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impotent
in a sentence
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  • Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent.   (source)
    impotent = powerless
  • She felt impotent rage.
  • "The world," he said, "is not a wish-granting factory," and then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness.   (source)
    impotent = lacking power to change things
  • But here, even more strongly than at home, I feel my impotence.   (source)
    impotence = lack of power to change things
  • Everyone in town said he'd been impotent for years and none of the Pastor kids was his.   (source)
    impotent = unable to have sexual intercourse
  • Lev stands there, impotent, unable to move, unable to process this.   (source)
    impotent = powerless
  • But then, they, too, fell into impotent postures, hands on their hips, waiting for the ambulances.   (source)
    impotent = powerless to change things
  • Laila would have to tail him home, helpless, trembling with resentment and impotent rage.   (source)
  • Simon would have regarded with impotent fury the disturbance between the North and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of everything but their land,   (source)
    impotent = lacking power to change things
  • Since artists are politically impotent, they must use this time to develop at deeper emotional levels.   (source)
    impotent = powerless to change things
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  • Three converts had gone into the village and boasted openly that all the gods were dead and impotent and that they were prepared to defy them by burning all their shrines.   (source)
    impotent = powerless
  • I felt stupid and utterly impotent when confronted by their tears.   (source)
    impotent = powerless to change things
  • Class warfare, racism and the inheritance of slavery ... impotent rage at having lost the Civil War, all figure in the violence of a Faulkner story.   (source)
    impotent = lacking power to change things
  • He was sixteen at the time of the invasion and shared with other Dutch teenagers the restless energy of anger and impotence.   (source)
    impotence = being powerless to change things
  • Roy Lee, Sherman, and O'Dell bowed their heads in impotent rage.   (source)
    impotent = powerless to change things
  • This Art was not the impotent black magic of today, often practiced halfheartedly by curious souls.   (source)
    impotent = weak or powerless
  • Although he frantically tried to scream warnings to her, no sound emerged and he was always too late and too impotent to save her.   (source)
    impotent = powerless
  • She saw with quiet impotence how the deluge was pitilessly exterminating a fortune that at one time was considered the largest and most solid in Macondo, and of which nothing remained but pestilence.   (source)
    impotence = lack of power to change things
  • …and in the room a tall shadow loomed over the tiny figure whose tiny finger yanked impotently at the trigger of the empty gun.   (source)
    impotently = without power to change things
  • It's essentially a backdoor switch that's triggered by the introduction of another uniquely engineered virus, which renders the vaccine impotent.   (source)
    impotent = powerless
  • Billy and I think that his attorney might go with an impotency defense.†   (source)
  • It was the recognition of impotency, pride abandoned for there was nothing to be proud of; the price of survival had been too much.†   (source)
  • Burned in effigy, accused in the press of "idiocy and impotency," and repudiated by his state and friends, Grimes never recovered—but before he died he declared to a friend: I shall ever thank God that in that troubled hour of trial, when many privately confessed that they had sacrificed their judgment and their conscience at the behests of party newspapers and party hate, I had the courage to be true to my oath and my conscience…… Perhaps I did wrong not to commit perjury by order of…†   (source)
  • But isn't that because we all feel so impotent and have no idea what to do?   (source)
    impotent = powerless to change things
  • But the multicolored bruises flowering under her green skin only remind me how impotent I am.   (source)
  • When he speaks he moves our men to impotence.   (source)
    impotence = weakness
  • All of those offerings are impotent, of course.   (source)
    impotent = weak or powerless
  • I shouted, hearing Isaac's impotent wailing echoing from the night of the broken trophies.   (source)
    impotent = lacking power to change things
  • He might have said something, some offering of impotent outrage, if this had been the work of the Taliban, or al-Qaeda, or some megalomaniacal Mujahideen commander.   (source)
  • Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.   (source)
  • As had happened with the death of his wife, as had happened to him so many times during the war with the deaths of his best friends, he did not have a feeling of sorrow but a blind and directionless rage, a broad feeling of impotence.   (source)
    impotence = lack of power to change things
  • His eyes grew moist with indignation, with angry impotence, and for the first time since his defeat it pained him not to have the strength of youth so that he could begin a bloody war that would wipe out the last vestiges of the Conservative regime.   (source)
  • His impotency appeared to him, and made his rage into that of a driven beast.†   (source)
  • Where now he realized only his own inconsequence, effort would make him aware of his own impotency and insufficiency.†   (source)
  • Endeavoring, then, to collect his ideas, he prepared to perform that species of incantation, and those uncouth rites, under which the Indian conjurers are accustomed to conceal their ignorance and impotency.†   (source)
  • The hand bunched into a fist and struck the bedframe with an impotent rage that made the whole bed tremble.   (source)
    impotent = powerless to change things
  • Would they not act with more consistency, in urging the establishment of the latter, as no less necessary to guard the Union against the future powers and resources of a body constructed like the existing Congress, than to save it from the dangers threatened by the present impotency of that Assembly?†   (source)
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  • He was impotent, but they adopted children.
  • I knew the process for making four different aphrodisiacs, three concoctions for contraception, nine for impotence, and two philtres referred to simply as "maiden's helper."   (source)
    impotence = inability to have an erection for sexual intercourse
  • That's our baby sister going in there with a guy who thinks condoms cause impotence.   (source)
  • At night they would wrestle for several hours in an anguished violence that seemed to be a substitute for the act of love, until popular intuition got a whiff of something irregular and the rumor spread that Ursula was still a virgin a year after her marriage because her husband was impotent.   (source)
    impotent = unable to have an erection for sexual intercourse
  • Macon had said no. That the doctor was impotent.   (source)
  • He knew there was no reason for him to be impotent at his age, and was forced to attribute it to the kind of life he was leading and the bachelor ways he had developed.   (source)
  • "Find me old, ugly, scarred men, preferably impotent," he had told the eunuch.   (source)
  • Your wife divorces you on the grounds that you're a nut, inattentive, also impotent.   (source)
  • Another group claims you're impotent.   (source)
  • "He thinks it might cause impotence," Fifi says, smiling sweetly, cherishing his cute male ignorance.   (source)
    impotence = inability to have an erection for sexual intercourse
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  • Besides fortunes there were little balls of sawdust to amuse the children and a special powder that was supposed to cure impotence, which Marcos sold under his breath to passersby afflicted with that malady.   (source)
  • He treated the classical writers with a household familiarity, as if they had all been his roommates at some period, and he knew many things that should not have been known, such as the fact that Saint Augustine wore a wool jacket under his habit that he did not take off for fourteen years and that Arnaldo of Villanova, the necromancer, was impotent since childhood because of a scorpion bite.   (source)
    impotent = unable to have an erection for sexual intercourse
  • I was afraid he thought he had hurt me with that crack about being impotent.   (source)
  • I've heard about guys who are impotent, how it suddenly gets them and they become maniacs.   (source)
  • Because of the poor circulation and the degeneration of connective tissue, victims were invariably sterile, and often impotent as well.   (source)
  • Perhaps not impotent then.   (source)
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  • We sold their photoreceptive skins to Web corporations, their flesh to worlds like Heaven's Gate, and ground their bones to powder to sell as aphrodisiacs to the impotent and superstitious on a score of other colony worlds.†   (source)
  • They can only satisfy their needs through collective strength — against the police, who hold the power of life and death, against poverty, against idleness, against their impotence in society.†   (source)
  • She felt furious, impotent, humiliated.†   (source)
  • Paul thought back to the moment of impotent rage as the strange 'thopter dived out of the night onto them, stooping like a giant hawk above the desert with wind screaming through its wings.†   (source)
  • Not in impotence but later, when the hatred could find sweet expression.†   (source)
  • But practiced in that way, anthropology seemed "impotent" in the face of "everyday problems of adequate nutrition, clean water, and illness prevention."†   (source)
  • Confined as he was by the M'Naghten Rule ("the usual definitions"), a formula quite color-blind to any gradations between black and white, Dr. Jones was impotent to answer otherwise.†   (source)
  • I stood there in front of their hostile faces, feeling ridiculous and impotent.†   (source)
  • On the whole, he had never felt so impotent in his life.†   (source)
  • In that same instant, the Council of Elders flashed from triumphant gloating to enraged impotence.†   (source)
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show 190 more examples with any meaning
  • It will make you impotent!†   (source)
  • He hit him again and again, giving in to the rage, unleashing his fury at the impotence he'd felt ever since the fire.†   (source)
  • The Brady Act, accordingly, has proven to be practically impotent in lowering crime.†   (source)
  • Why do we stand here impotently in the face of such an outrageous crime, covered by such a ridiculous deception?†   (source)
  • " 'I'll give you back your life!' he said, his eyelids quivering with the stress of his words, his chest heaving, that hand going out again and closing impotently in the dark.†   (source)
  • Jaime closed his eyes and inhaled with difficulty, forcing himself to contain the wild feelings that made him want to kill his brother, to run and marry Amanda himself, to weep in impotence and disappointment.†   (source)
  • He was overcome with a humiliating feeling of impotence and was ready to weep in self-pity.†   (source)
  • We must not dismiss this fancy as the recurrent dream of a man obsessed with the threat of impotence.†   (source)
  • You feel so … impotent!†   (source)
  • Only impotence.†   (source)
  • It held a sleeping threat, a sense that it had been born out of her rage and guilt and impotent anger.†   (source)
  • She had never felt so impotent in her life.†   (source)
  • The president is impotent.†   (source)
  • It was an odd impotence, neither of his mind nor of his body.†   (source)
  • A bunch of boozed-up …. impotent lunkheads.†   (source)
  • And I think I may be able to create a virus that will render the Raison Strain impotent.†   (source)
  • He was the first freshman I had ever known to freeze the cadre into complete impotence.†   (source)
  • I believe that we are not so weak, so impotent, or so frightened that we must give it up or perish.†   (source)
  • The man glowered at Max, his red face trembling with impotent rage.†   (source)
  • This miraculous speed has rendered me impotent.†   (source)
  • Many letters tell of soldiers hiding fugitives in camp and laughing at the impotent rage of owners who went home empty-handed.†   (source)
  • And now the voice was coming from inside me, and it sounded real and raw and impotent.†   (source)
  • I have mentioned the Confederation's most significant defects, passing over the imperfections that make its power largely impotent.†   (source)
  • Philly Byrnes is a poor little impotent sweaty guy past forty who's been sleeping for years with a rosary and a copy of Variety under his pillow.†   (source)
  • With the arrival of the Overlords, nations knew that they need no longer fear each other, and they guessed-even befbre the experiment was made-that their existing weapons were certainly impotent against a civilization that could bridge the stars.†   (source)
  • Feeble, impotent though inwardly raging, I struggled for words that would not come.†   (source)
  • Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell.†   (source)
  • To me it felt like a grim sort of statutory rape and produced psychic impotence.†   (source)
  • They become more and more impotent with every season.†   (source)
  • What was the reward or the justification of this impotent challenge, which brought nothing but grief?†   (source)
  • At dusk the drums of calamity began; their grave, throbbing rhythm came clearly through the night, throughout the night, each beat, each tattoo, echoing the mighty impotence of our human endeavour.†   (source)
  • He glowered at me in the darkness, an impotent sullenness to his anger.†   (source)
  • Philip spit out his answer with impotent hatred: "You can't talk to me that way!†   (source)
  • I began to cry, suddenly impotent against his rage.†   (source)
  • The new Congress would be as impotent as its predecessors.†   (source)
  • The snow is wasting (pernicious anemia— See those branching veinlets of impotent blue?†   (source)
  • Nathan opened his hands, trembling, impotent.†   (source)
  • They never spoke of their exploits, they confided in no one, they feigned indifference to the point where they earned the reputation of being impotent, or frigid, or above all timid fairies, as in the case of Florentino Ariza.†   (source)
  • Now she wouldn't know until Monday if Rachel had divorced Mack because he'd become impotent after getting caught in that earthquake.†   (source)
  • She'd developed a simple way to introduce an airborne agent into the vicinity of the vaccine-a virus that would essentially neutralize the vaccine by inserting its own DNA into the mix and rendering the vaccine impotent.†   (source)
  • Her visitors' impotent words flew against the steel edge of her pain, bled slowly, and returned to die in the senders' throats.†   (source)
  • Later, I would feel the same sort of impotent outrage when I studied the monstrous injustices of the world toward its meekest and most helpless citizens.†   (source)
  • Standing in the midst of hundreds of babbling Iranian men, I felt naked, impotent, a woman alone in a masculine society.†   (source)
  • The droning stream of her insults was like the sound of a distant riveting machine, a long, impotent pressure that reached nothing within him.†   (source)
  • If she could find the specific gene she'd engineered, and if it had survived the mutation, then introducing the virus she'd already developed to neutralize the vaccine might also render the Raison Strain impotent.†   (source)
  • My ears alert for any sound of trouble, my arms aching as I held my daughter close, my head spinning with unceasing prayer, I awaited my last moment, impotent against the rage of my demented husband.†   (source)
  • The heat and noise and mayhem surrounding the ring had immobilized me and rendered me impotent, with that absurd helplessness of being a spectator to an event beyond my control.†   (source)
  • Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from. us.†   (source)
  • He shook with impotent dread.†   (source)
  • After our interrogation of Molligen, I had thought that he would issue a warning thatsomeone was on the trail of The Ten and the organization would lie low I had thought our secret foray against them had rendered The Ten impotent because we were as invisible and undetected as they were.†   (source)
  • You feel disarmed when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical.†   (source)
  • "I have something to tell you!" cried Lillian, with the sound of that impotent rage which wishes that words were brass knuckles.†   (source)
  • I thought I could afford to ignore them-all those impotent mystics who prattle about their souls and are unable to build a roof over their heads.†   (source)
  • By its own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment.†   (source)
  • Taggart's scream rose to the shrill, impotent sound that confesses a miscalculation: "Do you realize what you're saying?"†   (source)
  • She was supposed to be above reproach," He was staring down at her with the heavy, blind stare of impotent hatred-a hatred of which she was the sudden symbol, not the object.†   (source)
  • They, the impotent mystics, struggling to escape the responsibility of reason, had known that he, the rationalist, had undertaken to serve their whims.†   (source)
  • "I quit," said Ellis Wyatt, "because I didn't wish to serve as the cannibals' meal and to do the cooking, besides," "I discovered," said Ken Danagger, "that the men I was fighting were impotent.†   (source)
  • And there's to be no salvation until men realize that their mortal mind is impotent to solve their problems and go back to faith, faith in God, faith in a higher authority!†   (source)
  • The wheels were running faster, as if gaining speed and purpose and lightness, ignoring the impotent obstacles of small jolts from the ruts of the ground.†   (source)
  • The mind is impotent, you say?†   (source)
  • She sat sprawled in her chair, looking past Chalmers, studying her own face in a mirror on the wall of the lounge; she was bored and it amused her to needle his impotent anger.†   (source)
  • I saw that evil was impotent-that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real-and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.†   (source)
  • Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent-and if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his. consciousness impotent.†   (source)
  • The woman was pushing forward, to squeeze herself into the group, to place some human bodies between herself and the sight of the great vacuum-the plain stretching off and dissolving into moonlight, the dead phosphorescence of impotent, borrowed energy.†   (source)
  • I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child's brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he's unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror.†   (source)
  • With the sign of the dollar as our symbol-the sign of free trade and free minds-we will move to reclaim this country once more from the impotent savages who never discovered its nature, its meaning, its splendor.†   (source)
  • I accepted their code and believed, as they taught me, that the values of one's spirit must remain as an impotent longing, unexpressed in action, untranslated into reality, while the life of one's body must be lived in misery, as a senseless, degrading performance, and those who attempt to enjoy it must be branded as inferior animals.†   (source)
  • Logic is impotent.†   (source)
  • …tears or tantrums-that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what their hunger-that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the roof of a skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipe line counts, but their feelings do not-that their feelings are impotent to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space or the nature of any action they have committed.†   (source)
  • You who've lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim-the source of man's rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity.†   (source)
  • When the looters' state collapses, deprived of the best of its slaves, when it falls to a level of impotent chaos, like the mystic-ridden nations of the Orient, and dissolves into starving robber gangs fighting to rob one another-when the advocates of the morality of sacrifice perish with their final ideal-then and on that day we will return.†   (source)
  • …dog she had heard about, she thought …. somebody's dog in somebody's laboratory …. the dog who got his signals switched on him, and saw no way to tell satisfaction from torture, saw food changed to beatings and beatings to food, saw his eyes and ears deceiving him and his judgment futile and his consciousness impotent in a shifting, swimming, shapeless world-and gave up, refusing to eat at that price or to live in a world of that kind…… No! was the only conscious word in her brain-no!†   (source)
  • She felt that she was a hostage-all through Rodia's stupid fault-and was trapped in impotent exasperation.†   (source)
  • Guilt and impotence rose in a bilious duet.†   (source)
  • Chelsea's attempt to sway us fluttered impotently against my shield.†   (source)
  • To assuage my fears of sexual impotence.†   (source)
  • He imagined the awful impotence of breathing in helplessly quarts and quarts of water.†   (source)
  • We waited impotently, holding our breaths, fighting panic.†   (source)
  • Why do you now moan complaints about man's impotence and the futility of human aspirations?†   (source)
  • I listened again, in impotence and anguish: "I'm coming to get you both."†   (source)
  • For now, he hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence.†   (source)
  • Teen-agers sneaked into the Elmira Theater in the afternoon and let Tex Ritter free them from the recollection of their fathers' shoes, yawning in impotence under the bed.†   (source)
  • For ten years or more, both of her daughters had often, if impotently, conspired to throw out this veteran kimono.†   (source)
  • Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphonesI have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent.†   (source)
  • In the last of these, the chamber they negotiated was long and dark, and Alessandro began to yell at the gondolier, accusing him of everything from cretinism to impotence, but the gondolier said, "I know the only straight line in Venice, and nothing you can say will shame or anger me."†   (source)
  • He sold his organ to a blind man and left the parrot to Clara, but Nana secretly poisoned it with an overdose of cod-liver oil, because no one could stand its lusty glance, its fleas, and its harsh, tuneless hawking of paper fortunes, sawdust balls, and powders for impotence.†   (source)
  • The history of every political body using this principle is a history of impotence, perplexity, and disorder.†   (source)
  • Hasn't it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of sexual impotence?†   (source)
  • "And we didn't get left back like you little dumb asses," she called out impotently to the slamming door.†   (source)
  • It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice.†   (source)
  • Forgetting the impotence of my position, venting a portion of the anger stored inside me, I snapped, "The discussion yesterday was that we were going out to eat tonight.†   (source)
  • It was not an act in celebration of life that he had wanted to perform-but an act in celebration of the triumph of impotence.†   (source)
  • I rebelled against their creed of human impotence and I took pride in my ability to think, to act, to work for the satisfaction of my desires.†   (source)
  • Consider the obscenity of offering their impotence and their need-their need of you-as a justification for your torture.†   (source)
  • They didn't see fit to tell me about your coming here, either!" yelled the chief, his voice confessing the helplessness of anger and broadcasting the vibrations of impotence to his men.†   (source)
  • He saw who was the accuser and who the accused-he saw the obscenity of letting impotence hold itself as virtue and damn the power of living as a sinhe saw, with the clarity of direct perception, in the shock of a single instant, the terrible ugliness of that which had once been his own belief.†   (source)
  • …to provide them with the means of their plan-so throughout the world and throughout men's history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values-the impotence of death.†   (source)
  • He was the man of extravagant energy-and reckless generosity-who knew that stagnation is not man's fate, that impotence is not his nature, that the ingenuity of his mind is his noblest and most joyous power-and in service to that love of existence he was alone to feel, he went on working, working at any price, working for his despoilers, for his jailers, for his torturers, paying with his life for the privilege of saving theirs.†   (source)
  • When you listen to a mystic's harangue on the impotence of the human mind and begin to doubt your consciousness, not his, when you permit your precariously semi-rational state to be shaken by any assertion and decide it is safer to trust his superior certainty and knowledge, the joke is on both of you: your sanction is the only source of certainty he has.†   (source)
  • I want you to observe, Miss Taggart, that those who cry the loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logicare those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it.†   (source)
  • But the longing came from the certainty that the truth and the right were hers-that the enemy was the irrational and the unreal-that she could not set herself another goal or summon the love to achieve it, while her rightful achievement had been lost, not to some superior power, but to a loathsome evil that conquered by means of impotence.†   (source)
  • …on the afterglow of the minds of others, offering their denial of the mind as their only claim to distinction, and a craving to control the world as their only lust-she, the woman hanger-on of that elite, wearing their shopworn sneer as her answer to the universe, holding impotence as superiority and emptiness as virtue-he, unaware of their hatred, innocently scornful of their posturing fraud-she, seeing him as the danger to their world, as a threat, as a challenge, as a reproach.†   (source)
  • …and their need as a higher claim to reward than your effort, who demand that you serve them, who demand that it be the aim of your life to serve them, who demand that your strength be the voiceless, rightless, unpaid, unrewarded slave of their impotence, who proclaim that you are born to serfdom by reason of your genius, while they are born to rule by the grace of incompetence, that yours is only to give, but theirs only to take, that yours is to produce, but theirs to consume, that…†   (source)
  • I was too pragmatic and impatient to let such thoughts flog me into impotence, yet I sincerely needed a working philosophy on which to hang my hat.†   (source)
  • "I mean," she said bluntly, "that whoring seems to have been invented by Earth people and no others—and the idea would shock old Jocko into impotence.†   (source)
  • And between, how many times, I thought, bleak of spirit, while her husband in his impotence and I in my innocence did nothing.†   (source)
  • The place had reduced me to such a shambles of absolute impotence that I found that I could not even indulge myself in my occasional autoerotic diversions, and was reduced to performing furtive pocket jobs during midnight strolls through Washington Square.†   (source)
  • He was just a fat old impotent man mocked and taunted between the sheets.†   (source)
  • What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my masters?†   (source)
  • Scarlett kicked the coverlet in impotent rage, trying to think of something bad enough to say.†   (source)
  • But this—a mean, smutty little horror, impotent even to frighten.†   (source)
  • He bowed and sauntered off, leaving her with her bosom heaving with impotent rage and indignation.†   (source)
  • The man was impotent, but had found an instructor in the psychoanalyst.†   (source)
  • His face was the face of a man drunk with fatigue and impotent rage and burning pity.†   (source)
  • For an hour Buckley commented upon the testimony of the State's witnesses and interpreted the evidence, concluding with the words, "The intellectual and moral faculties of mankind may as well be declared impotent, if the evidence and testimony submitted by the State are not enough to compel this Court to impose the death sentence upon Bigger Thomas, this despoiler of women!†   (source)
  • In fact, beautiful, and the picture of a far traveler, with his pale, mind-crippled, impotent handsomeness.†   (source)
  • And it did not help him any that at least two of the citizens who should have made two of the teeth in the outraged jaw served instead as props to hold the jaw open and impotent while he walked out of it unharmed.†   (source)
  • Father Latour judged that the day of lawless personal power was almost over, even on the frontier, and this figure was to him already like something picturesque and impressive, but really impotent, left over from the past.†   (source)
  • She had gone stiff all over, and then, her arm slackening, so that he felt she listened to him no longer, she had risen somehow and gone away and left him there, impotent, ridiculous, sitting on the floor grasping a pair of scissors.†   (source)
  • The men are impotent.†   (source)
  • At his cry of rage and fear, they both laughed: for a blind moment or two Eugene for the first time hated her: he was mad, impotent with jealousy and fear.†   (source)
  • The other is a mood of impotent fury in which he wreaks imaginary revenges upon those who have wronged him.†   (source)
  • Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realised at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realises that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old…†   (source)
  • And all my brothers, and the Councils of my brothers, will hear of it, but they will be impotent against me.†   (source)
  • Murderous impotent, baffled—a maniacal anger against her groped for an outlet in him, sometimes exploding in a wild inchoate scream.†   (source)
  • …beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the slope that had never known the print of a boot, there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary, and tourist—only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles.†   (source)
  • Only now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended on him—without his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you (he could feel the beak on his bare legs, where it had struck when he was a child) and then made off, and there he was again, an old man, very sad, reading…†   (source)
  • When he would reach the cabin and find it empty, he would think in a kind of impotent rage of the urgency, the lying and the haste, and of her alone and idle in the house all day, with nothing to do save to decide whether to betray him at once or, torture him a little longer.†   (source)
  • Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.†   (source)
  • …whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children's feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear,…†   (source)
  • It was a full pause, but before they could grasp him again he had raised the stick and struck the captive once and he was trying to strike again when they caught him at last and held him impotent and raging, with that light, thin foam about his lips.†   (source)
  • He trembled, unnerved and impotent.†   (source)
  • Force had been piled on top of force and military edicts in increasing numbers had rendered the civil authority more and more impotent.†   (source)
  • …he died, since after that it wouldn't matter, in that rotting house, caring for him and feeding him, raising chickens and peddling the eggs for the clothes she and Clytie couldn't make: so that he didn't even need to be a demon now but just mad impotent old man who had realised at last that his dream of restoring his Sutpen's Hundred was not only vain but that what he had left of it would never support him and his family and so running his little crossroads store with a stock of…†   (source)
  • He began to die before their eyes—a quick age, and a slow death, impotent, disintegrating, horrible because his life had been so much identified with physical excess— huge drinking, huge eating, huge rioting debauchery.†   (source)
  • It halted only long enough to disgorge the two dogs: a thousand costly tons of intricate and curious metal glaring and crashing up and into an almost shocking silence filled with the puny sounds of men, to vomit two gaunt and cringing phantoms whose droopeared and mild faces gazed with sad abjectness about at the weary, pale faces of men who had not slept very much since night before last, ringing them about with something terrible and eager and impotent.†   (source)
  • It broke down, it vanished into that old impotent logic and morality which had betrayed him before and what day might it have been, what furrow might he have stopped dead in, one foot advanced, the unsentient plow handles in his instantaneous unsentient hands, what fence panel held in midair as though it had no weight by muscles which could not feel it, when he realised that there was more in his problem than just lack of time, that the problem contained some super-distillation of this…†   (source)
  • Frank was remembering the Tara he had known before the war and on his face was a hurt look, a look of tired impotent anger.†   (source)
  • So he would reach the cabin at last, after the lying and the hurry, and as he put his hand on the door, remembering the haste and thinking that in a moment he would find that it had not been necessary at all and yet to neglect which precaution he dared not, he would hate her with a fierce revulsion of dread and impotent rage.†   (source)
  • …and chuckling and saying 'Sho, Mister Tawm' each time the demon paused) —the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man's state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, 'Kill them!†   (source)
  • Melanie smiled at him through sparkling tears while Scarlett felt the fox of wrath and impotent hate gnaw at her vitals.†   (source)
  • …and fallen fence and crumbling wall of cabin or cotton house or crib; himself diffused and in solution held by that electric furious immobile urgency and awareness of short time and the need for haste as if he had just drawn breath and looked about and realised that he was old (be was fifty-nine) and was concerned (not afraid concerned) not that old age might have left him impotent to do what he intended to do, but that he might not have time to do it in before he would have to die.†   (source)
  • Another thought that stung them to impotent wrath was the knowledge that the Yankees and Carpetbaggers would laugh.†   (source)
  • Impotent rage quelled what little fear was left in her heart as she stood helpless while they plundered and stole and ruined.†   (source)
  • There are some things which happen to us which the intelligence and the senses refuse just as the stomach sometimes refuses what the palate has accepted but which digestion cannot compass—occurrences which stop us dead as though by some impalpable intervention, like a sheet of glass through which we watch all subsequent events transpire as though in a soundless vacuum, and fade, vanish; are gone, leaving us immobile, impotent, helpless; fixed, until we can die.†   (source)
  • …require of her commensurate with honor she would not have become engaged to him and if she had not become engaged to him she would not have had to lie at night asking herself Why and Why and Why as she has done for forty-three years: as if she had been instinctively right even as a child in hating her father and so these forty-three years of impotent and unbearable outrage were the revenge of some sophisticated and ironic sterile nature on her for having hated that which gave her life.†   (source)
  • As she passed the stove, she shoved the handkerchief into the flames and with impotent anger watched it burn.†   (source)
  • Will asked calmly and, looking down at him in a confusion of joy and impotent fury, Scarlett saw in the quiet depths of his eyes understanding and pity.†   (source)
  • …he would do: how begin the Herculean task which we knew he would set himself, into which (oh yes, we knew this too) he would undoubtedly sweep us with the old ruthlessness whether we would or no; we talked of Henry, quietly—that normal useless impotent woman-worrying about the absent male—as to how be fared, if he were cold or hungry or not, just as we talked of his father, as if both they and we still lived in that time which that shot, those running mad feet, had put a period to and…†   (source)
  • …of him who, begetting him, owned him body and soul to sell (if he chose) like a calf or puppy or sheep; and the mentor watching again, perhaps even the gambler now thinking Have I won or lost? as they emerged and returned to Bon's rooms, for that while impotent even with talk, shrewdness, no longer counting upon that puritan character which must show neither surprise nor despair, having to count now (if on anything) on the corruption itself, the love; he could not even say, 'Well?†   (source)
  • How helplessly impotent all her earnest sympathy!†   (source)
  • The sincere if impotent desire wips His blessing.†   (source)
  • Leach had worked himself into an ecstasy of impotent rage.†   (source)
  • Terror that hid in the roses is impotent—flung on the dung-hill and dead!†   (source)
  • Beady Jones and Braverman showed an inflamed and impotent eagerness to take their turn.†   (source)
  • At that moment, the viscount could not help uttering an exclamation of impotent rage.†   (source)
  • It had begun to seem to them that events were trying to prove that they were impotent.†   (source)
  • I was wandering, mad with rage, naked, impotent.†   (source)
  • With barbarous and insane fury, with sheer impotent folly, he swept a clawing hand for his gun.†   (source)
  • I felt impotent, and in the dark, and distrustful.†   (source)
  • He twisted still, impotent, stubborn, not looking up.†   (source)
  • The young man fled while she was still threatening him with an impotent gesture.†   (source)
  • Ben-Hur walked the floor in pain of impotent wish.†   (source)
  • Hands lay impotent before the void.†   (source)
  • …at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair.†   (source)
  • He was jerked out of the way, into a room with the convicted prisoners, where he sat and wept like a child in his impotent rage.†   (source)
  • For there were still two men lying impotent in their bunks; and these, seeing the water pour in and thinking the ship had foundered, began to cry out aloud, and that with such harrowing cries that all who were on deck tumbled one after another into the skiff and fell to their oars.†   (source)
  • The King raged and stormed, and promised to hang the two the moment the sceptre was in his hand again; but they kept a firm grip upon him and enjoyed his impotent struggling and jeered at his threats.†   (source)
  • He writhed weirdly on his mat, gesticulating with his hands and feet, tossing the tangled strings of his mop—an impotent incarnation of rage.†   (source)
  • She remained on her feet staring at them, as they sat impotent as idols in their beds, weighted by their trays.†   (source)
  • It is a curious thing that I felt angry with my wife; I cannot account for it, but my impotent desire to reach Leatherhead worried me excessively.†   (source)
  • They seemed nothing more now than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creatures of my temperament.†   (source)
  • The malice, impotent though it be, which possesses these demon souls is an evil of boundless extension, of limitless duration, a frightful state of wickedness which we can scarcely realize unless we bear in mind the enormity of sin and the hatred God bears to it.†   (source)
  • But others, such as Mahmoud Ali, were cynical; they were firmly convinced that Turton had been made to give the party by his official superiors and was all the time consumed with impotent rage, and they infected some who were inclined to a healthier view.†   (source)
  • The hermit, grinding his teeth in impotent rage, moved swiftly out of the bedchamber, closing the door behind him; and straightway the King heard a talk, to this effect, proceeding from the 'chapel':— "Homage and greeting, reverend sir!†   (source)
  • …pleasure-cities, although he could never find out whether it had been solely to satisfy a want of money which, thanks to himself, she no longer felt, or from some capricious instinct which might, at any moment, revive in her, he would lean, in impotent anguish, blinded and dizzy, over the bottomless abyss into which had passed, in which had been engulfed those years of his own, early in MacMahon's Septennat, in which one spent the winter on the Promenade des Anglais, the summer…†   (source)
  • The lieutenant, who had listened with an air of impotent rage to the interview, spoke suddenly in firm and undaunted tones.†   (source)
  • She passed through hours of unintelligible shame and impotent rage and futile striving to reason away her defilement.†   (source)
  • Leach's rage was no longer impotent.†   (source)
  • He was impotent against it.†   (source)
  • You are impotent.†   (source)
  • When, in a dream, it occurred to the youth that his rifle was an impotent stick, he lost sense of everything but his hate, his desire to smash into pulp the glittering smile of victory which he could feel upon the faces of his enemies.†   (source)
  • But they will see at last, the foolish children, that, though they are rebels, they are impotent rebels, unable to keep up their own rebellion.†   (source)
  • But Deerslayer's mind was too much occupied to permit him to be disturbed by the abuse of excited hags, and their rage necessarily increasing with his indifference, as his indifference increased with their rage, the furies soon rendered themselves impotent by their own excesses.†   (source)
  • The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like an electric shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single whole the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts that incessantly occupied his mind.†   (source)
  • More than once she felt tempted to brave the awful and instant danger that awaited such an offence, and to raise her feeble, and, in truth, impotent voice in warning.†   (source)
  • So her schemes always went for nothing, and she laid them aside in impotent rage against the fates, and against herself for playing the fool on that fatal September day in not providing herself with a witness for use in the day when such a thing might be needed for the appeasing of her vengeance-hungry heart.†   (source)
  • Their force has long passed away—Age has no pleasures, wrinkles have no influence, revenge itself dies away in impotent curses.†   (source)
  • This promise of an impotent old man was so strange that, instead of being the result of the power of his will, it might emanate from enfeebled organs.†   (source)
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