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contrived
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  • After the midday meal, I contrived to overturn the pitcher that held the tea water, dumping it on the floor.†   (source)
  • "Ah yes, Vogonity—sorry—of the poet's compassionate soul"—Arthur felt he was on the homestretch now—"which contrives through the medium of the verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that, and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other"—he was reaching a triumphant crescendo—"and one is left with a profound and vivid insight into … into … er …"†   (source)
  • The first sentence was "This tome will endeavor to scrutinize, in quasi-inclusive breadth, the epistemology of ophthalmologically contrived appraisals of ocular systems and the subsequent and requisite exertions imperative for expugnation of injurious states," and as Violet read it out loud to her sister, both children felt the dread that comes when you begin a very boring and difficult book.†   (source)
  • The following day, Saturday, my mother and I would contrive to be out of the apartment before he woke from his sweaty, tangled sleep on the sofa.†   (source)
  • Artemis had somehow contrived to remain spotless.†   (source)
  • I counted to one hundred as I rocked, contriving the patience to get one down in order to take up another.†   (source)
  • Las Vegas is now so contrived and artificial that it has become something authentic, a place unlike any other.†   (source)
  • "If you could perhaps contrive to sit next to Miss Aberfoyle, that would be most wise," Miss Milhouse was saying now.†   (source)
  • If she were a petite woman, the hair would be too cute, too mischievous and contrived.†   (source)
  • The man across the wall shuffled through a bunch of photographs in a plastic sachet, with an air of contrived interest.†   (source)
  • Continuous observation of her, and of her contrived antics, led me to deduce that she was not in fact insane, as she pretended, but was attempting to pull the wool over my eyes in a studied and flagrant manner.†   (source)
  • This is not a revolution that will overthrow anything, or if it does, it will do so in ways we could never contrive in advance.†   (source)
  • Picture me: I'm a girl who is very bad I need to be punished, and by punished, I mean had It's where you store goodies for anniversary five Pardon me if this is getting contrived!†   (source)
  • I must contrive it that Paul learns the truth about her before I slay her.†   (source)
  • For that reason he'll be absorbed and attentive to what he's doing even though he doesn't deliberately contrive this.†   (source)
  • An ingeniously contrived philosophical system such as this may seem impressive, but it is pure fantasy.†   (source)
  • The plan of the living quarters was as unimaginative as a first-generation Greek landlord could contrive it to be.†   (source)
  • Martin Vanger had contrived his private torture chamber with great care.†   (source)
  • I managed a nauseated face that wasn't altogether contrived.†   (source)
  • The little collection of fruit-bearers growing by the river was his attempt to contrive, rain or no, a patch of the paradise, the green, apple-scented Eden, he envisioned.†   (source)
  • Other guests poured in, about thirty in all, timing their arrival during Moody's contrived absence.†   (source)
  • These were gratifying victories; prison is contrived to make one feel powerless, and this was one of the few ways to move the system.†   (source)
  • I'm afraid, my friend, that this contrivance will weigh a bit more than your bales of hay.†   (source)
  • The contrived turf war that a sixteen-year-old African American used to rationalize the shooting of an African refugee was a make-believe corollary of the more realistic competition over limited resources—housing, jobs, government aid—that fueled identity-based hostility in Clarkston among adults.†   (source)
  • "When Johnnie was first given a spinning room to look after," said Gray, "she came to Mr. Sessions and myself and asked permission to have a small device of her own contrivance used on the frames as an Indicator."†   (source)
  • CONTRIVANCES Aro did not rejoin his anxious guard waiting on the north side of the clearing; instead, he waved them forward.†   (source)
  • Our entire strategy depends upon contriving a meeting between Galbatorix, Eragon, Saphira, and as many spellcasters as we can muster.†   (source)
  • At least they had the luxury of surplus horses, or did if Gus and Jake hadn't contrived to fiddle around and lose them.†   (source)
  • Nothing has been contrived, dramatized, or fabricated.†   (source)
  • Unable now to meet with Kathryn, Harris contrived to work late in his parents' shop, lighting his own candle in the store window so that Kathryn would know he was longing to see her.†   (source)
  • I would take my seat on the far end of the couch and slowly inch my way down to her end, where I would contrive to put my head in her lap.†   (source)
  • How that was contrived we cannot guess; but Gollum is cunning, and the spies of the Enemy are many.†   (source)
  • He must know that those who tamper with fate are often swallowed by their own contrivance—†   (source)
  • Which they say was contrived.†   (source)
  • The chimney in the room above ought, if it could be so contrived, to be an angle chimney as the others are: but I would not have this attempted at the expense of pulling down the partition.†   (source)
  • Carlos would find the contrivance; it's the first thing he'll look for.†   (source)
  • I had never seen Mr. Viccars at work on it, and I wondered if he had contrived to keep it from me, in case I remarked upon it.†   (source)
  • As he reached the head of the escalators, he contrived to glance back.†   (source)
  • This time she contrived to mention Garin.†   (source)
  • Somehow she had contrived to land a couple of feet to the left of the usual place.†   (source)
  • After the Romans came the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic states, the trade empires of Italian city-states, and the Ottoman Empire, which did not disappear until the twentieth century, when the powerful nations of the European continent contrived to defeat and divide it.†   (source)
  • When his kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you.†   (source)
  • And let the message be worded as graciously as the Queen can contrive without pledging her honour: so as to give the Prince a hope that she is weakening.†   (source)
  • Whigs and abolitionists in the North claimed the war was contrived by Southerners to acquire another slave state.†   (source)
  • They have human form, they wear clothes, they speak a language, though certainly not Spanish or some sort of contrived 'field dialect.'†   (source)
  • We worked by contriving intricate and open-ended emotional conspiracies.†   (source)
  • He expected that the old man might be more than he could handle and was perhaps an escapee from an asylum, or, worse, someone who had contrived to avoid asylums altogether.†   (source)
  • There was something contrived and stagey in her posture, as if she had hastily scrambled into place when she heard their steps on the stairs.†   (source)
  • Objections to this plan are contrived.†   (source)
  • A bun could have been contrived to escape into black streamers blowing in the wind or in quiet wisps about her face, but only the older women in our picture album wear buns.†   (source)
  • Ruefully, because the henchman, a likable schemer named Ercole, is secretly involved with dissident elements in the court of Faggio who want to keep Niccolo alive, and so he contrives to stuff a young goat into the cannon instead, meanwhile smuggling Niccolo out of the ducal palace disguised as an elderly procuress.†   (source)
  • Both my dialect and my diction comprised a glib contrivance but they had succeeded in wildly amusing Leslie, and obviously winning her.†   (source)
  • Bleys and I contrived to float as near together as possible as the currents took us and we were swept along the twisting course of the Oisen.†   (source)
  • Just as wonderful to me was a contrivance my Uncle Etch kept behind his Lovettsville house.†   (source)
  • I liked The Point for many reasons: for the quietude of its shaded, narrow streets, the courtesy and refinement of its residents, the imposing presence of its history, and for its essential apartness from the pace and hustle of the earth—its eccentric removal from all things plastic, electric, neoned, cheap, contrived, or asphalted.†   (source)
  • If at that point but a moment of free choice had been granted To the leaves, the branches, to the trunk and roots The laws of nature might have contrived to intervene.†   (source)
  • However, Peter Holmes was an ingenious man and good with tools, and he had contrived a tolerable substitute.†   (source)
  • Once in a moment of thoughtlessness I asked how he would contrive to pay all his staff when the hospital was finally established, for it was certain many people would be needed to run it.†   (source)
  • He looked home-made, as though his wife had selfconsciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night.†   (source)
  • I was fired once, and contrived, with the aid of a friend from New York, to get back on the payroll; was fired again, and bounced back again.†   (source)
  • She embraced him with pneumatic intensity, contriving to press his hand into her cleavage.†   (source)
  • Stendahl drank it in, the dreariness, the oppression, the fetid vapors, the whole "atmosphere," so delicately contrived and fitted.†   (source)
  • Sun-dazed, her eyes aching with the glare, but awake to every movement of the boys, she contrived, schemed and planned, deciding to talk to Dick when he was really well, to persuade him to face clearly where he would end if he did not change his methods.†   (source)
  • contrived coyness
  • Anyhow, there's one thing—there's more honor in getting him out through a lot of difficulties and dangers, where there warn't one of them furnished to you by the people who it was their duty to furnish them, and you had to contrive them all out of your own head.   (source)
    contrive = arrange
  • My husband had contrived a very ingenious sort of Spiritoscope….†   (source)
  • "The scene," he said, "appears contrived."†   (source)
  • And when he asked what kind of work she did, she somehow contrived not to give him an answer.†   (source)
  • Their evidence against Sula was contrived, but their conclusions about her were not.†   (source)
  • There will be no escape again, if we do not contrive it.†   (source)
  • I am a very minor magician but I can at least contrive a charmed sleep.†   (source)
  • Somehow the Kingslayer had contrived to sink their galley and escape, Maester Vyman confided.†   (source)
  • "Would that I'd contrived some mission to take me out of the city.†   (source)
  • It's a smoke screen and pretty hastily contrived.†   (source)
  • He was a good farmer and had contrived many clever methods to raise his yields.†   (source)
  • Blomkvist wondered to what extent this was a coincidence and to what extent it was contrived.†   (source)
  • Now I realize that Kwang has contrived that the girl is here for me.†   (source)
  • Not if some better way can be contrived?†   (source)
  • How do they work?" he asked her, examining the little contrivance lingeringly.†   (source)
  • If Gollum had contrived to follow them, he remained unseen and unheard.†   (source)
  • Accordingly, he had to contrive some cause that would legitimize what he was doing.†   (source)
  • 'I wonder if this is a contrivance of the Enemy,' said Boromir.†   (source)
  • Despite my informal dress, the masquerade I had contrived seemed as effective as one could imagine.†   (source)
  • They have patience, care and attentiveness to what they're doing, but more than this…there's a kind of inner peace of mind that isn't contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the work in which there's no leader and no follower.†   (source)
  • "So you contrived a trick," I said.†   (source)
  • It was said that the whole XYZ story was a contrivance of the Federalist warmongers, that the breakdown of negotiations was the fault of the American envoys.†   (source)
  • And now they all saw what it meant; how a wicked Witch (doubtless the same kind as that White Witch who had brought the Great Winter on Narnia long ago) had contrived the whole thing, first killing Rilian's mother and enchanting Rilian himself.†   (source)
  • A boy and girl in one of the murals sat in a booth with ice-cream sundaes and frosty glasses of water and long-handled spoons for the sundaes and the scene was not contrived to be charming but was close to documentary in tone and the whole place was a little museumlike, I thought, with time compressed and objects arrayed of evolutionary interest.†   (source)
  • I'm not sure anymore what I see when I "look out," if it's real or of my own making or something in between, a widely shared fantasy of what we wish life to be and, therefore, have contrived to create.†   (source)
  • But they were every one of them computer wizards, and they were well versed in the art of contriving viruses.†   (source)
  • So between them our enemies have contrived only to bring Merry and Pippin with marvellous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where otherwise they would never have come at all!†   (source)
  • While he had fewer tattoos than his companion, they were more elaborate-not the self-inflicted work of an amateur but epics of art contrived by Honolulu and Yokohama masters.†   (source)
  • Each day I vowed to wreak vengeance upon them, see them through some terrible circumstance I'd contrived, or else await the hand of fate.†   (source)
  • The others had been cleared, minor culprits having simply been turned loose in order to lessen the chances that Blue Duck might somehow contrive an escape.†   (source)
  • Objections Contrived†   (source)
  • We could still attempt to defend against their other contrived charges, but first they have to stop, to hear the truth about Renesmee.†   (source)
  • The fabrics were rich enough, if a little musty, but the cut was too long in the legs and too short in the arms, with a collar that would have turned his face as black as Joffrey's had he somehow contrived to get it fastened.†   (source)
  • Forsyth was certain that the twisted abolitionist was at this very moment planning some contrived event to give fresh blood and juice to the journalistic hounds.†   (source)
  • "My country in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived," he told Abigail.†   (source)
  • My impression was of an uncomfortably industrious place where there always seemed to be more jobs than people, unless one was careful, so on this particular evening I contrived to lie low until routine sounds told me that it was near enough to the mealtime for me to show myself safely.†   (source)
  • Until we can contrive to lure Murtagh and Thorn away, or trap them, or otherwise gain an advantage over them, we stay here, and we don't move against Dras-Leona.†   (source)
  • It was possible that the whole situation was contrived to try to get me to escape, though I do not think that was the case.†   (source)
  • Apparently, in the process of rising for the prayer, Jeannie had contrived to cast a backward glance at the congregation.†   (source)
  • But as the encomiums to Washington continued, in speeches, sermons, and editorials—tributes that seemed often as contrived for show as the black plumes and fans—Abigail grew extremely impatient.†   (source)
  • I could regard events in such a way as to see that Dennis has been patiently availing me of the elements with which I might effect my own undoing, all along contriving to witness and test my discipline and loyalty.†   (source)
  • Those who must move through the poorer parishes cover their faces in herb-stuffed masks contrived like the beaks of great birds.†   (source)
  • Always when I visited, I wondered that tall Anys contrived to live in such a place, for surely she could not stand upright.†   (source)
  • I am an atom of intellect with millions of solar systems over my head, under my feet, on my right hand, on my left, before me, and my adoration of the intelligence that contrived and the power that rules the stupendous fabric is too profound to believe them capable of anything unjust or cruel.†   (source)
  • If you are, the glory will be all your own; and that your administration may be filled with glory and happiness to yourself and advantage to us is the sincere wish of one who though, in the course of our voyage through life, various little incidents have happened or been contrived to separate us, retains still for you the solid esteem of the moments when we were working for our independence, and sentiments of respect and affectionate attachment.†   (source)
  • I will send out messages, such as I can contrive, to those whom I know in the wide world; but so perilous are the lands now become that some may well miscarry, or come no quicker than you yourself.†   (source)
  • Because the parcel arrived damp, having traveled the last of its journey in an open cart unprotected from rain, Mr. Hadfield asked Mr. Viccars to see to its drying, and so he contrived lines in the garth of our cottage and slung the fabrics out to air, thus giving everyone ample chance to look and comment.†   (source)
  • Furious, she wrote straight away to Lovell, demanding to know how he could "contrive to rob me of all my happiness.†   (source)
  • To reach down a crock from a high shelf was a vast effort; to draw a pail of water an agony, and so I had to contrive new ways to go about the simplest of tasks.†   (source)
  • For not in doing or contriving, nor in choosing between this course and another, can I avail; but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be.†   (source)
  • The next day, she said she felt well enough to take a turn in the garden, and she mocked the rector and me as I refused to let her walk unsupported and he hovered, proffering unwanted shawls one moment and contriving unneeded shade the next.†   (source)
  • But at last she said: 'Lords, you are weary and shall now go to your beds with such ease as can be contrived in haste.†   (source)
  • We calculated that if we earned eight annas each day and contrived to live on four, we could save the money we needed to return in forty days.†   (source)
  • Ill deeds have been done here; but let now all enmity that lies between you be put away, for it was contrived by the Enemy and works his will.†   (source)
  • Loch knew from her actions that the contrivance down in the wires— the piano front had been taken away-was a kind of nest.†   (source)
  • Indeed, she had contrived to give the knot between her shoulder blades a tweak as she went into the water, and it now floated by her side.†   (source)
  • …and saw that what seemed so pathetic and frail to her represented to him victories over discomfort; and she began to feel, slowly, that it was not in this house she was sitting, with her husband, but back with her mother, watching her endlessly contrive and patch and mend—till suddenly she got to her feet with an awkward scrambling movement, unable to bear it; possessed with the thought that her father, from his grave, had sent out his will and forced her back into the kind of life he…†   (source)
  • 'There is some good stone-work here,' he said as he looked at the walls; 'but also some that is less good, and the streets could be better contrived.†   (source)
  • When Solomon was young, as he was in his picture overhead, it was the infinite thing with him, and he could see no end to the respect he would contrive and keep in a house.†   (source)
  • I exclaimed with contrived heartiness.†   (source)
  • He had built a small two-wheeled trailer using the front wheels of two motor bicycles, and he had contrived a trailer hitch both on Mary's bicycle and his own so that either could pull this thing, which served them as a perambulator and a general goods carrier.†   (source)
  • His eyes half closed upon the mountains of houses not wall-like, as houses were in other places, but swollen like bee-hives, and one hive succeeding another, rrounting into tremendous steps of stairs— and alive inside, inwardly contriving.†   (source)
  • If a few prisoners like Sophie alone had access to the upper regions of the house, any such contrived theft would be completely out of the question.†   (source)
  • Therefore Aragorn now set the host in such array as could best be contrived; and they were drawn up on two great hills of blasted stone and earth that orcs had piled in years of labour.†   (source)
  • And now he shall endure the slow torment of years, as long and slow as our arts in the Great Tower can contrive, and never be released, unless maybe when he is changed and broken, so that he may come to you, and you shall see what you have done.†   (source)
  • His contrivances defeated Troy and reshaped half the world.†   (source)
  • Persons of quality traveled by palanquin, or in the back of a hathay … and as it happened the innkeep had a cousin who owned several such contrivances and would be pleased to serve them in this matter.†   (source)
  • Antoine has a long slick head and narrow neck, a man of schemes and contrivances, called Snake when he was younger, and he determines it is necessary to turn his upper body to the wall behind him so he can identify the objects in question.†   (source)
  • …field-stripped cigarettes and work from the office and scorecards in the shape of airplanes, windblown and mostly white, and Pafko walks back to his position and alters stride to kick a soda cup lightly and the gesture functions as a form of recognition, a hint of some concordant force between players and fans, the way he nudges the white cup, it's a little onside boot, completely unbegrudging—a sign of respect for the sly contrivances of the game, the patterns that are undivinable.†   (source)
  • I thought you folks down there finally contrived to give them all away.†   (source)
  • Well, we've seen Nature pushing and contriving for some time now.†   (source)
  • He contrived, often at great sacrifice, to avoid all such predicaments.†   (source)
  • Later he was captured and hanged for murder, though many wished that his escape had been contrived.†   (source)
  • It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move.†   (source)
  • And then, if we could contrive it, the trumpet would be skilfully transferred to Florence Bishop.†   (source)
  • The Ramsays were not rich, and it was a wonder how they managed to contrive it all.†   (source)
  • A rumor went round that Snowball had after all contrived to introduce poison into Napoleon's food.†   (source)
  • He contrived at once to apologise without surrendering one jot of his conviction.†   (source)
  • Guenever alone had contrived to keep the raven on her head.†   (source)
  • Very quickly, a method had to be contrived to abate his heat; and one was found.†   (source)
  • From all this saddening data Brother Juniper contrived an index for each peasant.†   (source)
  • And how have you contrived to escape those widespread maladies?†   (source)
  • It had been contrived as a way of letting Winston know O'Brien's address.†   (source)
  • You can see the shafts of the huge chimneys and how cunningly the side flues were contrived to enter them, and the little private closets now public, and the enormous kitchen.†   (source)
  • The neatness of this antithesis is more than contrived; it corresponds to and defines the tremendous interval that separates from each other two such simultaneous cultural phenomena as the avant-garde and kitsch.†   (source)
  • Smoke curls from vents cunningly contrived, there is a smell of food, there is a sound of voices, not raised in anger or pain, but talking of ordinary things, of this one that is born and that one that has died, of this one that does so well at school and that one who is now in prison.†   (source)
  • Shelters could be contrived for few (the Master had one) and there was little food (even the Master went short).†   (source)
  • Banging his knee against the golden lard bucket he used for school lunch, he contrived a good bass drum, while his tongue fluttered sharply against his teeth to fill in snare drums and occasional trumpets.†   (source)
  • Still less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of a man's will to become a Saint, as a man by willing and contriving may become a ruler of men.†   (source)
  • Your Honor, in our blindness we have so contrived and ordered the lives of men that the moths in their hearts flutter toward ghoulish and incomprehensible flames!†   (source)
  • Some, like Rambert, even contrived to fancy they were still behaving as free men and had the power of choice.†   (source)
  • Don Andres had contrived to make exile endurable by building up a ceremonial so complicated that it could be remembered only by a society that had nothing else to think about.†   (source)
  • We all know the frightful disturbances in which the ordinary family is plunged when the curse of war swoops down upon the bread-winner and those for whom he works and contrives.†   (source)
  • They thought of ruthlessness rather than justice and of fear rather than respect, but not of pity or love: besides being too lost in amazed speculation as to just how Sutpen intended or could contrive to use Mr Coldfield to further whatever secret ends he still had.†   (source)
  • When it was finished they went within and with one mat she had contrived not to use they made a floor and sat down and were sheltered.†   (source)
  • We all know the frightful disturbances in which the ordinary family is plunged when the curse of war swoops down upon the bread-winner and those for whom he works and contrives.†   (source)
  • But Brown merely contrived to look scattered and emptily swaggering where the master had looked sullen and quiet and fatal as a snake.†   (source)
  • …touch, he no more to them than a buzzing wasp: capable of stinging for a little moment but that's all; the spell of this peace and dignity rendering even the barns and stable and cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive … this, the peace and joy, ebbing for an instant as he looked again at the stiff black back, the stiff and implacable limp of the figure which was not dwarfed by the house, for the reason that it had never looked big anywhere and which…†   (source)
  • He arranged the accident to the gun, and-which I did not suspect until now-contrived the death of his brother John by this same method of injecting formic acid into the jugular vein.†   (source)
  • With the aid of necromantic books she contrived a black concoction which she then set over a fire to brew for a year, at the end of which period three blessed drops should be obtained of the grace of inspiration.†   (source)
  • He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm.†   (source)
  • He was tired out, and overwhelmingly glad that he had contrived to be sent in the maharajah's luxurious airliner instead of in one of the crowded troop carriers.†   (source)
  • …flattering (and doubtless to him, meaningless) gesture to the bucolic maiden—and that bucolic maiden, with that profound and absolutely inexplicable tranquil patient clairvoyance of women against which that metropolitan gallant's foppish posturing was just the jackanape antics of a small boy, receiving the letters without understanding them, not even keeping them, for all their elegant and gallant and tediously contrived turns of form and metaphor, until the next one arrived.†   (source)
  • Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry--the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon--are always blowing our whole structure away.†   (source)
  • For the issuing of the stream they had contrived a small low arch under the new wall; but near the entrance they had so altered the narrow bed that a wide pool stretched from the mountain-wall to the head of the fall over which the stream went towards Dale.†   (source)
  • For she never took a lodger with whom she did not contrive to stand in some human, friendly, and as it were auntlike or, rather, motherly relation; and many a one has made full use of this weakness of hers.†   (source)
  • And though the cliffs were patrolled day and night, little groups of people contrived to thread their way unseen between the rocks and would toss flowers into the open trailers as the cars went by.†   (source)
  • And she took their ragged clothes and with thread she herself spun on a bamboo spindle from a wad of cotton she mended and contrived to cover the rents in their winter clothes.†   (source)
  • When the girl's father, Forgall the Wily, was told that the couple had talked together, he contrived to send Cuchulainn off to learn battle skills from Donall the Soldierly in Alba, supposing the youth would never return.†   (source)
  • For example, after describing how the discovery of a dead rat led the hotel cashier to make an error in his bill, Tarrou added: "Query: How contrive not to waste one's time?†   (source)
  • If he had known where she lived, and at what time she left work, he could have contrived to meet her somewhere on her way home; but to try to follow her home was not safe, because it would mean loitering about outside the Ministry, which was bound to be noticed.†   (source)
  • For, although she had contrived to seduce young Arthur in his nonage, he had escaped her— to settle down with Guenever as his wife.†   (source)
  • —Yes, watching him, not concerned yet, just considerably annoyed, giving Bon plenty of time to come to him, giving him all of a week maybe (after he—the lawyer—would have contrived to get hold of Henry and find out a good deal of what Henry was thinking without Henry ever knowing it) before he would contrive Bon too, and maybe so good at the contriving that even Bon would not know at once what was coming.†   (source)
  • This was an astonishment to him, for he was prepared for O-lan to hate Lotus, having heard many times of such things, and some women will even hang themselves upon a beam with a rope when a man takes a second woman into the house, and others will scold and contrive to make his life worthless for what he has done, and he was glad that O-lan was a silent woman for at least she could not think of words against him.†   (source)
  • I say to myself: all we who ask too much and have a dimension too many could not contrive to live at all if there were not another air to breathe outside the air of this world, if there were not eternity at the back of time; and this is the kingdom of truth.†   (source)
  • The sketch was small, hardly more than a miniature in colored inks, but the artist had contrived to give the flesh tones a waxwork delicacy of texture.†   (source)
  • Yet though he was not large, not tall, he contrived somehow to look more lonely than a lone telephone pole in the middle of a desert.†   (source)
  • But the Marquesa remained unaware of what had taken place; in fact she was quite pleased, for during the visit she had contrived a few felicitous phrases, phrases (who knows) that might bring a smile to her daughter's face and might make her murmur: "Really, my mother is charming.†   (source)
  • Hence the sign, carpentered neatly by himself and by himself lettered, with bits of broken glass contrived cunningly into the paint, so that at night, when the corner street lamp shone upon it, the letters glittered with an effect as of Christmas: REV. GAIL HIGHTOWER, D.D. Art Lessons Hand-painted Xmas & Anniversary Cards Photographs Developed But that was years ago, and he had had no art pupils and few enough Christmas cards and photograph plates, and the paint and the shattered glass…†   (source)
  • …that they knew of until that second year when he was fourteen and one of them, Clytie or Judith, found hidden beneath his mattress the shard of broken mirror: and who to know what hours of amazed and tearless grief he might have spent before it, examining himself in the delicate and outgrown tatters in which he perhaps could not even remember himself, with quiet and incredulous incomprehension) hanging behind a curtain contrived of a piece of old carpet nailed across a corner.†   (source)
  • Sometimes we toyed with our imagination, composing ourselves to wait for a ring at the bell announcing somebody's return, or for the sound of a familiar footstep on the stairs; but, though we might deliberately stay at home at the hour when a traveler coming by the evening train would normally have arrived, and though we might contrive to forget for the moment that no trains were running, that game of make-believe, for obvious reasons, could not last.†   (source)
  • Everywhere it had been blood on steel, and smoke on sky, and power unbridled —and, in the general confusion of the times, Gawaine had at last contrived to murder our dear old friend King Pellinore, in revenge for the death of his own father, King Lot.†   (source)
  • And men and women labored at the cutting and contriving of heavy furs for the winter and of soft light furs for the spring and at the thick brocaded silks, to cut and shape them into sumptuous robes for the ones who ate of the profusion at the markets, and they themselves snatched a bit of coarse blue cotton cloth and sewed it hastily together to cover their bareness.†   (source)
  • Then the lord raised the thunderbolt, his mighty weapon, And against Tiamat, who was raging, thus he sent the word: "Thou art become great, thou hast exalted thyself on high, And thy heart hath prompted thee to call to battle…… And against the gods my fathers thou hast contrived thy wicked plan.†   (source)
  • With these to work on he contrived to master the intricacies of your language, and we still possess in our library the manuscript of one of his first linguistic exercises--a translation of Montaigne's essay on Vanity into Tibetan--surely a unique production.†   (source)
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