All 50 Uses of
indifferent
in
The Sunlight Dialogues
- The attendant looked at him indifferently, as if from infinitely far away, and the Judge sipped his whiskey again, uneasy.†
Chpt Pro.
- But the cemetery stood serene in the shadow of its hemlock trees, the tombstone markers solemn and patient and indifferent to the bug-filled heat, the field flowers encroaching on the graveyard grass, indifferent to what City Hall would think, neither troubled nor amused by the joke that had been played on the Batavia Chief of Police.†
Chpt 1
- But the cemetery stood serene in the shadow of its hemlock trees, the tombstone markers solemn and patient and indifferent to the bug-filled heat, the field flowers encroaching on the graveyard grass, indifferent to what City Hall would think, neither troubled nor amused by the joke that had been played on the Batavia Chief of Police.†
Chpt 1
- The situation is hopeless, and as a reasonable man the responsible citizen becomes indifferent.†
Chpt 1
- For all his elaborate show of indifference, for all his clowning, his play-acting, his sometimes arrogant, sometimes mysteriously gentle defiance and mocking of both prisoners and guards, he sweated prodigiously, throughout his stay, from what must have been nervousness.†
Chpt 2
- You could not tell whether he was speaking to you or scoffing at you for your immersion in the false; whether he was wrestling with a problem of immense significance to him or indifferently displaying his hodge-podge of maniac learning.†
Chpt 2
- Their business was to keep him in his cell, feed him, and, with professional indifference, see that he stayed alive.†
Chpt 2
- He did exercises every morning, slowly and methodically, combed his few wisps of graying hair with his short, square fingers, polished his thick glasses, revealing naked, for a minute or two, his protrusive, heavy-lidded eyes, then sat waiting like a hopeless and indifferent barber in a run-down shop, reading the day-old paper he'd gotten from the guard the night before.†
Chpt 2
- Boyle looked back at his paper and then, slowly, as if indifferently, turned his back.†
Chpt 2
- The Sunlight Man was as indifferent as a freight train driving a cow from its track.†
Chpt 2
- He lived outside time, indifferent to the wisdom of age or the rights of station, indifferent even to that studied and fatuous indifference of people like Miss Bunce, the probation officer, whose every gesture was a parody of people like Hodge.†
Chpt 2
- He lived outside time, indifferent to the wisdom of age or the rights of station, indifferent even to that studied and fatuous indifference of people like Miss Bunce, the probation officer, whose every gesture was a parody of people like Hodge.†
Chpt 2
- He lived outside time, indifferent to the wisdom of age or the rights of station, indifferent even to that studied and fatuous indifference of people like Miss Bunce, the probation officer, whose every gesture was a parody of people like Hodge.†
Chpt 2
- He sweated out their troubles, cried like a woman at their weddings, lent them money and could even borrow from them, indifferent even to their idea of what he was.†
Chpt 2
- And beyond all that, when they went bad--when they ended up in prison or beat their wives--he went on feeling as he'd felt before, indifferent even to goodness.†
Chpt 2
- …a place to be, no more demanding or self-conscious than the land, or a bird, or somebody else's cow, not insistently kind like his wife Vanessa, who would weep when they came home drunk at night, would visit them in jail when they got into trouble, would have cocoa ready when they came in from plowing off the roads with Hodge's old tractor, and yet not professionally indifferent either, like Miss Bunce who sat listening with that prim smile, fiddling with her yellow plastic bracelet.†
Chpt 2
- The policeman jerked him closer, as powerful as a diesel crane, for all his age, and he shook him with the indifferent violence of a thrashing machine.†
Chpt 2
- The butt of the pistol came in as swift and indifferent as a steel sledge, and the first blow broke the cheekbone.†
Chpt 2
- The shabby law office in which they sat--the high, dark walls of legal books as patient and indifferent as a well gone dry or an old philosopher writing his will, their bindings glossy and old as the County (older than W. B. Hodge Sr by three generations, stamped Taggert V. Hodge, Batavia, N.Y.), deep-toned as oil paintings, cracked like bamboo, solemn and superannuated as the engraving of the Roman Colosseum hanging above the door--made Hodge and son insignificant creatures of the…†
Chpt 3
- Craftily, ruefully, squinting up from under his eyebrows at his troubled life, Will Hodge Sr recognized that the cage was there, understood it as one understands that someday one will no doubt die--that one might, if one were a twenty-year-old poet or a fool, make howling melodrama of it, but the fact would remain no more than it was, for all one's howling--an indifferent limit, a wall closing out what a man who had business to attend to had no good reason to be curious about.†
Chpt 3
- Late that night when Nick Slater came back, lurching, half-skating up the driveway on foot, singing (Hodge sitting mournfully in the snowbank under the tamarack in Luke's front yard), Luke was indifferent, befuddled by some drug he'd taken for the headache, and took Nick back without a word.†
Chpt 3
- If the professionals fail--if the people with all their indifference and all their monstrous opinions, or their no-opinions … There are always politicians.†
Chpt 3
- The richest farm country in New York State had mysteriously grayed: the land had quit; stone fences had fallen into disrepair; the Guernsey dairies--best dairies in the world--had begun to give way to Holstein dairies, quantity over quality; and then price supports came, and the hard-kernel wheat that grew nowhere else in America as it grew in New York State was swallowed up in the indifferent bins of Government to mold and fester as though it were common wheat.†
Chpt 3
- She loved strength, a body like Ben Hodge had had once, taller than Will's, and quick and graceful: strength that had something to do with beauty (not the stocky power and indifference to height that had moved up and down the barn roofs at Stony Hill, shouldering easily a tarpaper roll or a bundle of sunlit shingles: not that) and something to do, more important, with freedom.†
Chpt 4
- One doesn't last a day in police work if one wears one's feeling on one's sleeve; and the man who takes very little personally, who with mild eyes and a stern jaw accepts all abuse, threats, mockeries with the indifference of a man born deaf and blind--who puts insult away as quickly and lightly as he drops his ball-point pen back into his pocket--that man grows tougher yet with experience.†
Chpt 5
- Detached from mankind--thrust back with sharp insults or, simply, blank stares by those whose activities he indifferently impedes--fawned over by fools who, in an analogous situation, cannot walk past a sleeping dog without calling to it and holding out their fingers--smiled at by children who tomorrow will frown or fawn, like their parents--the policeman little by little slides away from whatever comfortable humanity he may once have shared with his neighbors.†
Chpt 5
- In your truly Protestant department, where after his day of professionally indifferent justice (strained, bent, dented here and there by the age-old hammerings of low pay and temptation always too ready-at-hand, by anger, boredom, and the despair which comes with dealing out more justice than any policeman gets), the man of the force goes home to a wife who involves him, as soon as he crosses his threshold, in excuse-making and bribery and pointless anger of his own; and lest he begin…†
Chpt 5
- --some spark of true religion, maybe, in a generally indifferent Catholic childhood; or perhaps it was simply a snatch at absolute control by a soul uncommonly conscientious but imperfectly informed on the ins and outs of time and space, struggling through a labyrinthine universe full of surprises.†
Chpt 5
- What made an offender behave as he did was a matter of indifference to Figlow.†
Chpt 5
- He could not see the vanity mirror he knew stood solemn and indifferent before him like a messenger with news already known, no longer a matter of sorrow, much less shock.†
Chpt 5
- He had not seen her for a long time and had not known he had any particular feeling for her; his brother's wife, simply; a sword in his brother's side but not in his, a matter of sad indifference.†
Chpt 5
- It came to him that it was from the doctor she'd tried to run, to Taggert Hodge she was as indifferent as to the walls, the stale smell of flowers.†
Chpt 5
- He was capable of looking down, capable of smiling with kindly middle-aged-janitor indifference when she passed, walking like music, a drop of sweat beside her nose.†
Chpt 5
- As indifferent to that as he was to almost everything, in those days.†
Chpt 5
- …she would slip into the moonlit water as silently as a mossy stone and be carried away without grief or remorse and without even fear except for, of course, the first shock, like the shock of the ice-cold water around her body, biting at the white of her thighs and invading the funereal and elegant black dress, transforming cloth to the indifferent murderous lead that would drag her downward and soon, before she knew what was happening (she who had planned it) swallow her alive.†
Chpt 6
- He bumped into me and jerked his head toward me, a face without eyes or nose or mouth, as far as I could see in that murderous light, and he held my arm tightly, as if to keep me from getting away, and with his free hand ran his fingers over my cheeks and eyes; then he released me as though I were a thing not alive, and he went around me, silent and indifferent, and felt his way on down the hall.†
Chpt 6
- It was against his faith that the bulk of humanity was stupid or indifferent or selfish.†
Chpt 7
- The Old Man, not old then, stared at him with mindless eyes, comfortable in the leather chair, the magazine--Taggert's magazine--closed indifferently over his finger.†
Chpt 7
- I've proved what reason is-- Paid with contempt, indifference.†
Chpt 7
- To modern eyes some of them looked like artistic representations of certain human ideals--the dignity of old age, the innocence of youth, the technical struggles of the craftsman, and so forth--or sometimes they looked like representations of ideals beyond human understanding: Amu, the Sumerian sky god, for instance, was misanthropic, and Enlil (or Illil, as some texts say), the underworld god, was totally indifferent to man.†
Chpt 7
- While the Hebrews moved from place to place with their sheep, turning green meadows into enormous deserts, indifferent as any intellectual to earth, the Mesopotamian peoples studied it, toyed with it, experimented with it as elaborately as they experimented with, for instance, sex.†
Chpt 7
- The gods will rumble on, indifferent to your theories, and your house will in due time fall around your ears.†
Chpt 7
- Nothing short of hate could explain his continuing pursuit of a man he knew had the power--and the indifference--to kill him.†
Chpt 8
- One projected onto the indifferent breezes--onto the indifferent greens or the softness of snow--the absurdities of one's human temperament--beauty, holiness, truth.†
Chpt 8
- One projected onto the indifferent breezes--onto the indifferent greens or the softness of snow--the absurdities of one's human temperament--beauty, holiness, truth.†
Chpt 8
- Indifferent.†
Chpt 8
- It came to him that what was convincing was less the details than the mockery, the godlike indifference of the man.†
Chpt 9
- What in the world could make a man so indifferent?†
Chpt 9
- He listened with the indifferent curiosity of a visiting Martian.†
Chpt 9
- He did not, suddenly; but he was indifferent to that, for the moment.†
Chpt 9
Definition:
-
(indifferent) without interestin various senses, including:
- unconcerned -- as in "She is indifferent to what is served to eat."
- unsympathetic -- as in "She is indifferent to his needs."
- not of good quality (which may imply average or poor quality depending upon context) -- as in "an indifferent performance"
- impartial -- as in "We need a judge who is indifferent."