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obdurate
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  • She had a raven's heart, small and obdurate.†   (source)
  • And I fixed my thoughts an him obdurately, that guard, calculating how a vampire might get to him, how take his life and his lantern and his keys.†   (source)
  • But British-American relations had been strained since the Paris Peace Treaty, and the British remained maddeningly obdurate until that winter, when the commissioners were informed that His Majesty's government would welcome an American minister to "reside constantly" at the Court of St. James's.†   (source)
  • His mummer's show with Edmure and the gallows had 'only made the Blackfish more obdurate, that was plain.†   (source)
  • He threw himself against the leather straps of the chair, against the solid air all around him, against the obduracy of the queen of Attolia.†   (source)
  • Blasingame, who had been asleep when we had come into the barracks, came up the stairs from third division with a quizzical, obdurate look on his face.†   (source)
  • Then later again, in the pure consequence of Elizabeth Bishop's style, in the sheer obduracy of Robert Lowell's and in the barefaced confrontation of Patrick Kavanagh's, I encountered further reasons for believing in poetry's ability - and responsibility - to say what happens, to "pity the planet," to be "not concerned with Poetry."†   (source)
  • It was one point upon which she was obdurately firm: she had made it clear to him that she would not and could not speak of her experiences in the camp.†   (source)
  • He braced against it quietly to accept, endure it, relishing not only his exertion but the sullen, obdurate cruelty of the iron, for it was the cruelty which proved and measured his courage.†   (source)
  • And he replied obdurately that she had only to look around her to see what happened to children brought up as theirs would be brought up.†   (source)
  • But at one part of the line there was a grim and obdurate group that made no movement.   (source)
  • It's very kind in him, but I don't want him to, I'm sure,' said Kit, hammering stoutly at an obdurate nail.   (source)
  • Miss Dartle,' said I, 'if you can be so obdurate as not to feel for this afflicted mother ...   (source)
  • Pharaoh was obdurate for his heart was hardened.
  • For the last two days I have been dead, slain by the thought of the cruelty with which thou hast treated me, obdurate knight,   (source)
  • the child's misery would move even the most obdurate heart
  • That stony, obdurate look covered her face like a mask.†   (source)
  • He did not like this mulishness, this almost ostentatious look of obduracy.†   (source)
  • And he was obdurate; she could not move him.†   (source)
  • For although the playground reflected an obdurate disrepair, the statue itself was whitewashed every spring, and even on the dullest, grayest days— despite being dotted here and there with birdshit and occasional stains of human desecration—Mary Magdalene attracted and reflected more light than any other object or human presence at St. Michael's.†   (source)
  • Anger at her obdurate density, anger that she could actually kidnap him , keep him prisoner here, force him into a choice between drinking dirty rinse-water from a floor-bucket or suffering the pain of his shattered legs , and then, on top of all that, find the nerve to criticize the best thing he had ever written.†   (source)
  • Since young King Tommen and his counsellors have become so obdurate, we mean to broach the subject with King Stannis.†   (source)
  • And she was looking at me with two calm, violet eyes and a child's mouth that seemed almost obdurately soft, obdurately the cupid's bow unsullied by paint or personality; and the mouth smiled now and said, as those eyes seemed to fire: 'Yes, he's as you said he would be, and I love him already.†   (source)
  • But of the four it was Timothy Pickering who held the strongest views and, as Secretary of State, was the most important, given the precarious nature of a world at war, as well as his own obdurate personality.†   (source)
  • Nathan's stilted, didactic enunciation might have been, under different circumstances, vaguely comical—a burlesque of itself—but now was edged with such real threat, rage and obdurate conviction that I could not help but give a small shiver and feel at my back the approach, like the thudding of gallows-bound footsteps, of some awful and unnamed doom.†   (source)
  • Having made her decision moments before, Sophie was not about to resist or protest—in a kind of headlong autohypnosis she had placed herself beyond revulsion, realizing in any case that she was as helpless as a crippled moth—and let her thighs, submissively, be spread apart as the brutish muzzle and the bullethead of a tongue probed into what, with some dull distant satisfaction, she realized was her obdurate dryness, as parched and without juice as desert sand.†   (source)
  • The sexual memory in which I was drenched during that season in Brooklyn, whenever I forlornly unloosed the floodgates, was of uneasy darkness, sweat, reproving murmurs, bands and sinews of obdurate elastic, lacerating little hooks and snaps, whispered prohibitions, straining erections, stuck zippers and a warm miasmal odor of the secretions from inflamed and obstructed glands.†   (source)
  • Sophie, watching him, heard him say "…. diese unertragliche Sprache" in a bemused tone, twisting his lips to fit some of the obdurately unpronounceable words of this "impossible language," quickly give up the effort and then rise to his feet.†   (source)
  • But I now made the contribution of maturity to childhood's intuitions—satiety and doom; the sense of what is unescapable in our lot; death; the knowledge of limitations; how life is more obdurate than one had thought it.†   (source)
  • Benny was obdurate.†   (source)
  • She was obdurate.†   (source)
  • So Rex was sent to Farm Street to Father Mowbray, a priest renowned for his triumphs with obdurate catechumens.†   (source)
  • Seeing the obdurate look on Scarlett's face, Mammy picked up the tray and, with the bland guile of her race, changed her tactics.†   (source)
  • Ashley looked unhappy but obdurate.†   (source)
  • "No candles!" repeated Mr. Kernan obdurately.†   (source)
  • Hall tried to convey everything by grimaces and dumb show, but Mrs. Hall was obdurate.†   (source)
  • She implored him not to come, but he was obdurate.†   (source)
  • But at one part of the line there was a grim and obdurate group that made no movement.†   (source)
  • 'After all your love!' he returned, obdurately.†   (source)
  • 'Now, David,' said Mr. Murdstone, 'a sullen obdurate disposition is, of all tempers, the worst.'†   (source)
  • 'Miss Dartle,' said I, 'if you can be so obdurate as not to feel for this afflicted mother —'†   (source)
  • No entreaties will move the obdurate Hassan.†   (source)
  • How could any parent be obdurate for a length of time against such a paragon as he was?†   (source)
  • Assuming the Griffiths of Lycurgus to remain obdurate and unmoved—why then—why then—and now that she was here—there were the churches and the religious people generally.†   (source)
  • Remain obdurate, my boy.†   (source)
  • But to achieve this goal, it was necessary above all to strike at the Asiatic principle of bondage and obduracy at its vital center point, at the very nerve of resistance—in Vienna.†   (source)
  • Naab, however, was obdurate, unreasonably so, Cole said, unless there were some good reason why he wished to strike the trail in the night.†   (source)
  • In the end Marija said that she would help with ten dollars; and Jurgis being still obdurate, Elzbieta went in tears and begged the money from the neighbors, and so little Kristoforas had a mass and a hearse with white plumes on it, and a tiny plot in a graveyard with a wooden cross to mark the place.†   (source)
  • Francois was obdurate, but when he turned his back Buck again displaced Sol-leks, who was not at all unwilling to go.†   (source)
  • Even Mrs. Trenor, whose taste for variety had led her into some hazardous experiments, resisted Jack's attempts to disguise Mr. Rosedale as a novelty, and declared that he was the same little Jew who had been served up and rejected at the social board a dozen times within her memory; and while Judy Trenor was obdurate there was small chance of Mr. Rosedale's penetrating beyond the outer limbo of the Van Osburgh crushes.†   (source)
  • It was the note which the family had taken to sounding on the mention of the Countess Olenska's name, since she had surprised and inconvenienced them by remaining obdurate to her husband's advances; but on May's lips it gave food for thought, and Archer looked at her with the sense of strangeness that sometimes came over him when she was most in the tone of her environment.†   (source)
  • All sorts of pleas for a reconsideration were made, but the packers were obdurate; and all the while they were reducing wages, and heading off shipments of cattle, and rushing in wagonloads of mattresses and cots.†   (source)
  • According to the outline Settembrini presented, two principles were locked in combat for the world: might and right, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge, the law of obduracy and the law of ferment, change, and progress.†   (source)
  • She came, but refused to kiss them; it was such hard luck on the little things, she said, and though Dolly proffered Chorly-worly and Porgly-woggles in turn, she was obdurate.†   (source)
  • …from his grandfather, which had then blended with the humanistic inheritance of his father to create beautiful literature within him, Lodovico, just as humanity and politics were blended in the lofty idea of civilization, to which he raised a toast, an idea full of the mildness of the dove and the boldness of the eagle and awaiting its day, the dawn of the Day of Nations, when the principle of obduracy would be defeated and a path opened for the Holy Alliance of bourgeois democracy.†   (source)
  • Recently—a year and a half or two years before—the diplomatic cooperation of his own country and Austria in Albania had troubled his discourse, a cooperation that both inspired him, since it was directed against demi-Asia with its lack of Latin, against knouts and Schlusselburg prison, and tormented him as a misalliance with his country's sworn enemy, with the principle of obduracy and the bondage of nations.†   (source)
  • Hutter was too stern and obdurate by nature to shrink from the consequences of any of his acts, and he was also too familiar with the opinions of the savages not to understand that nothing was to be gained by equivocation or an unmanly dread of their anger.†   (source)
  • He said the peasants were obdurate and that at the present moment it would be imprudent to "overresist" them without an armed force, and would it not be better first to send for the military?†   (source)
  • 'The great dog, regardless of being half-choked by his collar, was obdurately pulling with his dead weight against his master, resolved to get across the room.†   (source)
  • An iron constitution, perfect obduracy of feeling, a certain address well suited to manage savages, and an indomitable courage, had early pointed him out to the commander-in-chief as a suitable agent to be employed in directing the military operations of his Indian allies.†   (source)
  • Catherine, by instinct, must have divined it was obdurate perversity, and not dislike, that prompted this dogged conduct; for, after remaining an instant undecided, she stooped and impressed on his cheek a gentle kiss.†   (source)
  • Driven from the faces of the house by the obduracy of the material, they took refuge in the porch and on the roof.†   (source)
  • 'Why is it,' said the old gentleman, coming up a step higher, and leaning his elbows on the wall, with as much complacency as if he were looking out of window, 'why is it that beauty is always obdurate, even when admiration is as honourable and respectful as mine?'†   (source)
  • What obduracy!†   (source)
  • I was alone, and calm and quiet below me in the sun and shade lay the old house, with its terraces and turrets, on which there had seemed to me to be such complete repose when I first saw it, but which now looked like the obdurate and unpitying watcher of my mother's misery.†   (source)
  • Every where his eyes, which just at that moment possessed a secret magnifying quality, seemed to rest on several dark, savage, and obdurate countenances at once, from none of which could he extract a solitary gleam of sympathy or commiseration.†   (source)
  • CHAPTER XIII Sentimental and Otherwise I fear the gentleman to whom Miss Amelia's letters were addressed was rather an obdurate critic.†   (source)
  • "Not a karnel!" exclaimed the obdurate Hawkeye; "his death is certain, and we have no powder to spare, for Indian fights sometimes last for days; 'tis their scalps or ours! and God, who made us, has put into our natures the craving to keep the skin on the head."†   (source)
  • Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits?†   (source)
  • And seeing that Mr. Jaggers stood quite still and silent, and apparently quite obdurate, under this appeal, I turned to Wemmick, and said, "Wemmick, I know you to be a man with a gentle heart.†   (source)
  • On the other side your incomprehensible, persistent, and, so to speak, obdurate silence with regard to the source from which you obtained the money which was so suddenly seen in your hands, when only three hours earlier, on your own showing, you pledged your pistols for the sake of ten roubles!†   (source)
  • It is not an easy thing to shake off in a moment the expectations nurtured through years until they have become essentially a part of us; and though Ben-Hur asked himself what the vanities of the world were to such a one, his ambition was obdurate and would not down.†   (source)
  • This upper robe concealed what at first view seemed rather inconsistent with its form, a shirt, namely, of linked mail, with sleeves and gloves of the same, curiously plaited and interwoven, as flexible to the body as those which are now wrought in the stocking-loom, out of less obdurate materials.†   (source)
  • 'You will not persist in saying that,' rejoined the gentleman, with a voice and emphasis of kindness that might have touched a much harder and more obdurate heart.†   (source)
  • The French officer, Monsieur Sanglier, as he was usually styled, and chose to call himself, remonstrated against this act as one likely to reflect more discredit on his command than any other part of the affair; but Pathfinder, who had witnessed one or two Indian massacres, and knew how valueless pledges became when put in opposition to interest where a savage was concerned, was obdurate.†   (source)
  • He was indistinctly conscious that the pardon of this priest was the greatest assault and the most formidable attack which had moved him yet; that his obduracy was finally settled if he resisted this clemency; that if he yielded, he should be obliged to renounce that hatred with which the actions of other men had filled his soul through so many years, and which pleased him; that this time it was necessary to conquer or to be conquered; and that a struggle, a colossal and final…†   (source)
  • The Delaware, whose name in English signified "Hard Heart," an appellation that the French had translated into "le Coeur-dur," forgot that obduracy of purpose, which had probably obtained him so significant a title.†   (source)
  • A little more, in truth, and it will be all extinguished for Sir Leicester; and the damp door in the mausoleum which shuts so tight, and looks so obdurate, will have opened and received him.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless the whole was lost on the observers, who knew no feeling of poetry, had lost their sense of natural devotion in lives of obdurate and narrow selfishness, and had little other sympathy with nature, than that which originated with her lowest wants.†   (source)
  • This old man wears a hat, a thumbed and napless and yet an obdurate hat, which has never adapted itself to the shape of his poor head.†   (source)
  • He seemed to remember a time when he was not quite so rough and obdurate; and almost thought that he had first hated Nicholas because he was young and gallant, and perhaps like the stripling who had brought dishonour and loss of fortune on his head.†   (source)
  • He was artful, cruel, and obdurate.†   (source)
  • So in her bosom even now; the strongest qualities she possessed, long turned upon themselves, became a heap of obduracy, that rose against a friend.†   (source)
  • But still Mr Lillyvick, regardless of the siren, cried obdurately, 'Morleena, my hat!' upon the fourth repetition of which demand, Mrs Kenwigs sunk back in her chair, with a cry that might have softened a water-butt, not to say a water-collector; while the four little girls (privately instructed to that effect) clasped their uncle's drab shorts in their arms, and prayed him, in imperfect English, to remain.†   (source)
  • If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,—and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart."†   (source)
  • For, while all that was hard and stern in his recollection, remained Reality on being proved—was obdurate to the sight and touch, and relaxed nothing of its old indomitable grimness—the one tender recollection of his experience would not bear the same test, and melted away.†   (source)
  • Thus, a terrible impression steals upon and overshadows her that from this pursuer, living or dead—obdurate and imperturbable before her in his well-remembered shape, or not more obdurate and imperturbable in his coffin-bed—there is no escape but in death.†   (source)
  • But he looked such a very obdurate butcher as he stood scraping the great block in the shop, and moreover, his appearance was so little improved by the loss of a front tooth which I had knocked out, that I thought it best to make no advances.†   (source)
  • But I found out afterwards that he was a mild man of a heavy temperament, whose place in the business was to keep himself in the background, and be constantly exhibited by name as the most obdurate and ruthless of men.†   (source)
  • Rebecca said, in an agony of tears—her voice choking with emotion, her handkerchief up to her ready eyes, fainting against the mantelpiece a figure of woe fit to melt the most obdurate heart.†   (source)
  • I was completely bewildered between Mr. Spenlow and Mr. jorkins, as to which of them really was the objecting partner; but I saw with sufficient clearness that there was obduracy somewhere in the firm, and that the recovery of my aunt's thousand pounds was out of the question.†   (source)
  • since he stands obdurate,   (source)
    obdurate = stubbornly persistent; or showing unfeeling resistance to tender feelings
  • Madam, if your heart be so obdurate,
    Vouchsafe me yet your picture for my love,
    The picture that is hanging in your chamber;
    To that I'll speak, to that I'll sigh and weep;
    For, since the substance of your perfect self
    Is else devoted, I am but a shadow;
    And to your shadow will I make true love.   (source)
    obdurate = stubbornly showing unfeeling resistance to tender feelings
  • The place is august, the terms obdurate.†   (source)
  • BLOOM: (Obdurately) Sirs, take notice that by the law of torts you are bound over in your own recognisances for six months in the sum of five pounds.†   (source)
  • And I saw a Centaur full of rage come crying out, "Where is, where is that obdurate one?"†   (source)
  • But to convince the proud what signs avail, Or wonders move the obdurate to relent?†   (source)
  • By this hand, thou thinkest me as far in the devil's book as thou and Falstaff for obduracy and persistency: let the end try the man.†   (source)
  • But his doom Reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought Both of lost happiness and lasting pain Torments him: round he throws his baleful eyes, That witnessed huge affliction and dismay, Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate.†   (source)
  • But, sirs, be sudden in the execution, Withal obdurate, do not hear him plead; For Clarence is well-spoken, and perhaps May move your hearts to pity, if you mark him.†   (source)
  • My zeal in your behalf ye cannot doubt; Ruthless indeed were I and obdurate If such petitioners as you I spurned.†   (source)
  • Who could have thought that Don Fernando, a highborn gentleman, intelligent, bound to me by gratitude for my services, one that could win the object of his love wherever he might set his affections, could have become so obdurate, as they say, as to rob me of my one ewe lamb that was not even yet in my possession?†   (source)
  • On the other hand, as men generally derive confidence from their numbers, they might often encourage each other in an act of obduracy, and might be less sensible to the apprehension of suspicion or censure for an injudicious or affected clemency.†   (source)
  • Don Stockfish, soul of a mortar, stone of a date, more obstinate and obdurate than a clown asked a favour when he has his mind made up, if I fall upon you I'll tear your eyes out!†   (source)
  • My Lord of Buckingham, if my weak oratory Can from his mother win the Duke of York, Anon expect him here; but if she be obdurate To mild entreaties, God in heaven forbid We should infringe the holy privilege Of blessed sanctuary! not for all this land Would I be guilty of so deep a sin.†   (source)
  • I began, "Master, thou that overcomest everything, except the obdurate demons, who at the entrance of the gate came out against us, who is that great one that seemeth not to heed the fire, and lies scornful and contorted, so that the rain seems not to ripen him?"†   (source)
  • For the last two days I have been dead, slain by the thought of the cruelty with which thou hast treated me, obdurate knight, O harder thou than marble to my plaint; or at least believed to be dead by all who saw me; and had it not been that Love, taking pity on me, let my recovery rest upon the sufferings of this good squire, there I should have remained in the other world.†   (source)
  • …Such wondrous power God to his saint will lend, Though present in his Angel; who shall go Before them in a cloud, and pillar of fire; By day a cloud, by night a pillar of fire; To guide them in their journey, and remove Behind them, while the obdurate king pursues: All night he will pursue; but his approach Darkness defends between till morning watch; Then through the fiery pillar, and the cloud, God looking forth will trouble all his host, And craze their chariot-wheels: when by…†   (source)
  • May I die if the enchanters that persecute me are not trying to entangle me in them and delay my journey, by way of revenge for my obduracy towards Altisidora.†   (source)
  • Presently he broke out again, as if he were love-stricken in earnest, "O Princess Dulcinea, lady of this captive heart, a grievous wrong hast thou done me to drive me forth with scorn, and with inexorable obduracy banish me from the presence of thy beauty.†   (source)
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