toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

gossamer
in a sentence

show 127 more with this conextual meaning
  • As the last pirate began his climb, I ran down the catwalk and hurried up the ladder to the aft crow's nest, past the shimmering gossamer skin of the gas cells.†   (source)
  • A second ago an insect or bird the size and color of a hummingbird but with gossamer wings a meter across paused five meters out to inspect me before diving toward the sea with folded wings.†   (source)
  • The shimmering forms of dryads emerged from their trees—a legion of Daphnes in green gossamer dresses.†   (source)
  • A few bogies shoot past Hiro, already so spread out as to be nothing more than an annoyance, and splat into bystanders, wrapping them in sticky gossamer veils.†   (source)
  • A gossamer blanket of coaldust floated down like a dirty blessing and gently smothered the traffic.†   (source)
  • A silver mist surrounded Perry Fleming, rising off her skin in gossamer threads.†   (source)
  • My fingers danced; intricate and quick they spun something gossamer and tremulous into the circle of light our fire had made.†   (source)
  • Jessica felt that the night was dominated by degrees of smallness in substances beneath their feet and hands—boulders or pea gravel or flaked rock or pea sand or sand itself or grit or dust or gossamer powder.†   (source)
  • She swung her own legs over the edge of the bed and slid into gossamer panties.†   (source)
  • Wraithlike flames, blue and gossamer, flickered across the surface of the oil and then vanished with small shrieks of fury.†   (source)
  • The dew and gossamer had dried early from the grass and by midmorning the finches had fallen silent.†   (source)
  • Eve is lovely, a valentine hairline, white gossamer panties.†   (source)
  • Tonight, when the veil between the worlds is thin—when magic is afoot within the mundane—perhaps Nyx will grant your petitions and dust you with the gossamer mist of dreams fulfilled.†   (source)
  • For a brief second, I was distracted by the profusion of white blossoms that hung in garlands from everything in the room that wasn't alive, dripping with long lines of white gossamer ribbons.†   (source)
  • The one currently floating through your head on gossamer wings.†   (source)
  • The transparent underskin tore like gossamer under his fingers.†   (source)
  • In the gossamer stillness, my paranoia ratchets up.†   (source)
  • Strung between a window in each of two towers was a gossamer thread of china from which hung—laundry!†   (source)
  • Slanting through the thin silver mist; the dew upon the yellow leaves was glimmering, and the woven nets of gossamer twinkled on every bush.†   (source)
  • A very, very long time ago, when this world and your own were much younger, and not so different, the boundaries between them were as gossamer, and could be freely passed.†   (source)
  • But worst of all, they were transparent, gossamer, like stage drops made of silk.†   (source)
  • Enoch said, "Mine—it's a mine!" and what had seemed like gossamer wings resolved suddenly and clearly into a parachute, the fat silver body hanging below it packed with explosives; an angel of death floating serenely toward earth.†   (source)
  • On trying to get the backing to stick again, I spied a gossamer-thin letter paper folded and ensconced behind that backing, the lines of blue writing showing through.†   (source)
  • Below it was another dress, this one made of silvery silk, with slender bejeweled straps holding up its gossamer weight.†   (source)
  • There was a light gossamer touch on my face.†   (source)
  • As Max watched, the constellation Orion was outlined in gossamer threads of tiny golden lights.†   (source)
  • THEY MAY look a little like angels with their gossamer dragonfly wings folded along the contours of their backs, but they are not.†   (source)
  • It was gossamer, silent, and absolute.†   (source)
  • A morning mist hung over the water, as thin as gossamer and the wisps of memory.†   (source)
  • Though I have a new life now, and am enjoying the city for the most part, I will never forget that the passing down of memories is the strongest link in the gossamer bridge that binds us as people.†   (source)
  • …lack, lurked the sea. the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon's tearing-free and monument to her exile; you could not hear or even smell this but it was there, something tidal began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer micro-electrode is yet too gross for finding.†   (source)
  • But, as the children were quick to see, even such a charnel-house as the forest centre was not devoid of beauty - the staghorns, their leaves rearing skyward like the antlers of mating deer; the rock lilies, their bells as white as virgin snow; and the orchids, dangling like gossamer clouds out of the dark trees.†   (source)
  • In fact, like Ben, he was born to be a saint, gentle and unselfish--he even had the look of a saint: straight blond hair as soft as gossamer, dark blue eyes, long lashes, a quick, open smile--and unlike Ben, he saw what was there, not angels in pear trees but pears.†   (source)
  • From the top she was level with the little spiders sailing past on their gossamer threads.†   (source)
  • And because there's no sense for one's eyes to be blinking When all they behold has been scorched by the sun, And the fine ashes of Autumn (its white gossamer) Float in at the windows with each vagrant breeze.†   (source)
  • The presence of night was beside them-a beast in gossamer, with no shine of outline, only of ornament-rings, earrings… .†   (source)
  • I sat up, and a gossamer sheet floated away.   (source)
  • pretty speeches full of gossamer rhetoric
  • Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream.   (source)
    gossamer = insubstantial (thin) and delicate
  • There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.   (source)
    gossamer = characterized by unusual lightness and delicacy
  • The women were in white gossamer gowns… with golden shoes.†   (source)
  • Inside, the sailmakers would be in a frenzy, seeking out every tear in her gossamer gas cells.†   (source)
  • Many were ! it brilliantly, festooned with colored lanterns and shifting veils of gossamer light.†   (source)
  • You'd think the thing was spun from rusted gossamer.†   (source)
  • Radiant gossamers, beautiful even in daylight, flitted among tropical vegetation of a hundred hues.†   (source)
  • Like the ones at Camp Half-Blood, these wore gossamer dresses.†   (source)
  • The bed was huge and white, with clouds of gossamer floating down from the canopy to the floor.†   (source)
  • Her long black hair was braided down behind the shoulders of her gossamer dress.†   (source)
  • Clary thought of the silver dress at the bottom of Amatis's chest, the lovely gossamer of it.†   (source)
  • From it, he withdrew silvery, gossamer-fine strands of thought clinging to the wand and deposited them into the basin.†   (source)
  • A gossamer-thin white spiderweb was twisting and spinning from the Witch of Endor's fingers and wrapping itself like a bandage around each of Sophie's fingers.†   (source)
  • The autumn sun poured in through gossamer curtains and onto marigold tiles, giving the whole room an amber glow.†   (source)
  • Inside the curtain, Rahel closed her eyes and thought of the green river, of the quiet deep-swimming fish, and the gossamer wings of the dragonflies (that could see behind them) in the sun.†   (source)
  • The folds of her midnight-blue gossamer robe fell around her, and her white hair was long and unbound.†   (source)
  • The women's beautiful gossamer gowns billowed as they raised in their right hands golden orbs and called out in unison, "I was with you in the beginning, in the dawn of all that is holy, I bore you from the womb before the start of day.†   (source)
  • I'd seen hundreds of shattered windshields in the junkyard, each one unique, with its particular spray of gossamer extruding from the point of impact, a chronicle of the collision.†   (source)
  • Nothing stirred except the tiny arboreais and gossamers we had seen flitting through the trees yesterday.†   (source)
  • As true darkness fell, innumerable prairie gossamers-much paler than their forest cousins, but also of greater wingspan, luminescent shades the size of small children-danced in the vales and valleys of the gently rolling hills.†   (source)
  • Aboard the Girandole, Old Kady lights the lanterns and candle-globes hanging from the sagging second tier and, as if not to be outdone, the darkened jungle begins to glow with the faint phosphorescence of decay while glowbirds and multihued gossamers can be seen floating from branch to branch in the darker upper regions.†   (source)
  • Even in the still shadowed places, glowbirds nestled like Japanese lanterns above lighted walkways, glowing swingvines, and illuminated hanging bridges, while fireflies from Old Earth and radiant gossamers from Maul-Covenant blinked and coded their way through labyrinths of leaves, mixing with constellations sufficiently to fool even the most starwise traveler.†   (source)
  • She had long, dark hair cut Cleopatra-style and a white gossamer dress that complemented her graceful figure.†   (source)
  • The plane lifted and banked to the right; the Black Forest fell away beneath tattered layers of clouds that hid the world beneath a veil of pale gossamer.†   (source)
  • Long velvet ropes of moss hang from the tops of trees like gossamer green curtains; branches blossom with pink and white flowers.†   (source)
  • Just over the top, he knew, the wind was flowing up a white ramp many kilometers in length, and the gossamer rivers of snow that it pushed before it leapt here into the blue.†   (source)
  • She was pretty in a dryad-y way, with her purple gossamer dress and her elfish face, but her eyes were green-tinted with chlorophyll from crying.†   (source)
  • At first they were no more than pale gossamer-threads, so fine that they only twinkled fitfully where the Moon caught them, but steadily they grew broader and clearer, until their design could be guessed.†   (source)
  • I had the strong sense of the first evening I had entered Notre-Dame, but then that was gore, like something gossamer and precious snatched away from me.†   (source)
  • Propelled by the breeze, a spider hanging from a gossamer strand of silk drifted past Eragon, rising and falling on the invisible eddies of air.†   (source)
  • But I tore my eyes from the bowery canopy and searched across the rows of satin-draped chairs—blushing more deeply as I took in the crowd of faces all focused on me—until I found him at last, standing before an arch overflowing with more flowers, more gossamer.†   (source)
  • The heat, by this time, was singeing my clothes, had caught Claudia's gossamer gown, so that I grabbed her up and ran down the passage trying to stifle the flames with my body.†   (source)
  • I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen, of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been; Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.†   (source)
  • They appeared to be mining not stone but white light, and when they took the stone in slabs and caused it to float through empty space, tracked by searchlights, hanging on gossamer cables and unseen chains, it was as if they were handling light in cubic measure, cutting and transporting it in dense selfgenerating quanta from the heart of magical cliffs.†   (source)
  • The car was decorated with more flowers that trailed in streamers along its length, and long gossamer ribbons that were tied to a dozen shoes—designer shoes that looked brand-new—dangling behind the bumper.†   (source)
  • Not even Melanie's influence could repair the break of that gossamer thread.†   (source)
  • A change had come upon our afternoon; it was not the thing of gossamer it had been.†   (source)
  • The nightdress was inside the case, thin as gossamer, apricot in colour.†   (source)
  • As the last sweet note melted away in a gossamer tremolo, a silence profound as that of the tombs, nay, of death itself, betokened the highest triumph the artist is destined to know upon this earth.†   (source)
  • He had morning gossamers on his trousers from being the first one through the yards, and he was ready for any conversation with up-to-the-minute gang news of the bloody nights of the beer barons and the last curb quotations--everybody was playing the stock market, led by Insull.†   (source)
  • She came to all the parties in a sort of cocoon of gossamer, my dear, as though she were part of some Celtic play or a heroine from Maeterlinck; and she would go to church.†   (source)
  • The cord is so gossamer that it breaks every day, but the marks get there finally, and finally one day the gossamer cord doesn't break and is enough.†   (source)
  • Looking at it from the roof of her house, she had thought that crossing it would make her feel like a gossamer-winged fairy flying through the air.†   (source)
  • She paused, expecting him to smile, but he went on smoking his cigarette, and I noticed, faint as gossamer, the line between his brows.†   (source)
  • I saw the little creases in the flesh of her neck, just the tiniest little creases, the little mark left day after day by that absolutely infinitesimal gossamer cord of thuggee which time throws around the prettiest neck every day to garrote it.†   (source)
  • He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide.†   (source)
  • 'I came away in rather a hurry,' he said to Mrs Van Hopper, a line, thin as gossamer, between his brows.†   (source)
  • Fascinated, he watched the heavy dark drop hang in the glistening cloud, and pull down the gossamer.†   (source)
  • With Ferdinand Barnacle he was gossamer.†   (source)
  • Her dress was of a dark and glossy silk, and fluttered like gossamer around her form.†   (source)
  • It was a little thing with a veil of gossamer on its head.†   (source)
  • Such an unworldly, uncalculating, gossamer creature is a relief to him and an amusement.†   (source)
  • He was merely floating those gossamer threads of thought which, like the spider's he Hoped would lay hold somewhere.†   (source)
  • A few of the dancers had already changed into ordinary dress; but most of them wore their skirts of gossamer gauze; and all had thought it the right thing to put on a special face for the occasion: all, that is, except little Jammes, whose fifteen summers--happy age!†   (source)
  • I drifted like a gossamer; the ground seemed to me a cloud, the hills a feather-weight, the air to have a current, like a running burn, which carried me to and fro.†   (source)
  • And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of civilisation was control, restraint—a poise of self that was as delicate as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as rigid as steel.†   (source)
  • Gossamers glimmered like threads of silver among the trees and the fir boughs and tassels seemed to utter friendly speech.†   (source)
  • They displayed this or that portion of their necks and breasts, lent their arms a radiant illusion with transparent gossamer.†   (source)
  • The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful.†   (source)
  • Looking over the damp sod in the direction of the sun, a glistening ripple of gossamer webs was visible to their eyes under the luminary, like the track of moonlight on the sea.†   (source)
  • Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous bedizening, its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a white mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate, somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head with an enticing glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl…†   (source)
  • All this was flung before Amory like an opened scroll, while ulterior to him and speculating upon him were those two breathless, listening forces: the gossamer aura that hung over and about the girl and that familiar thing by the window.†   (source)
  • Was there any point in her wearing gossamer sleeves so that men would be curious about her body—about her diseased body?†   (source)
  • Clouds, which had just received their gossamer robe of gold and purple from the setting sun, drifted slowly by; and Christine said to Raoul: "Soon we shall go farther and faster than the clouds, to the end of the world, and then you will leave me, Raoul.†   (source)
  • Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.†   (source)
  • During each hour of his segmented day, he had thought of her mouth, her cheekbones, her eyes— whose color, shape, and placement cut deep into his soul—of her limp back, the way she carried her head, the neck bones above the collar line of her blouse, her arms a radiant illusion under flimsiest gossamer.†   (source)
  • In the silence when this voice ceased Amory realized that there were other things in the room besides people…. over and around the figure crouched on the bed there hung an aura, gossamer as a moonbeam, tainted as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusively brooding already over the three of them…. and over by the window among the stirring curtains stood something else, featureless and indistinguishable, yet strangely familiar….†   (source)
  • But this arm was more beautiful, this arm bent gently behind the head—and was barely clad, because the fabric of the sleeve was thinner than that of the blouse, the flimsiest gossamer, which lent the arm just a hint of delicate illusion, making it even prettier than it probably would have been without any covering.†   (source)
  • Poor Hans Castorp—what an error his earlier assumption had been upon first making the acquaintance of those arms through thin gossamer: that once bared, bared against all good reason, those arms would affect him less deeply without the seductive "radiant illusion" of fabric, as he had called it that day.†   (source)
  • We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening flew away on gossamer-wings.†   (source)
  • The postilions, with a thousand gossamer gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the points to the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the courier was audible, trotting on ahead into the dun distance.†   (source)
  • A third with pins in her mouth was running about between the countess and Sonya, and a fourth held the whole of the gossamer garment up high on one uplifted hand.†   (source)
  • Now old Merlin stepped into view and cast a dainty web of gossamer threads over Sir Sagramor which turned him into Hamlet's ghost; the king made a sign, the bugles blew, Sir Sagramor laid his great lance in rest, and the next moment here he came thundering down the course with his veil flying out behind, and I went whistling through the air like an arrow to meet him —cocking my ear the while, as if noting the invisible knight's position and progress by hearing, not sight.†   (source)
  • One evening, at a bridal party (but not her own; for, so lost from self-control, she would have deemed it sin to marry), poor Alice was beckoned forth by her unseen despot, and constrained, in her gossamer white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean dwelling of a laboring-man.†   (source)
  • The sunshine was on them: that early autumn sunshine which we should know was not summer's, even if there were not the touches of yellow on the lime and chestnut; the Sunday sunshine too, which has more than autumnal calmness for the working man; the morning sunshine, which still leaves the dew-crystals on the fine gossamer webs in the shadow of the bushy hedgerows.†   (source)
  • The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.†   (source)
  • Young love-making—that gossamer web!†   (source)
  • When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another.†   (source)
  • But good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic acid, or else, spread over sheepwalks, and scattered in lonely houses and huts on the clayey or chalky corn-lands, where the rainy days look dreary.†   (source)
  • Then the night fell, changing the touch of the air, drawing a low, even haze, like a gossamer veil of blue, across the face of the country, and bringing out, keen and distinct, the smell of wood-smoke and cattle and the good scent of wheaten cakes cooked on ashes.†   (source)
  • But she was so incorporated with my existence, that it was the idlest of all fancies, and would soon rise out of my reach and sight, like gossamer floating in the air.†   (source)
  • …spot.
    This snare the Firegod forged, ablaze with his rage at War,
    then limped to the room where the bed of love stood firm
    and round the posts he poured the chains in a sweeping net
    with streams of others flowing down from the roofbeam,
    gossamer-fine as spider webs no man could see,
    not even a blissful god—
    the Smith had forged a masterwork of guile.
    Once he'd spun that cunning trap around his bed
    he feigned a trip to the well-built town of Lemnos,
    dearest to him by far of…†   (source)
  • White, between 1867 and 1870, launched various attacks upon these ludicrous gossamers of speech, and particularly upon /enceinte/, /limb/ and /female/, but only /female/ succumbed.†   (source)
  • How serene does she now arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour, shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call it gossamer.†   (source)
  • It's like a fine fine veil or web they have all over the skin, fine like what do you call it gossamer, and they're always spinning it out of them, fine as anything, like rainbow colours without knowing it.†   (source)
  • And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.†   (source)
  • Here comes the lady:—O, so light a foot Will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint: A lover may bestride the gossamer That idles in the wanton summer air And yet not fall; so light is vanity.†   (source)
  • As sore wonder some on cause of thunder, On ebb and flood, on gossamer and mist, And on all things, till that the cause is wist.†   (source)
  • Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air, So many fathom down precipitating, Thou'dst shiver'd like an egg: but thou dost breathe; Hast heavy substance; bleed'st not; speak'st; art sound.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)