had been as indifferent. To those who had approached him casually, as the sometimes tedious hours passed, he had been quietly and courteously unresponsive. This well-bred but decidedly marked disinclination to mingle with them, together with the undeniably distinguished appearance of the young man, only served to center the interest of the little world of the Pullmans more strongly upon him. Keeping to himself, and engrossed with ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... I was singularly unresponsive to all these forms of emotional appeal, although I became unspeakably embarrassed when they were presented to me at close range by a teacher during the "silent hour," which we were all required to observe every evening, and which was never broken into, even by a member of the faculty, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... small glass. The bagman told the steward that he could not compliment him on the quality of his liquor, but the steward said nothing. He did not even seem interested—only bored. He had heard the same remark often before, no doubt. He was a fat, solemn steward—not formal, but very reticent—unresponsive. He looked like a man who had conducted a religious conservative paper once and failed, and had then gone into the wholesale produce line, and failed again, and finally got his present billet through the influence of his creditors and two clergymen. He might have been a sociable fellow, ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson |
