All 9 Uses of
stagnant
in
Atlas Shrugged
- Hanging strands of moss and clots of waxy foliage made the thick vegetation look as if it were drooling; the too many draperies, hanging in the stagnant air of a small room, had the same look.†
Chpt 1.10
- It was too early to hope, but his reports were the only bright points in the stagnant fog of her days in the office.†
Chpt 2.2 *
- She could renounce the railroad, she thought; she could find contentment here, in this forest; but she would build the path, then reach the road below, then rebuild the road-and then she would reach the storekeeper of Woodstock and that would be the end, and the empty white face staring at the universe in stagnant apathy would be the limit placed on her effort.†
Chpt 2.8
- The sky had the stagnant breath of a furnace and the streets of New York were like pipes running, not with air and light, but with melted dust.†
Chpt 3.3
- Dagny noticed the first flicker of feeling in Lillian's lifeless eyes: it resembled pleasure, but so distantly that it looked like sunlight reflected from the dead surface of the moon to the stagnant water of a swamp; it flickered for an instant and went.†
Chpt 3.3
- Once, they had been a promise, and from the midst of the stagnant sloth around her she had looked to them for proof that another kind of men existed.†
Chpt 3.4
- With all of their noisy devotion to the age of science, their hysterically technological jargon, their cyclotrons, their sound rays, these men were moved forward, not by the image of an industrial skyline, but by the vision of that form of existence which the industrialists had swept away-the vision of a fat, unhygienic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed, germeaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature's rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures and thus let the ri†
Chpt 3.5
- of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice-that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself-and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.†
Chpt 3.7
- From the rites of the jungle witch-doctors, which distorted reality into grotesque absurdities, stunted the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural for stagnant stretches of centuriesto the supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, which kept men huddling on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn-to the seedy little smiling professor who assures you that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural force: Society-all of it is the same performance for the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the†
Chpt 3.7
Definitions:
-
(1)
(stagnant) not circulating or flowing
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Note that stagnant can also be used as the adjective form of stagnate (not changing - in a negative sense).