impotent

in a sentence

grouped by contextual meaning

She felt impotent rage.

Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent.  (source) Freeman J. Dyson

I shouted, hearing Isaac's impotent wailing echoing from the night of the broken trophies.  (source) John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, 2012

Lev stands there, impotent, unable to move, unable to process this.  (source) Neal Shusterman, Unwind, 2007

But here, even more strongly than at home, I feel my impotence.  (source) Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, 2008

…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) Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea, 2014

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) Robert Ludlum, The Bourne Supremacy, 1986

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) Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960

He was sixteen at the time of the invasion and shared with other Dutch teenagers the restless energy of anger and impotence.  (source) Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place, 1971

Chelsea's attempt to sway us fluttered impotently against my shield.†  (source) Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn, 2008

Billy and I think that his attorney might go with an impotency defense.†  (source) Alice Sebold, Lucky, 1999

Laila would have to tail him home, helpless, trembling with resentment and impotent rage.  (source) Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, 2007

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) Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967

He was impotent, but they adopted children.

Everyone in town said he'd been impotent for years and none of the Pastor kids was his.  (source) Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle, 2005

"Find me old, ugly, scarred men, preferably impotent," he had told the eunuch.  (source) George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings, 1999

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) Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits, 1986

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) Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind, 2007

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) Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967

That's our baby sister going in there with a guy who thinks condoms cause impotence.  (source) Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991

Macon had said no. That the doctor was impotent.  (source) Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, 1977

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) Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits, 1986

Your wife divorces you on the grounds that you're a nut, inattentive, also impotent.  (source) John Gardner, The Sunlight Dialogues, 1972

"He thinks it might cause impotence," Fifi says, smiling sweetly, cherishing his cute male ignorance.  (source) Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991

I was afraid he thought he had hurt me with that crack about being impotent.  (source) Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926

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) Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967