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ephemeral
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show 63 more with this conextual meaning
  • In a soft voice, Lifaen said, "Once we were like you, bright, fleeting, and as ephemeral as the morning dew."   (source)
  • Nicolas was also close to the little girl's heart, but there was something ephemeral and volatile about him.   (source)
  • For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit?   (source)
  • They were fragments of dreams-but solid, to be touched, to be felt, to be used-not ephemeral at all.   (source)
    ephemeral = fleeting (existing only for a short time)
  • The tearoom, called "the abode of fancy," is an ephemeral structure built to enclose a moment of poetic intuition.   (source)
    ephemeral = existing only for a short time
  • He had so long since ceased to direct his course towards any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of ephemeral satisfactions,   (source)
  • Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence.   (source)
    ephemeral = lasting only for a short time
  • Of course, all that happened tonight was ephemeral,   (source)
    ephemeral = existing only for a short time
  • the ephemeral flower   (source)
  • The flower will wither in a few moments and leave nothing save its brown seed vessels; but thence may be perpetuated a race as ephemeral as itself.   (source)
  • It was during an access of this kind that I suddenly left my home, and bending my steps towards the near Alpine valleys, sought in the magnificence, the eternity of such scenes, to forget myself and my ephemeral, because human, sorrows.   (source)
    ephemeral = lasting only for a short time
  • Ephemeral as the flamelike budding leaves, men flourish on the ripe wheat of the grainland, then in spiritless age they waste and die.   (source)
    ephemeral = temporary (existing only for a short time)
  • That sense of loss is exactly what we must anticipate, prepare for, and cherish to the last of our days; for it is only our heartbreak that finally refutes all that is ephemeral in love.†   (source)
  • Kalden said, looking to her, his eyes seeming to want to get back to the place where Mae was something more than ephemeral.†   (source)
  • Quickly, then, she picked Phoebe up and stood for a moment in the doorway of the apartment where she had spent so many hopeful years, years that seemed as ephemeral now as if they had never happened.†   (source)
  • Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form.†   (source)
  • Right through that ephemeral girl.†   (source)
  • Almost as a rule, they are minor and ephemeral-a flight of ochre-colored steps leading down the hill, the small segment of a bridge otherwise hidden by palms, an undistinguished part of a villa, a brown awning, a horse cart passing through an opening in the Aurelian Wall.†   (source)
  • She began to move infinitely slowly upwind across the swale, and I had the impression that both ears were cocked for the faintest sound, while I could see her nose wrinkling as she sifted the breeze for the most ephemeral scents.†   (source)
  • Her preoccupation with her sweetheart was maddening, and I could hardly bear the thought—thrust it into the back of my mind—that this precipitate passion she had for a few hot moments lavished on me was the result of a transfer of identity; that I was merely an instant surrogate Jozef, flesh to occupy space in an ephemeral fantasy.†   (source)
  • He was about fifteen years old and looked faintly perturbed about being pulled out of class for a project so ephemeral and disorganized.†   (source)
  • We held on to our letters as on to all far-away or ephemeral things at that moment, to our secret hope or joy and our despair too, which she might require of us.†   (source)
  • He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.†   (source)
  • And, of course, the most famous apparition of all, reported numerous times in the Capitol basement—an ephemeral black cat that prowled the substructure's eerie maze of narrow passageways and cubicles.   (source)
    ephemeral = existing only for a short time
  • But I am aware of our ephemeral passage.   (source)
  • In fact, if there could be any hope, it would be very ephemeral,   (source)
    ephemeral = lasting only for a short time
  • As is usual with bright natures, the deity that lies ignominiously chained within an ephemeral human carcase shone out of him like a ray.   (source)
    ephemeral = existing only for a short time
  • Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about eighteen, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour.   (source)
  • I would contest nothing; but I tell you that the favor of a minister is ephemeral, and that a man must be mad to attach himself to a minister.   (source)
    ephemeral = lasting only for a short time
  • Marfa Petrovna had not the slightest intention of settling anything substantial on him, having regard for his children's interests, and, if she left him anything, it would only be the merest sufficiency, something insignificant and ephemeral, which would not last a year for a man of his habits.   (source)
  • She told him, convinced that it had been something so innocent and ephemeral that in fact it was rather touching.†   (source)
  • For his only point of reference in his own past was the ephemeral love affair with Fermina Daza, and only what concerned her had anything to do with reckoning his life.†   (source)
  • That, along with so many other ephemeral images in the course of so many years, would suddenly appear to Florentino Ariza at the whim of fate, and disappear again in the same way, leaving behind a throb of longing in his heart.†   (source)
  • So that Florentino Ariza heard about many acts of disloyalty, and even some state secrets, which important clients and even local officials confided to their ephemeral lovers, not caring if they could be overheard in the adjoining rooms.†   (source)
  • It was the first time in half a century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity, and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren.†   (source)
  • He remembered Ángeles Alfaro, the most ephemeral and best loved of them all, who came for six months to teach string instruments at the Music School and who spent moonlit nights with him on the flat roof of her house, as naked as the day she was born, playing the most beautiful suites in all music on a cello whose voice became human between her golden thighs.†   (source)
  • But everyone passed her by, indifferent, for little did they care that a river flowed from century to century through their ephemeral city.†   (source)
  • But the victory, if one could call it that, was ephemeral and elusive, a brief and strident shout atop a mountain that was more noise than substance, more smoke than flames.†   (source)
  • …from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.†   (source)
  • But still the phrases flickered on as ephemeral and capricious as before, as thwarting-the abrupt and fragmentary glimpses of a figure passing behind the brief notches of parapets.†   (source)
  • As he climbed the swart stairs, stained with every upward step by shallow, rocking lantern-light, he muttered, and this he did not so much to populate the silence with ephemeral, figment selves, but to follow the links of his own slow thinking, which when he failed to hear, he lost: "And wut?†   (source)
  • I am the ghost of Louis, an ephemeral passer-by, in whose mind dreams have power, and garden sounds when in the early morning petals float on fathomless depths and the birds sing.†   (source)
  • Another year's instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles.†   (source)
  • They talked on slight and ephemeral subjects, and when his tea was brought up he told the amazed little servant that a cup was to be set for Sue.†   (source)
  • It was so small, in fact, such a tiny, initial, ephemeral concentration of something immaterial—of something not yet matter, but related to matter—of energy, that one could not yet, or perhaps no longer, think of it as matter, but rather as both the medium and boundary between the material and immaterial.†   (source)
  • That was the feeling which possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them.†   (source)
  • Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when, their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the harvesters.†   (source)
  • They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multitude they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.†   (source)
  • In his jargon, they were dealing with biopsychic projections of subconscious complexes into the objective world, processes whose source one should attribute to the medium, a person whose constitution was in a somnambulant state; one might speak of such events as objectified dreams to the extent that they demonstrated an ideoplastic capability in nature— the capacity of thoughts, under certain conditions, to assume substance and thus reveal themselves in ephemeral reality.†   (source)
  • Thinking that Beauty—in the order of feminine elegance—was governed by occult laws into the knowledge of which they had been initiated, and that they had the power to realise it, I accepted before seeing them, like the truth of a coming revelation, the appearance of their clothes, of their carriages and horses, of a thousand details among which I placed my faith as in an inner soul which gave the cohesion of a work of art to that ephemeral and changing pageant.†   (source)
  • …this dreaming child—as the face of a king is scrutinised by a petitioner lost in the crowd—that scrap of nature, that corner of a garden could never suppose that it would be thanks to him that they would be elected to survive in all their most ephemeral details; and yet the scent of hawthorn which strays plundering along the hedge from which, in a little while, the dog-roses will have banished it, a sound of footsteps followed by no echo, upon a gravel path, a bubble formed at the side…†   (source)
  • Swann was irritated, as a rule, by the sight of these flowers, which had then been 'the rage' in Paris for about a year, but it had pleased him, on this occasion, to see the gloom of the little lobby shot with rays of pink and gold and white by the fragrant petals of these ephemeral stars, which kindle their cold fires in the murky atmosphere of winter afternoons.†   (source)
  • A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he.†   (source)
  • It seems as though man's lodging partook of his ephemeral character, and God's house of his eternity.†   (source)
  • It is the only one of them all which can hope for immortality; but if it be connected with their ephemeral authority, it shares their fortunes, and may fall with those transient passions which supported them for a day.†   (source)
  • Isabel pronounced them with confidence "ephemeral," but she esteemed the courage, energy and good-humour of the writer, who, without parents and without property, had adopted three of the children of an infirm and widowed sister and was paying their school-bills out of the proceeds of her literary labour.†   (source)
  • Thus it is that the American at times steals an hour from himself; and laying aside for a while the petty passions which agitate his life, and the ephemeral interests which engross it, he strays at once into an ideal world, where all is great, eternal, and pure.†   (source)
  • These tinctured the silent bosom of the clouds above them and lit up their ephemeral caves, which seemed thenceforth to become scalding caldrons.†   (source)
  • In 1792, at the very time when the anti-Christian republic of France began its ephemeral existence, the legislative body of Massachusetts promulgated the following law, to compel the citizens to observe the Sabbath.†   (source)
  • Some great decorum, some fetich[62] of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up[63] by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down.†   (source)
  • BOOK SECOND THE ARRIVAL I Tidings of the Comer On fine days at this time of the year, and earlier, certain ephemeral operations were apt to disturb, in their trifling way, the majestic calm of Egdon Heath.†   (source)
  • scenes ephemeral   (source)
    ephemeral = existing only for a short time
  • Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless, sleepless, calm, Holding Humanity as in thy open hand, as some ephemeral toy, How ill to e'er forget thee!†   (source)
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