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enormity
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  • Now that he had time to think of it, his son's crime stood out in its stark enormity.†   (source)
  • The enormity of his decision not to race Voldemort to the wand still scared Harry.†   (source)
  • Aspen's green eyes grew wide for a second, taking in the enormity of that question.†   (source)
  • To be fair though, when confronted by the sheer enormity of the distances between the stars, better minds than the one responsible for the Guide's introduction have faltered.†   (source)
  • And even though I know that Alex still does it sometimes, the enormity of the risk hasn't really hit me until now.†   (source)
  • The enormity of what I've done overwhelms me and I'm trembling.†   (source)
  • There are no clouds and the mountains, McKinley on the right, tower over us in dazzling white enormity, filling the sky while the sun warms our backs and the dogs settle into running.†   (source)
  • She had become part of the exodus without entirely registering the enormity and strangeness of it.†   (source)
  • Don't you see the enormity of what you've done?†   (source)
  • The enormity of his own terrible grief.†   (source)
  • The blast of air had also cleared away a patch of fog, and for the first time, Sophie realized the enormity of what they were facing.†   (source)
  • Don't misunderstand me, both are needed—but an emphasis on fathering is necessary because of the enormity of its absence."†   (source)
  • She had put into it all the fury of which she was capable, her crudest words, the most wounding, most unjust vilifications, which still seemed minuscule to her in light of the enormity of the offense.†   (source)
  • There was a new, businesslike feel to the atmosphere around them, and it pulled me back into the enormity of what was coming.†   (source)
  • Phaedrus pondered this for a while, then realized the enormity of the student's misconception of what accreditation was all about.†   (source)
  • My mates stared at me, mystified and scared, and the enormity of my problems suddenly came crashing down on me.†   (source)
  • Luke drew a long breath, finally coming to terms with the enormity of it all.†   (source)
  • I set my wineglass on the table as the enormity of this sinks in.†   (source)
  • For the first time, the enormity of Hrothgar's action struck Eragon.†   (source)
  • The enormity of what she had seen was now topped by the further enormity of involving the police.†   (source)
  • It showed her worse than those who justified this thing, the enormity of which she had seemed to understand well.†   (source)
  • His size, of course, you saw first: the height, the big wrists, the enormity of his mere presence.†   (source)
  • "Now," she said, sensing the enormity of the task facing her, "I had to find my family in all of this."†   (source)
  • Stung by the name he was given for committing a crime—which the State taught was not a crime at all—whose enormity never stopped pulling at his conscience, he never informed again.†   (source)
  • He saw her gaze go to his rows of ribbons, and her eyes widened as they took in the enormity of his combat experience and military achievement.†   (source)
  • But once in Washington, D.C., the enormity of the event and your contribution sank in.†   (source)
  • For the first time Roland felt the enormity of his responsibility in the matter; this wood was not noble, not part of the awesome machine of Civilization, but merely warped pine covered with splat-tered white bird droppings.†   (source)
  • And what they saw was both horrifying and heartbreaking in its enormity.†   (source)
  • Nately was appalled and bewildered by the abominable old man's inability to perceive the enormity of his offence.†   (source)
  • Monterrey's factories were terrifying in the enormity of scale, which made a man feel small and vulnerable like Lilliputians in a world of Gullivers.†   (source)
  • The enormity of this taking was enough to give Alvin decidedly more pleasure than he'd felt with the last victim, and he took his time now to relish the accomplishment.†   (source)
  • It is true that there is something about the enormity of this city that forces you to be reflective, as if you have to constantly peek inside yourself to make sure your character has not somehow slipped away from you in the onrush of strangers.†   (source)
  • Find out for yourself-at least learn the enormity of what I'm trying to tell you.†   (source)
  • He wasn't sure why he was doing this, why these men's callousness mattered to him, but before he quite realized the enormity of his overreaction, he battered the door with the guy's face, battered it again, and then a third time.†   (source)
  • He would never have thought the dwarf capable of such enormity.†   (source)
  • Understanding one another, we do not need laws which treat living forms as though they were as indistinguishable as bricks; we could never commit the enormity of imagining that we could mint ourselves into equality and identity, like stamped coins; we do not mechanistically attempt to hammer ourselves into geometrical patterns of society, or policy; we are not dogmatists teaching God how He should have ordered the world.†   (source)
  • Members of the Dail and Seanad, after all the long and torn history of our two peoples, standing here as the first British prime minister ever to address the joint Houses of the Oireachtas, I feel profoundly both the history in this event, and I feel profoundly the enormity of the honour that you are bestowing upon me.†   (source)
  • But I had to let you know the size of what we're dealing with, the enormity, the importance.†   (source)
  • Once, on a visit to a New Mexico nuclear testing ground, Kennedy was astounded at the enormity of the crater left by a recent underground test explosion.†   (source)
  • He was seeing the enormity of the smallness of the enemy who was destroying the world.†   (source)
  • They glided through monstrous foundries, past coiled energy converters, and beneath shuttered research labs that protruded like rock ledges in the hollowed enormity of an old salt mine.†   (source)
  • The enormity of it still shocked Clary, and, she suspected, Jace as well.†   (source)
  • I am committed to confronting the enormity of this global public health catastrophe and its potential for even greater devastation.†   (source)
  • When they crested the top of the ruins and saw the carnage spread out below them, the halfling realized the enormity of the destruction.†   (source)
  • The enormity of it, the weight of the line, was a mass too great to express.†   (source)
  • It stood, in profile, wide open, in all its black, Steinway enormity, opposite the couch, its bench almost directly across from Franny.†   (source)
  • In keeping with the enormity of everything else about Troy, it weighed forty-one billion tons.†   (source)
  • Fear at the enormities of the forbidden kept her desires delicate, wire and bone.†   (source)
  • Certainly he had not been entirely unaware of the camps; perhaps, Sophie thought, the enormity of their existence had been for Nathan, as for so many Americans, part of a drama too far away, too abstract, too foreign (and thus too hard to comprehend) to register fully on the mind.†   (source)
  • The key had materialized to show him the enormity of this venture.†   (source)
  • The pause was only long enough for them to understand what an enormity the downward stroke would be.   (source)
    enormity = extreme wickedness or evilness
  • Did they realize the enormity of such an outrage?†   (source)
  • But that first night the enormity of it all stole the words from her.†   (source)
  • Joe stood in his front hall, newspaper in hand, absorbing the enormity of the crisis before him.†   (source)
  • Undiluted fear ripped through my stomach as the enormity of what I was about to do hit me.†   (source)
  • The enormity of the lie made Davos gasp.†   (source)
  • This was my wretched attempt to understand our blankness in the face of God's enormity.†   (source)
  • "Enormity," the black-haired prince replied.†   (source)
  • General Peckem screamed, as though struck by the enormity of the disaster for the first time.†   (source)
  • John keeps encouraging me to "buy, buy, buy," emphasizing the enormity of our future home.†   (source)
  • Tyrion, if you are guilty of this enormity, the Wall is a kinder fate than you deserve.†   (source)
  • As the enormity of my helplessness dawned on me, my position began to slip.†   (source)
  • The yellow enormity was squirming in his litter, a look of annoyance on his huge pie face.†   (source)
  • Eragon could not seem to grasp the enormity of the revelation all at once.†   (source)
  • He could never have been trusted with a task of such enormity.†   (source)
  • The other three would divide the yellow enormity's slaves amongst them, like as not.†   (source)
  • I also remembered the fear of my mother finding that note surpassing any other worry about the enormity of knowing, without a doubt, that I loved Aspen.†   (source)
  • They sat, then, they sat beside each other, smelling of each other, faces flushed pink, both of them stunned, both of them speechless before the enormity of what had just happened.†   (source)
  • The enormity of the mission, of flying to a foreign country at nearly supersonic speed, at thirty thousand feet, alone, in a humped container of titanium and steel, caused her to grow momentarily silent.†   (source)
  • And then, slowly, the ceiling above my head trembles and folds back on itself, and all of a sudden the sky is revealed in its enormity.†   (source)
  • He strove to project an air of confidence, but the truth was, the enormity of the situation frightened him and he had no idea whether he was up to the task.†   (source)
  • Considering the enormity of his crime, Villiers was either arrogant to the point of carelessness or a damn fool.†   (source)
  • The sheer enormity of it!†   (source)
  • Getting quickly to her feet, Rose stared at the low ceiling as though she were in a submarine sinking out of control into an abyss, furiously calculating the enormity of the crushing pressure, waiting for the first signs of failure in the hull.†   (source)
  • I wanted to see this stump of yours and hear whatever excuses you cared to offer up for your latest enormities.†   (source)
  • And the enormity of the night.†   (source)
  • "Ragnar Danneskjold …." said Rearden, as if he were seeing the whole of the past decade, as if he were looking at the enormity of a crime spread through ten years and held within two words.†   (source)
  • Chaplain Gage Hotaling could never forget the bleak enormity of these mass burials: "We buried fifty at a time in bulldozed plots.†   (source)
  • Considering the shattering events-the enormity of the embarrassment experienced by Carlos last night at the motel in Montrouge, it was more than likely that Andre Villiers had been summoned to an out-of-the-way restaurant for an emergency meeting.†   (source)
  • Yossarian choked on his toast and eggs at the enormity of his error in tearing her long, lithe, nude, young vibrant limbs into any pieces of paper so impudently and dumping her down so smugly into the gutter from the curb.†   (source)
  • With an awed contempt-awed by the enormity of the sight-she wondered what inner degradation those men had to reach in order to arrive at a level of self-deception where they would seek the extorted approval of an unwilling victim as the moral sanction they needed, they who thought that they were merely deceiving the world.†   (source)
  • The foreman and others were held responsible for this atrocity, but now that the house is built and here to stay in all its enormity, its inhabitants shall pay, and pay dearly.†   (source)
  • It was there and then, seeing this army assembled before us, and realizing this search would still account for a considerable amount of time, that I came to grasp the enormity of this house that was still under construction-a house that even I, the matron, had lost track of.†   (source)
  • An enormity of pillars, steps, buttresses, bridges, domes, and towers flowing into one another as if they had all been chiseled from one collossal rock, the Temple of the Lord of Light loomed like Aegon's High Hill.†   (source)
  • Before he dies, the Enormity That Rides will tell me whence came his orders, please assure your lord father of that.†   (source)
  • All knowledge of the rest of his body and the feeling in it would leave him; he would not find it possible to describe his position in the bed, where his legs were or his hands; his mouth alone felt and it felt enormity.†   (source)
  • The yellow skirt spread fanlike, straw hat held ribbon-in-hand, orange beads big as peach pits (to conceal the joining at the neck)-none of that, any more than the forest scene so unlike the Mississippi wilderness (that enormity she had been carried to as a bride, when the logs of this house were cut, her bounded world by drop by drop of sweat exposed, where she'd died in the end of yellow fever) or the melancholy clouds obscuring the sky behind the passive figure with the small,…†   (source)
  • The spar-hawk's voice broke at the enormity of his confession.†   (source)
  • He was shaken with the enormity of the problem.†   (source)
  • But, for one thing, now that the town was closed and the harbor out of bounds, there was no question of bathing; moreover, they were in a quite exceptional frame of mind and, though in their heart of hearts they were far from recognizing the enormity of what had come on them, they couldn't help feeling, for obvious reasons, that decidedly something had changed.†   (source)
  • She heard the soft muffled sound of his footsteps dying away down the long hall, and the complete enormity of her actions came over her.†   (source)
  • I woke to the enormity of my sin; I saw the true light at last, and I fell on my knees and confessed to God and asked His guidance and received it.†   (source)
  • Afterward…There were other things, hideous, important things behind her and rising vaguely in her mind, but first, above all, just one thing: to see him again… She came to the quarry and she looked slowly, carefully, stupidly about her, stupidly because the enormity of what she saw would not penetrate her brain: she saw at once that he was not there.†   (source)
  • He was still hearing that while he stood beside the table on which papers were scattered and from which she had not risen, and listened to the calm enormity which her cold, still voice unfolded, his mouth repeating the words after her while he looked down at the scattered and enigmatic papers and documents and thinking fled smooth and idle, wondering what this paper meant and what that paper meant.†   (source)
  • The worst of them made up uglier names than Bolshevist even, and allowed the brutal side of their natures to dwell on imaginary enormities which they attributed to the knights.†   (source)
  • The enormity of his decision frightened him.†   (source)
  • "And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced into the pages of Solomon's Song.†   (source)
  • —Sin, remember, is a twofold enormity.†   (source)
  • The world is growing too ethereal and spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer.†   (source)
  • I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed.†   (source)
  • 'It's almost an aggravation of the enormity, that we shall be out to-day.†   (source)
  • But the sermon over, he none the less tranquilly resumed his course of seditions and enormities.†   (source)
  • No sophistry of Southerners could blind her to its enormity.†   (source)
  • Brother, you behold a culprit, a criminal, a wretch, a libertine, a man of enormities!†   (source)
  • The breeze hollowed out undulations in the magnificent enormity of the chestnut-trees.†   (source)
  • What then! such enormities were to happen and no one was to be punished!†   (source)
  • On the other hand, no doubt if he were sent to the chair now in the face of his first—and yet so clear manifestation of contrition—when now, for the first time he was beginning to grasp the enormity of his offense—it would be but to compound crime with crime—the state in this instance being the aggressor.†   (source)
  • And even while I was oppressed by the enormity of my sin,—for sin it was,—I chuckled with an insane delight.†   (source)
  • And if there was something uncanny about the enormity of the snowing, deadly silence— and as a child of civilization he most certainly felt there was—both his intellect and senses had long ago tasted of the uncanniness up here.†   (source)
  • No, some other method of punishment must be found to bring Anne to a proper realization of the enormity of her offense.†   (source)
  • He realized that he was safe and only then did he appreciate the full enormity of what he might have incurred.†   (source)
  • Beside the savage desire within him to realize the enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred.†   (source)
  • She had traveled enough over the untrodden prairie to have some faint conception of the enormity of what faced her.†   (source)
  • The enormity of the crime and the extreme depravity of the criminal, appear the greater in view of the character of the victim, a middle-aged man respectable and discreet, belonging to that official grade, the petty-officers, upon whom, as none know better than the commissioned gentlemen, the efficiency of His Majesty's Navy so largely depends.†   (source)
  • The sensation of standing there, in that warm familiar room, and looking at her, and wishing her dead, was so strange, so fascinating and overmastering, that its enormity did not immediately strike him.†   (source)
  • Now the Vicomte had no doubt vaguely heard that in England the fashion of duelling amongst gentlemen had been surpressed by the law with a very stern hand; still to him, a Frenchman, whose notions of bravery and honour were based upon a code that had centuries of tradition to back it, the spectacle of a gentleman actually refusing to fight a duel was a little short of an enormity.†   (source)
  • …two-fold desire to make the speaker be quiet and to preserve, oneself, an appearance of guilelessness in the eyes of the listener, is neutralised in an intense vacuity; in which the unflinching signs of intelligent complicity are overlaid by the smiles of innocence, an expression invariably adopted by anyone who has noticed a blunder, the enormity of which is thereby at once revealed if not to those who have made it, at any rate to him in whose hearing it ought not to have been made.†   (source)
  • Marilla told Matthew the whole story, taking pains to impress him with a due sense of the enormity of Anne's behavior.†   (source)
  • All my wrongs and humiliations flashed upon me with a dazzling brightness, all that I had suffered and others had suffered at his hands, all the enormity of the man's very existence.†   (source)
  • What he had not learned back then, however, was a taste for extending the thrilling contact with deadly nature until it threatened with its full embrace—had not learned to venture out into the enormity as a weak, if well armed and reasonably well equipped child of civilization, or at least to postpone fleeing before the enormity until contact with it verged on a peril that knew no limits, until it was no longer the last thrust of foam and a soft paw, but the wave itself, the gorge, the…†   (source)
  • The malice, impotent though it be, which possesses these demon souls is an evil of boundless extension, of limitless duration, a frightful state of wickedness which we can scarcely realize unless we bear in mind the enormity of sin and the hatred God bears to it.†   (source)
  • These rabbits and dyed eggs remind me of life on a great steamer, when for weeks on end you stare at an empty horizon and a briny desert, under conditions of deluxe comfort that only superficially help you forget the enormity of the situation, an awareness of which lives on as a secret horror gnawing in the deeper regions of your mind.†   (source)
  • Lady Bertram did not think deeply, but, guided by Sir Thomas, she thought justly on all important points; and she saw, therefore, in all its enormity, what had happened, and neither endeavoured herself, nor required Fanny to advise her, to think little of guilt and infamy.†   (source)
  • And it is the more to be lamented, because there is reason to suppose as my dear Charlotte informs me, that this licentiousness of behaviour in your daughter has proceeded from a faulty degree of indulgence; though, at the same time, for the consolation of yourself and Mrs. Bennet, I am inclined to think that her own disposition must be naturally bad, or she could not be guilty of such an enormity, at so early an age.†   (source)
  • Without understanding her sensations, Cosette was conscious that she was seized upon by that black enormity of nature; it was no longer terror alone which was gaining possession of her; it was something more terrible even than terror; she shivered.†   (source)
  • He would enter into no further discussion of the subject, and while old Arthur dilated upon the enormity of his demands and proposed modifications of them, approaching by degrees nearer and nearer to the terms he resisted, sat perfectly mute, looking with an air of quiet abstraction over the entries and papers in his pocket-book.†   (source)
  • Our Pawnee friend is already staked for the torture, and I well know, by the eye and the countenance of the great Sioux, that he is leading on the temper of his people to further enormities.†   (source)
  • From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus.†   (source)
  • I wish my people to be impressed with the enormity of the crime, the determination to punish it, and the hopelessness of escape.†   (source)
  • I had an obscure feeling that all was not over and that he would still commit some signal crime, which by its enormity should almost efface the recollection of the past.†   (source)
  • Topsy always made great capital of her own sins and enormities, evidently considering them as something peculiarly distinguishing.†   (source)
  • But in vain he cried out against the enormity of turtle and champagne that was fit for an archbishop.†   (source)
  • Newson, like a good many rovers and sojourners among strange men and strange moralities, failed to perceive the enormity of Henchard's crime, notwithstanding that he himself had been the chief sufferer therefrom.†   (source)
  • Miss Wirt and these two affectionate young women so earnestly and frequently impressed upon George Osborne's mind the enormity of the sacrifice he was making, and his romantic generosity in throwing himself away upon Amelia, that I'm not sure but that he really thought he was one of the most deserving characters in the British army, and gave himself up to be loved with a good deal of easy resignation.†   (source)
  • And the very enormity of this offence against all manly and honourable sentiment proved, beyond doubt, the main if not the sole reason of the impunity with which it was committed.†   (source)
  • One should have expected some terrible enormities charged to those who are excluded from Heaven, as the reason; but no,—they are condemned for not doing positive good, as if that included every possible harm.†   (source)
  • Yet she appeared confident in innocence and did not tremble, although gazed on and execrated by thousands, for all the kindness which her beauty might otherwise have excited was obliterated in the minds of the spectators by the imagination of the enormity she was supposed to have committed.†   (source)
  • "To think that Monsieur of Reims sent this enormity to Monsieur of Paris," added la Gaultière, clasping her hands.†   (source)
  • Therein lay the enormity.†   (source)
  • Once—it was at the epoch of the visit from the archbishop to the convent— one of the young girls, Mademoiselle Bouchard, who was connected with the Montmorency family, laid a wager that she would ask for a day's leave of absence—an enormity in so austere a community.†   (source)
  • —Add to this a plaited tucker, knots of ribbon on her shoes—and that the stripes of her petticoat ran horizontally instead of vertically, and a thousand other enormities which shocked good taste.†   (source)
  • He remained there until daylight, in the same attitude, bent double over that bed, prostrate beneath the enormity of fate, crushed, perchance, alas! with clenched fists, with arms outspread at right angles, like a man crucified who has been un-nailed, and flung face down on the earth.†   (source)
  • …over his head; a populace of waves spits upon him; confused openings half devour him; every time that he sinks, he catches glimpses of precipices filled with night; frightful and unknown vegetations seize him, knot about his feet, draw him to them; he is conscious that he is becoming an abyss, that he forms part of the foam; the waves toss him from one to another; he drinks in the bitterness; the cowardly ocean attacks him furiously, to drown him; the enormity plays with his agony.†   (source)
  • So they did not abstain; and, in the midst of the uproar, there was a frightful concert of blasphemies and enormities of all the unbridled tongues, the tongues of clerks and students restrained during the rest of the year, by the fear of the hot iron of Saint Louis.†   (source)
  • Or, in view of the enormities of which he had been a witness for the past two hours, did he say to himself, that it was necessary to recur to supreme resolutions, that it was indispensable that the small should be made great, that the police spy should transform himself into a magistrate, that the policeman should become a dispenser of justice, and that, in this prodigious extremity, order, law, morality, government, society in its entirety, was personified in him, Javert?†   (source)
  • The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.†   (source)
  • As I listened to what she was saying, the enormity of it dawned on me.†   (source)
  • He then caused all the duennas of the palace, those that are here present, to be brought before him; and after having dwelt upon the enormity of our offence, and denounced duennas, their characters, their evil ways and worse intrigues, laying to the charge of all what I alone was guilty of, he said he would not visit us with capital punishment, but with others of a slow nature which would be in effect civil death for ever; and the very instant he ceased speaking we all felt the pores…†   (source)
  • We have observed the disposition to retaliation excited in Connecticut in consequence of the enormities perpetrated by the Legislature of Rhode Island; and we reasonably infer that, in similar cases, under other circumstances, a war, not of PARCHMENT, but of the sword, would chastise such atrocious breaches of moral obligation and social justice.†   (source)
  • But when a creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities, he dreaded lest the corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself.†   (source)
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