pertinacious

in a sentence

There was something in the moody and dogged silence of this pertinacious companion that was mysterious and appalling.  (source) Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 1820

But in the end Buck's pertinacity was rewarded; for the wolf, finding that no harm was intended, finally sniffed noses with him.†  (source) Jack London, The Call of the Wild, 1903

"But tell me, my dear Sir," pertinaciously continued the other, "was the man's death effected by the halter, or was it a species of euthanasia?"†  (source) Herman Melville, Billy Budd, 1924

Though he could not help seeing how small his attainments were beside the American's, his British pertinacity, his wounded vanity (perhaps they are the same thing), would not allow him to give up the struggle.†  (source) W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, 1915

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) Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984

In whatever position I placed the box the needle pertinaciously returned to this unexpected quarter.†  (source) Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1877

'There may be those who could have laughed at his pertinacity; I didn't.†  (source) Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, 1900

Hamilton called on Adams at the Barnes boardinghouse, where presumably they drew up chairs in Adams's tiny sitting room—two proud, pertinacious men who by now hated each other, one ambitious for war, the other peace, and each determined to have his way.†  (source) David McCullough, John Adams, 2002

Why do you remain pertinaciously perched on my knee, when I have given you notice to quit?†  (source) Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, 1847

They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs.†  (source) Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

I had remembered them as little tricksters, pertinacious but foolish, with only a kind of village cunning; and I had assumed that for them studying meant only cramming.†  (source) V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 1979

It clung to the member pertinaciously; yet she thought but little of the sign till Tirzah complained that she, too, was attacked in the same way.†  (source) Lew Wallace, Ben Hur, 1880

His most vivid conception of a supernatural element in the world's affairs had come to him once when this pertinacity of misfortune was at its climax; there seemed to him something stronger in life than his own will.†  (source) Henry James, The American, 1877