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coherent
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show 188 more with this conextual meaning
  • It was difficult to think or write coherently.   (source)
    coherently = in a sensible and clear manner
  • It seemed to make no difference, except that one's dreams were more coherent.   (source)
    coherent = sensible and clear
  • Just now he spoke coherent words for the first time.   (source)
    coherent = understandable or sensible
  • I could hear my thoughts brushing past each other in my head, none of them coherent enough to be spoken.   (source)
    coherent = sensible (reasonable)
  • She was not at all coherent, but this was the gist of it.†   (source)
  • Snake bite, was Edgar's first coherent thought.†   (source)
  • The hunger made it difficult to think coherently.†   (source)
  • Whether through careful consideration spawned by books and spirited debate over coffee at two in the morning, or simply from a natural proclivity, we must all eventually adopt a fundamental framework, some reasonably coherent system of causes and effects that will help us make sense not simply of momentous events, but of all the little actions and interactions that constitute our daily lives—be they deliberate or spontaneous, inevitable or unforeseen.†   (source)
  • For over two years, my days would begin at 5:30 in the morning, and a cup of tea later, I was in front of my computer, taking my notes and research and trying to piece them into a coherent story about these two very real lives.†   (source)
  • A coherent symbolic set, as iconographers would call it.†   (source)
  • I wasn't entirely sure I was making coherent sentences.†   (source)
  • There is no coherent government policy, in America or anywhere else in the world.†   (source)
  • This is my first coherent thought as we reach the bottom floor of our high-rise and climb into a waiting jeep.†   (source)
  • "My mother was coherent until the last five or six months of her life," Mort Janklow said.†   (source)
  • My eyes jolt open, and my first coherent thought is this: —ai, —as, —a, —ames, —ates, —Brent.†   (source)
  • Finally, I awoke feeling able to talk to him coherently and understand what he said.†   (source)
  • "Those last lines are the only bit of coherence in the whole thing," said William Spiver.†   (source)
  • Was the lady incapable of a coherent line of thought?†   (source)
  • At one thousand meters the craft's landing beacons flared and three beams of coherent light from the space-port north of town locked the ship in a welcoming ruby tripod.†   (source)
  • I asked, keeping my eyes closed; it was easier to talk to him coherently that way.†   (source)
  • And here I was, alone with these tribesmen, with no coherent plan.†   (source)
  • Looking back on it I don't remember having one coherent thought when it was happening.†   (source)
  • My only coherent thought was: YIKES!†   (source)
  • To peer into her eyes and keep a train of coherent and logical thought seemed to be impossible.†   (source)
  • But that European coherence vanished in the rest of the house, where wicker armchairs were jumbled together with Viennese rockers and leather footstools made by local craftsmen.†   (source)
  • He can see and know everything in one single coherent vision.†   (source)
  • The family came back, this time not as close but more menacing, and when I was able to sort out one coherent question, "Quién es?"†   (source)
  • Dan nodded, too upset to say anything coherent.†   (source)
  • We're asked to have tidy biographies that are coherent.†   (source)
  • Eric looked strangely guilty, then he said, "Oh, Cass wasn't at her most coherent, I don't really know.†   (source)
  • This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image.†   (source)
  • I glanced back down at my book, as if somehow, the words there would suddenly form together into something coherent.†   (source)
  • The story spilled out of me, with interruptions from Larry, not entirely coherent, but at least it was out, like a splinter.†   (source)
  • Besides, he was coherent enough to realize that stumbling, at night, over a shifting glacier, where crevasses yawned hundreds of feet down through wastes of blue ice into subterranean pools, was far more dangerous.†   (source)
  • It was crowded and because, I've always assumed, she had not struggled and had no open wounds, could sit upright and talk coherently, she was made to wait.†   (source)
  • It always means thinking back, if only briefly, to a time three or four years ago when there was a certain coherence to his life at home and at school, a consistency between the goals he publicly embraced and his inner desires, between the outward and the inward.†   (source)
  • That was mostly because I lost my ability to form coherent sentences every time he got close to me.†   (source)
  • After dinner, they went upstairs to their room and made love, and as Franz fell asleep his thoughts began to lose coherence.†   (source)
  • I imagined Shay Bourne—who could barely string together a coherent sentence, who bit his fingernails to the quick—being led to a gallows.†   (source)
  • Once again a startled, drowsy voice answered; it was a barely coherent greeting.†   (source)
  • The night she died, Joe sat at her bedside in the hospital, holding her hand, putting cold compresses on her brow, and slipping slivers of ice into her parched mouth when she asked for them, while she spoke sporadically, half coherently, about a Knights of Columbus dinner dance to which Frank had taken her when Joe was only two, the year before the accident and amputation.†   (source)
  • But increasingly we share a common agenda and common objectives: completion of the Single Market and structural economic reform; better conditions for growth and jobs in Europe; successful enlargement; a united and coherent foreign policy voice for Europe; a more effective fight against crime, drugs, illegal immigration and environmental damage; flexible, open and accountable European institutions.†   (source)
  • Her friend Judith was born with stumpy arms and tiny, malformed hands; Alex wobbled when he walked and had to contort his face painfully to form coherent words, which often let out an embarrassing amount of drool; Will was a quadriplegic who needed a pump to keep him breathing.†   (source)
  • He did not speak, because his consciousness was held, not by coherent statements, but by two pictures that seemed to glare at him insistently.†   (source)
  • "Sir," the boy blubbered, his words barely coherent.†   (source)
  • A common remedy would be a trip to the library, where the This I Believe staff would do research and cobble together excerpts from the would-be essayist's published writings and arrange them artfully into a coherent script that the person would read into the microphone.†   (source)
  • He is drunk again but still coherent enough to know in an instant that Booth is the killer—and that he must get out of town before someone implicates him, too.†   (source)
  • After we steadied down (a man can't think when women are grabbing him, especially when five of them are not his wives)—a few minutes later, when we were coherent, I said, "Stu, want you to leave for Luna City at once.†   (source)
  • When he was feeling good, free of self-censor, he tried for coherence with Kit.†   (source)
  • What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain.†   (source)
  • Half strangling on the goo and crud of threescore daily Camels, I was surprised that I was coherent at all.†   (source)
  • The information that we've got is all available, of course, but not as a coherent story.†   (source)
  • What did I start to gather together, to try and make coherent?†   (source)
  • I think the meeting will be broken up or at least you will have such an unfriendly audience that it will be impossible for you to make any coherent speech.†   (source)
  • A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.   (source)
    coherence = being clear enough to understandable
  • I answered as quickly and coherently as I could that I had only got his telegram early in the morning, and had not a minute in coming here, and that I could not make any one in the house hear me.   (source)
    coherently = clearly
  • Kreacher began to sob so hard that there were no more coherent words.†   (source)
  • The pieces of Cholly's life could become coherent only in the head of a musician.†   (source)
  • It was very difficult, while he was touching me, to frame a coherent question.†   (source)
  • He must jot down a few notes, organize some sort of coherent presentation.†   (source)
  • Then he assembles the remains of the tablet itself into a coherent group.†   (source)
  • Ruth quietly tried to steer her mother back to coherence.†   (source)
  • Alas, Orange Juice's defence lacked precision and coherence.†   (source)
  • He sputtered, but managed nothing coherent.†   (source)
  • Not that what had happened to me made sense, but at least I could tell it coherently.†   (source)
  • He seemed confused and couldn't offer a coherent explanation of what had happened at the airport.†   (source)
  • That was his last coherent memory of the Fist of the First Men.†   (source)
  • But it lacked coherence, a coming together of the features into a total self.†   (source)
  • I was amazed I was still coherent at all, could fly at all.†   (source)
  • As the day wore on, Alex became more coherent.†   (source)
  • Somehow he formed a coherent thought in the madness that pounded through his skull.†   (source)
  • The gunslinger felt no urge to think coherently, or to plan.†   (source)
  • I'm sorry, she's not very coherent right now.†   (source)
  • Before I'd formed a single coherent thought, he was through the door.†   (source)
  • I shook my head, trying to think it through coherently.†   (source)
  • He went to the altar, stood beside it for a moment coherent thought was now almost impossible.†   (source)
  • Melanie was incapacitated with fear, unable to think in coherent words.†   (source)
  • When he wakes up in the morning, he's perfectly coherent, he never misses a turn on the road.†   (source)
  • His arguments are rational and coherent.†   (source)
  • "I can't seem to piece together a coherent picture of her.†   (source)
  • I was amazed I was still coherent at all, could fly at all.†   (source)
  • I couldn't grab hold of a single coherent thought.†   (source)
  • He wasn't answering very coherently any more.†   (source)
  • And if I don't eat I won't be coherent.'†   (source)
  • Her words were slightly slurred, but at least she was coherent.†   (source)
  • The wounds made it difficult for her to remain coherent.†   (source)
  • He was reasonably coherent, so there's no evident brain damage.†   (source)
  • He seems more coherent in the morning but, for the most part, no more than a few minutes at a time.†   (source)
  • Until I'm satisfied she's coherent and capable of judgment, she won't be charged.†   (source)
  • It would help that the words were barely coherent, my tears turned to sobs.†   (source)
  • 'There'd be no point, he's still unconscious — stirring now and then but nowhere near coherent.†   (source)
  • In his teens, his misgivings began to take a coherent shape.†   (source)
  • His chest heaving, Eragon stuttered and trailed off, unable to speak coherently.†   (source)
  • Her thoughts all spun around Jared, but she could make nothing coherent of them, either.†   (source)
  • But I was so confused that my head was spinning and I couldn't form a coherent sentence.†   (source)
  • I squeezed with all my remaining strength, mumbling half-coherent pleas.†   (source)
  • Still, he was able to tell me, quite coherently, what had happened.†   (source)
  • A thought occurred to him—earlier the Rat Man had said that the control subjects were like the glue that kept the project's data together, made it all coherent and relevant.†   (source)
  • She raised the chimes and watched as they swayed and clanked, turning the noise from the trees into snatches of coherent speech: Happiness approaches.†   (source)
  • It amazed him to think the Vatican was failing at every turn to provide coherent, stringent guidelines for spiritual growth and yet somehow still found time to give astrophysics lectures to tourists.†   (source)
  • In other places, the surface material is such that when damp enough to make it coherent it becomes slimy, and thus unpleasant to walk upon; also, without care, the slime is apt to smear shoes and dresses, which materially lessens the comfort of ladies.†   (source)
  • Dan stared at his roommate, trying to add up all the things he'd just learned about him into one coherent person.†   (source)
  • When he had regained some semblance of coherence, he turned to look back at the meadow, the lake, and night sky.†   (source)
  • Geoffrey had been sitting by Ian, who was remembering in a broken, scarcely coherent way how he and Ian had rescued Misery from the palace dungeons of the mad French viscount Leroux, how they had escaped in a wagonload of hay, and how Misery distracted one of the viscounts guards at a critics moment by slipping one gorgeously unclad leg out of the hay and waving it delicately.†   (source)
  • Unfortunately the situation was so wonderful to me that each time I saw Tommy I melted in delicious giggles and was unable to form a coherent sentence.†   (source)
  • I'd never experienced anything like it: crushing pain between my temples-pain so severe that it was accompanied by shuddering waves of nausea and made it impossible for me to speak in coherent sentences.†   (source)
  • In the nanoseconds before their self-destruction, the resulting X rays were focused, aimed, and released in sixteen thousand eight hundred and thirty invisible but very coherent beams.†   (source)
  • We stared at each other for a second, both searching for a topic of conversation or, heck, a coherent sentence.†   (source)
  • Once, when he appeared to fail to recognize me—when I could establish no coherent communication with him—he spoke up as I was leaving; it was a sad, reflective voice that said, "You don't want to see her, Johnny."†   (source)
  • You could almost say that an elephant—or a human being— is in reality a single coherent colony of monocellular creatures.†   (source)
  • The handwriting sloped and slopped all over the place and was not intelligent or coherent or even legible.†   (source)
  • There is anticipation in the air but it is not the expectant midsummer hum of a shirt sleeve crowd, a sandlot game, with coherent precedents, a history of secure response.†   (source)
  • Waves, rays, coherent beams.†   (source)
  • Following the heady rediscovery of man and nature in the Renaissance, the need to assemble contemporary thought into one coherent philosophical system again presented itself.†   (source)
  • He wanted me to tell my story in what he called a coherent way, but would often accuse me of wandering, and become annoyed with me; and at last he said that the right thing was, not to tell the story as I truly remembered it, which nobody could be expected to make any sense of but to tell a story that would hang together, and that had some chance of being believed.†   (source)
  • We needed to make the complexity of the case and the multiple ways that Walter's rights had been violated coherent and understandable to the judge.†   (source)
  • Enter unannounced, gain his confidence, wait for an unguarded moment, take out the Zumwalt, shoot him three times in the viscera for maximum slowness of agony, put the gun in his hand to suggest a lonely man's suicide, write semi-coherent things on the mirror, leave Stover's car in Treadwell's garage.†   (source)
  • It seems that danger assigns to public voices the responsibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come rushing around our heads.†   (source)
  • It was the single coherent word she managed as he plunged into her, so hard, so deep she was amazed she didn't die from the pleasure of it.†   (source)
  • By the time I reached the bottom of Marshall's stairs, I felt slightly more coherent, although I was sweating from the walk, and I could feel a headache setting in.†   (source)
  • These, I think, were the subjects around which time could reassemble for him, around which past and present and future could begin to seem coherent and purposeful.†   (source)
  • Another minute before the man was coherent enough to get his feet under his weight and stand, and Ryan took advantage of the time to shove a paper towel he retrieved from the car into his mouth.†   (source)
  • The data were not always coherent.†   (source)
  • I tried to remember to be gentle with him, but it was hard work to remember anything in the onslaught of sensation, hard to hold on to any coherent thoughts.†   (source)
  • In the booth Russ sees the crowd begin to lose its coherence, people sitting scattered on the hard steps, a priest with a passel of boys filing up the aisle, paper rolling and skittering in the wind.†   (source)
  • Her four eyes glimmered as if she had a separate thought behind each and was trying to weave them into a coherent web.†   (source)
  • And although what he's saying is damn bizarre, it's nevertheless coherent—no transposition of words, no substitution of inappropriate words."†   (source)
  • But murderers who seem rational, coherent, and controlled, and yet whose homicidal acts have a bizarre, apparently senseless quality, pose a difficult problem, if courtroom disagreements and contradictory reports about the same offender are an index.†   (source)
  • And all this time I was educating Claudia, whispering in her tiny seashell ear that our eternal life was useless to us if we did not see the beauty around us, the creation of mortals everywhere; I was constantly sounding the depth of her still gaze as she took the books I gave her, whispered the poetry I taught her, and played with a light but confident touch her own strange, coherent songs on the piano.†   (source)
  • She used that word a lot and it was hard for me to imagine that all the scuffle and boredom of those years, the crisscross boredom and good times and flare-ups and sameshit nights—I didn't understand how the streaky blur in my nighttime mind could have some sort of form and coherence.†   (source)
  • Later, when he heard a condensed (and probably less than coherent) explanation of the situation, Larry was uncharacteristically quiet.†   (source)
  • Combined with the blood loss he'd suffered, it was a wonder he had been conscious, much less coherent to any degree.†   (source)
  • This apparatus enabled him to intercept a few coherent messages in the midst of a deafening roar from across the sea.†   (source)
  • One question had been put to him which he struggled to answer in a coherent way, and they had to film that section several times.†   (source)
  • I was so shocked by the room I couldn't form a coherent question like, Why? or, May I please kick your father's teeth in?†   (source)
  • Ask them about swordplay and they can list every blow from a duel a month old, but ask them to solve a problem or make a coherent statement and …. well, I would be lucky to get more than a blank stare in return.†   (source)
  • I mean, my father was coherent?†   (source)
  • The boy still did not speak (and would have been incapable of any coherent explanation, had it been required), but for the first time the awful smile softened a little.†   (source)
  • I couldn't say anything to the flock, not in front of the EMT, and I was too upset, scared, and mad to come up with anything coherent anyway.†   (source)
  • For a week they had worked like dogs to put together coherent material about the Section that they could use on TV.†   (source)
  • Alba quickly tired of watching him, and when she saw it was impossible to communicate with him in any coherent language, she took him to the ceramic studio, where Blanca, to keep him amused, tied an apron around him to protect him from stains and water and placed a ball of clay in his hands.†   (source)
  • Perhaps it is because the invisible psychic self, being only a wave energy of some type, responds to open spaces in much the manner of heat contained in a hot stone placed in a cold room: It radiates outward, dissipating, dispersing itself, and cannot be conserved in a coherent form.†   (source)
  • You're not coherent.†   (source)
  • Roran was so tired, he found it difficult to marshal a coherent response, but at last he managed to say, "There are too few of us for the men to make mischief.†   (source)
  • They took the cultural cues from the Innovators — cues that the mainstream kids may have seen but not been able to make sense of—and leveled, sharpened, and assimilated them into a more coherent form.†   (source)
  • You were not very coherent.†   (source)
  • Eragon was no longer capable of coherent thought, but somewhere in the back of his brain he was aware that he was about to die.†   (source)
  • He walked away shaking his head angrily, mad at the Russians, embarrassed with himself, wishing he were back at Bethesda where he belonged, and wishing he knew how to swear coherently.†   (source)
  • Roran's thoughts flashed quick-hot-muddled-cold, and he seemed to have difficulty forming a coherent answer.†   (source)
  • Yet he was always coherent enough before the outbursts came, telling me to strap him down, confine him, protect him from himself… He would relive horrible events from his past, his voice hoarse, guttural, hollow.†   (source)
  • Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity.†   (source)
  • Some moments later Matson said mildly, "If you two can unwind and blow your noses, we might get this on a coherent basis."†   (source)
  • It is like the sound track of a movie pieced together by a chimpanzee, in parts coherent but creating no design, making no final sense; its paranoia causes her to feel weak and ill.†   (source)
  • I was amazed that after all the booze she had guzzled she could remain so coherent throughout the evening; but by the time the bar closed at four o'clock I saw that she was pretty well smashed.†   (source)
  • She shut her eyes and kept them firmly closed to the very end of the symphony, at which point she opened them again, embarrassed by the tears streaming down her cheeks but unable to do anything about them, or to say anything sensible or coherent to the Samaritan, who was still gazing down at her with grave and patient concern.†   (source)
  • I couldn't exactly talk with any coherency, or do sports, or show any talent for anything.†   (source)
  • I'm not sure," I said, scrambling for coherency while his gaze unintentionally scattered my thoughts.†   (source)
  • You're being less coherent than usual, Chang.†   (source)
  • Finally, she grew quiet, and after that, coherent thought.†   (source)
  • On this count there was an underlying coherence in the logic of his career.†   (source)
  • She had long since lost all coherent ideas about the house; she merely hated Roark.†   (source)
  • He became at times almost incapable of coherent speech.†   (source)
  • None of the talk was too coherent, but all of it seemed to have the same undercurrent.†   (source)
  • She stopped, looking about her with her first coherent thought of astonishment.†   (source)
  • It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of…†   (source)
  • He wore an apache jersey and a pair of the rope-soled sandals from the Chinese shop; he was lean but his face was flushed and gross, with bloodshot green eyes and mouth of froggy width, the skin of his throat creased, dirty, half shaved; his voice was choky and his conversation only part coherent.†   (source)
  • …on the mountain had broken and now the whole passel of them from the father through the grown daughters down to one that couldn't even walk yet, sliding back down out of the mountains and skating in a kind of accelerating and sloven and inert coherence like a useless collection of flotsam on a flooded river moving by some perverse automotivation such as inanimate objects sometimes show, backward against the very current of the stream, across the Virginia plateau and into the slack…†   (source)
  • But what he told about himself and his present occupation did not make sense, for all its apparent coherence.†   (source)
  • The drudgery of making a coherent life of Roger has once more become intolerable, and so I turn for a few day's respite to May 1895.†   (source)
  • Sometimes on these occasions his speech would be made up of some weird jargon of Biblical phrases and quotations and allusions, of which he seemed to have hundreds, and which he wove together in the strange pattern of his emotion in a sequence that was meaningless to them but to which he himself had the coherent clue.†   (source)
  • He has made hardly any changes for the sake of artistic effect, except those elementary adjustments needed to present his narrative in a more or less coherent form.†   (source)
  • It was hard to see the small arms going around his neck and hear the choking voice relate what had frightened her, when she, Scarlett, had gotten nothing coherent out of her.†   (source)
  • A man may believe himself divinely appointed to kill clergymen-or doctors-or old women in tobacco shops-and there's always some perfectly coherent reason behind it.†   (source)
  • He didn't give any coherent account of why he had brought us here, but he seemed to know the locality.†   (source)
  • A man's reply, too low and husky for coherence, made Tom turn quickly.†   (source)
  • "You deserted me," was the only coherent remark.†   (source)
  • The regiment left a coherent trail of bodies.†   (source)
  • Go ahead and despise distinctions, precision, logic, the coherence of the human word.†   (source)
  • Shefford launched himself so swiftly that he scarcely talked coherently.†   (source)
  • She was coherent, even brilliant, within the limits of her special hallucinations.†   (source)
  • The woman's story hung coherently together, and all my questions were unable to shake it.†   (source)
  • "But I assure you, he can speak coherently when he warms to his topic," Hans Castorp said.†   (source)
  • But Catherine's meditations had lacked a certain coherence.†   (source)
  • But when he did find spoken words for it, they came to him coherently, though slowly.†   (source)
  • But he could not bring forward any coherent explanation of the fact.†   (source)
  • "Well," he went on with an evident effort at self-control and coherence.†   (source)
  • They lacked all coherence.†   (source)
  • I had nothing so coherent in my head.†   (source)
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