sclerotic /SKLəR-aw-tik/. adjective. Of or related to the sclera (tough white outer layer) of the eye. Characterized by hardening and/or thickening of the cell walls. Figuratively: hard, unmoving, unchanging. From Greek sklēros (hard).
“Always this problem of re-entry. How the strands of duplicity tightened, like the veins on the surface of a sclerotic soul.” (Martin Amis)
“Each ball brought every one of note from counties upon counties away; from each great house, from each plump farm, from over the wooded hills around and across that fertile plain they came, like iron filings to a magnet drawn: sclerotic grandees, rod backed matrons, amiable buffoons ruddily ho hoing, indulgent city relations down for a little country air or to kill for sport or find a spouse, beaming boys with faces polished as their shoes, cynical graduates come to sneer and feast, poised observers of the social scene cutting their drinks with their barbed remarks, dough fresh country youths with invitations clutched, new blossomed maidens half embarrassed, half proud of their emergent allure; politicians, priests and the brave fighting men; the old money, the new money, the once monied, the titled and the expleted, the fawnshy and just the fawning, the well matured and the spoiled … the castle had room for all of them.” (Iain Banks)
“That Jewry faced the possibility of a second Holocaust, in successive decades, is strongly suggested by Stalin’s sclerotic manoeuvrings in this period, and particularly his decision of 1951: anti-Semitism went from covert to overt, from Pravda’s mutterings about ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ to a fully orchestrated propaganda campaign.” (Martin Amis)
“Fifty-feet-higher sea level means a much bigger bay, more tidally confused, Hell Gate more hellish, the Harlem River a wild tidal race and not a shipping canal, the Meadowlands a shallow sea, Brooklyn and Queens and the south Bronx all shallow seas, their prismatically oily waters sloshing poisonously back and forth on the tides. Yes, a total mess of a bay, still junked up by bridges and pipelines and rusting sclerotic infrastructural junk of all kinds.” (Kim Stanley Robinson)
“…it’s impossible to ascertain, in a city as sclerotic as this, which are the arteries and which the veins. Do oxygenated heme groups transport the needed fix out to the Valley, while spent thrombocytes wash the reduced waste back to the Civic Center for reconditioning? Or does the cycle run the other way around?” (Richard Powers)
“…with fine features and a Byzantine profile; deep sad eyes, set at a curious and touching angle to the line of the nose; the expression of a statue, all statues, eyes looking gently upward from the inclined head, revealing a sclerotic pattern of unhappiness and yearning regret, endlessly repeated…” (J.M.G. Le Clézio)
“The two women had dust smeared on the backs of their skirts; one of them wore a brooch with its stone missing. The short man looked like a squashed head on a sack of clothes. The tall one had magnanimous eyes, a sclerotic nose, and a liver-spotted white head.” (Mary Gaitskill)