Persistent determination

Usage examples of pertinacity.

The Quakers have been celebrated for the pertinacity with which they avoid giving a direct answer, but what Quaker could ever vie with a Yankee in this sort of fencing?

Sam Lee had bade her good-bye and had seemed sorry to leave, notwithstanding which, however, he refused, with true Chinese pertinacity, to assume the new duties.

She walked the deck with briskness, and a pertinacity that awakened admiration in the crew at first, but by and by superstitious awe.

Gilmour Wilson had gone on challenging him with real Yankee pertinacity, and in the end he got his way.

But if we are inclined to think poorly of the Admiral for his dismal pertinacity, what are we to think of the people who took advantage of their high position to ignore consistently the just claims made upon them?

Surnames survived in Eastthorpe with singular pertinacity, for it was remote from the world, but what was the relationship between the scores of Thaxtons, for example, whose deaths were inscribed on the tombstones, some of them all awry and weather-worn, and the Thaxtons of 1840, no living Thaxton could tell, every spiritual trace of them having disappeared more utterly than their bones.

See Clara Conant Gilson, in the article just cited: He had a few striking peculiarities of pronunciation, one or two of which cling to me with great pertinacity even now.

In 1139 she crossed to England, wherein siege, in battle, in council, in hair-breadth escapes from pursuing hosts, from famine, from perils of the sea, she showed the masterful authority, the impetuous daring, the pertinacity which she had inherited from her Norman ancestors.

A thoroughly macabre pertinacity had marked the attaining of his practical joke.

But the pertinacity of his pursuit thus far has inclined me to take a grimmer view of the matter now.

But the will of the dead must be scrupulously obeyed, even when we weep over their pertinacity and self-delusion.

I am perplexed with it only because there seems to be pertinacity about it.

My servants very wisely, and with much pertinacity, resisted the adoption of this plan, and took care to have both the large skins well filled.

But there was something that might have spoken, too, of death upon the battle-field, or in the deadly breach, or in some enterprise where daring courage needed to be supported by unshrinking pertinacity and resolution.

Only it occurred to him that the pertinacity of the old beggar was annoying Helene, and so he hastened to fumble in his pocket, in his turn giving her some alms, and at the same time waving her away.