All 10 Uses of
passive
in
The Mill on the Floss
- Under these average boyish physiognomies that she seems to turn off by the gross, she conceals some of her most rigid, inflexible purposes, some of her most unmodifiable characters; and the dark-eyed, demonstrative, rebellious girl may after all turn out to be a passive being compared with this pink-and-white bit of masculinity with the indeterminate features.†
Chpt 1.5
- Tom turned his cheek passively to meet her entreating kisses, and there gathered a moisture in his eyes, which he just rubbed away with his hand.†
Chpt 2.7 *
- He sank back again in renewed insensibility and rigidity, which lasted for many hours, and was only broken by a flickering return of consciousness, in which he took passively everything that was given to him, and seemed to have a sort of infantine satisfaction in Maggie's near presence,—such satisfaction as a baby has when it is returned to the nurse's lap.†
Chpt 3.1
- "To think o' these cloths as I spun myself," she went on, lifting things out and turning them over with an excitement all the more strange and piteous because the stout blond woman was usually so passive,—if she had been ruffled before, it was at the surface merely,—"and Job Haxey wove 'em, and brought the piece home on his back, as I remember standing at the door and seeing him come, before I ever thought o' marrying your father!†
Chpt 3.2
- She had become almost indifferent to her mother's habitual depreciation of her, but she was keenly alive to any sanction of it, however passive, that she might suspect in Tom.†
Chpt 3.2
- "Where's your mother?" he said, so preoccupied that he received the kiss as passively as some quiet animal might have received it.†
Chpt 3.4
- Mrs. Tulliver, seeing that everything had gone wrong, had begun to think she had been too passive in life; and that, if she had applied her mind to business, and taken a strong resolution now and then, it would have been all the better for her and her family.†
Chpt 3.7
- And just now he was living in that freshened memory of the far-off time which comes to us in the passive hours of recovery from sickness.†
Chpt 3.9
- Behind all the delicious visions of these last hours, which had flowed over her like a soft stream, and made her entirely passive, there was the dim consciousness that the condition was a transient one, and that the morrow must bring back the old life of struggle; that there were thoughts which would presently avenge themselves for this oblivion.†
Chpt 6.13
- But a suppressed resolve will betray itself in the eyes, and Stephen became more and more uneasy as the day advanced, under the sense that Maggie had entirely lost her passiveness.†
Chpt 6.14
Definition:
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(passive) accepting what happens without trying to take control or reacting strongly