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ineffable
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  • He felt an ineffable love for her.   (source)
  • "It must excite ineffable feelings in the breast of a father to have lived to see a son to whose educ[atio]n and happiness his life has been so devoted so eminently distinguished by the voice of his country," Jefferson wrote.   (source)
    ineffable = indescribably wonderful
  • So many times she'd tried to draw him, she thought, tried to capture that ineffable quality that made Jace himself, but her fingers had never been able to get what she saw down on paper.   (source)
    ineffable = indescribable
  • I held his lifeless little hand and thought about the talks the two of us had, the ineffable sadness always in his brown eyes.†   (source)
  • So, while I'll continue to seek out wild places, I know I don't need to travel to the Amazon or Everest to experience the ineffable.†   (source)
  • Her eyes were open and she was staring at me with a look ineffably grieving.†   (source)
  • I know how men will say this, to describe that womanly affect they find ineffable.†   (source)
  • Unlike Marxism, it is ineffable, and it cannot be explained in words.†   (source)
  • This helps to explain my ineffably sad dream, where, hotly embracing Leslie once more on the couch, I managed at last to fondle one bare breast, which, however, felt like a soggy ball of dough beneath my hand, itself tightly imprisoned within the rim of a murderous brassiere made of wormwood and wire.†   (source)
  • The scene between the captive girl and her master was both ineffably mysterious and shamelessly frank.†   (source)
  • Edmund Quincy spoke bitterly of the "ineffable meanness of the lion turned spaniel in his fawnings on the masters whose hands he was licking for the sake of the dirty puddings they might have to toss to him."†   (source)
  • There was an ineffable quality about Mrs. Serto's daughter now.†   (source)
  • That was the court's ineffable gift to you.†   (source)
  • "The ineffable happens, things do take a turn," he said.†   (source)
  • I was seized by the ineffable power of membership, of finally belonging to something.†   (source)
  • She had been housed with the captain while the rest of them had gone on to entertain the commander; the doctor had reserved her, implying to the commander that she was not a virgin like the others, who would offer him the salubrious and then other ineffable effects of his taking their maidenhood, which to a soldier is like an amulet of life and rebirth.†   (source)
  • …a broken sofa in the snow, and Klara thought these pictures were utterly modern in one sense only, that the subjects seemed photographed, overtly posing or caught unaware, sometimes self-consciously aloof, a housing project massed behind them or here's a man with lidded eyes and a watch cap and one of those bloated polyester jackets and a gun with banana clip—you see how Acey belies the photographic surface by making the whole picture float ineffably on the arc of the cartridge clip.†   (source)
  • I personally decided to wait, to see, during ten years, if I would be capable to find the proper words, the proper pace, the proper melody, or maybe even the proper silence to describe the ineffable.†   (source)
  • He threw aside all the great things he knew, he threw aside the ineffable beauties, and the principles of light, and he burned with their memory.†   (source)
  • And why should the boy assume that the old man, having seen what he had seen, having contended throughout his life with great and ineffable forces, having survived into old age, and having known, intimately and deeply, both natural and feminine beauty, would want to say anything at all?†   (source)
  • In one of his essays on painting, Alessandro had expressed the opinion that a face cannot adequately be described in words, or even in sculpture, that it was a province exclusively of the painters, that the recognition of a face was wholly dependent upon the ineffably expressed variations of light and color for which language had few words and sculpture no shapes.†   (source)
  • I fell asleep that night thinking of Tradd's ineffable sadness, of Mark's gruff gentleness, of Pig's volatility and blind loyalty, of my virginity, of my pleasure in talking in bed at night, of secrets between roommates, of my inability to tell boys who loved me that I loved them.†   (source)
  • …as the gestalt: the blissful temper of the sunny June day, the ecstatic pomp of Mr. Handel's riverborne jam session, and this festive little room whose open windows admitted a fragrance of spring blossoms which pierced me with that sense of ineffable promise and certitude I don't recall having felt more than once or twice after the age of twenty-two—or let us say twenty-five—when the ambitious career I had cut out for myself seemed so often to be the consequence of pitiable lunacy.†   (source)
  • Such terms are only clues to the transcendency. the ineffable.†   (source)
  • The warm, faintly soap-scented humidity of her body, ineffably sweet "I'm so relieved to see you again.†   (source)
  • He remembered the magnificent voice he had heard in the lobby of the strike meeting, and he imagined a giant of a man, with a rich mane of hair, perhaps just turning gray, with bold, broad features of an ineffable benevolence, something vaguely like the countenance of God the Father.†   (source)
  • It is a song of love for one's far distant country, it is informed with longing for that land where they shall not hurt or destroy in all that holy mountain, for that unattainable and ineffable land where there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, for the land that cannot be again, of hills and grass and bracken, the land where you were born.†   (source)
  • When Herbert Duckworth smiled …. when Herbert Duckworth came into the room …." here she broke off, shook her head quickly from side to side and screwed her face up, as if he were ineffable; no words could describe him.†   (source)
  • What is understood is that time and eternity are two aspects of the same experience-whole, two planes of the same nondual ineffable; i. e., the jewel of eternity is in the lotus of birth and death: om mani padme hum.†   (source)
  • The ineffable teaching of the beatitude beyond imagination comes to us clothed, necessarily, in figures reminiscent of the imagined beatitude of infancy; hence the deceptive childishness of the tales.†   (source)
  • "You don't believe me, I suppose," went on the other, with an air of ineffable conceit.†   (source)
  • He smiled with an ineffably benign superiority.†   (source)
  • On her face there was a look of ineffable content.†   (source)
  • Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.†   (source)
  • She sighed a sigh of ineffable satisfaction, as if her cup of happiness were now full.†   (source)
  • She submitted, still with her pure, trusting smile, in which there was something ineffably passive.†   (source)
  • So, then, he felt himself ineffably superior to me in every respect!†   (source)
  • 'Your prerogative!' sneered Mrs. Bumble, with ineffable contempt.†   (source)
  • The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness.†   (source)
  • It remained, however, gentle and veiled in an ineffable half-light.†   (source)
  • The voice was that of Phoebus de Châteaupers; that which took place within her was ineffable.†   (source)
  • Morning to ye, shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I'm sorry I stopped ye."†   (source)
  • Mercedes turned her eyes with an ineffable look towards heaven.†   (source)
  • He heard an ineffable voice, which must have been "her voice."†   (source)
  • What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the sunset!†   (source)
  • Such a day is an ineffable mixture of dream and of reality.†   (source)
  • On the one hand, miasms; on the other, an ineffable perfume.†   (source)
  • It was the ineffable first embrace of two maiden souls in the ideal.†   (source)
  • Her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection.†   (source)
  • Those leaping horses, striking sparks from the cobbles in their forward lunge, were creatures to be ineffably admired.†   (source)
  • Now you, sir, will you answer me or not?" he went on suddenly, gazing at Gania with ineffable malice.†   (source)
  • Through the scene between Marguerite and the elder Duval, Lena wept unceasingly, and I sat helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter of idyllic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable happiness was only to be the measure of his fall.†   (source)
  • I yearn for it; and when I drink it I savour every drop, and afterwards I feel my soul swimming in ineffable happiness.†   (source)
  • To him, the spirit lodged within Billy, and looking out from his welkin eyes as from windows, that ineffability it was which made the dimple in his dyed cheek, suppled his joints, and dancing in his yellow curls made him preeminently the Handsome Sailor.†   (source)
  • At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity.†   (source)
  • Bill is puffing and blowing, but there is a look of ineffable peace and growing content on his rose-pink features.†   (source)
  • A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.†   (source)
  • Incandescent rainbows shone above it, blue, red, and golden lights played about it; but the stream itself was white, ineffable.†   (source)
  • Magnificent vistas opened onto regions toward which they were slowly climbing, a world of ineffable, phantasmagoric Alpine peaks, soon lost again to awestruck eyes as the tracks took another curve.†   (source)
  • It passed, with simple and immortal movements, scattering on every side the bounties of its grace, smiling ineffably still; but Swann thought that he could now discern in it some disenchantment.†   (source)
  • Her lips trembled into a smile, but the eyes remained distant and serious, as if bent on some ineffable vision.†   (source)
  • …he meant the gentle reverence, which, though hidden beneath smiles, they showed one another at every turn, almost imperceptible and yet so evident in both the physical connections and the deep-seated ideals that bound them all; he meant the dignity, bordering on gravity, though totally fused with good cheer, which alone defined their every deed, an ineffable spiritual influence, earnest yet never gloomy, devout yet always reasonable— though not lacking a certain ceremonial quality.†   (source)
  • He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions.†   (source)
  • I recognise, moreover, that our ineffable and Athenian—oh, how infinitely Athenian—Republic is capable of honouring, in the person of that obscurantist old she-Capet, the first of our chiefs of police.†   (source)
  • Life was passionate and manifold, and because it offered so much they felt a restless yearning for something more; because they were human they were unsatisfied; and they threw this eager vitality of theirs into a vehement striving after the ineffable.†   (source)
  • The time element of music is singular: a segment of human earthly existence in which it gushes forth, thereby ineffably enhancing and ennobling life.†   (source)
  • The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent, perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil were still alive), breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and made of that stage on which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on which a supernatural ceremony could be performed.†   (source)
  • …in its molten liquidity the motifs which now and then emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown; recognised only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instil, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name; ineffable;—if our memory, like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, did not, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast them with those…†   (source)
  • Lydgate turned his dark eyes on her and watched her as she delicately handled the tea-service with her taper fingers, and looked at the objects immediately before her with no curve in her face disturbed, and yet with an ineffable protest in her air against all people with unpleasant manners.†   (source)
  • "Had you seen her this morning, Mary," he continued, "attending with such ineffable sweetness and patience to all the demands of her aunt's stupidity, working with her, and for her, her colour beautifully heightened as she leant over the work, then returning to her seat to finish a note which she was previously engaged in writing for that stupid woman's service, and all this with such unpretending gentleness, so much as if it were a matter of course that she was not to have a moment at…†   (source)
  • Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road.†   (source)
  • "You don't expect anybody to believe this, about the lady and the sovereign, do you?" says the constable, eyeing him aside with ineffable disdain.†   (source)
  • Miss Squeers made no more direct reply than surveying her former friend from top to toe, and elevating her nose in the air with ineffable disdain.†   (source)
  • Sometimes a mischievous child risked his skin and bones for the ineffable pleasure of driving a pin into Quasimodo's hump.†   (source)
  • Morrel listened to catch the last sound of her dress brushing the branches, and of her footstep on the gravel, then raised his eyes with an ineffable smile of thankfulness to heaven for being permitted to be thus loved, and then also disappeared.†   (source)
  • FAUST Thou, monster, wilt nor see nor own How this pure soul, of faith so lowly, So loving and ineffable,— The faith alone That her salvation is,—with scruples holy Pines, lest she hold as lost the man she loves so well!†   (source)
  • These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it.†   (source)
  • But it is the singularity of the expression which reigns upon the face--it is the intense, the wonderful, the thrilling evidence of old age, so utter, so extreme, which excites within my spirit a sense--a sentiment ineffable.†   (source)
  • What ineffable misery the bigoted Separatists or Pharisees endured at finding themselves elbowed and laughed at in the procurator's presence in Caesarea by the devotees of Gerizim!†   (source)
  • He began with being a young man of promise; at Oxford he distinguished himself, to his father's ineffable satisfaction, and the people about him said it was a thousand pities so clever a fellow should be shut out from a career.†   (source)
  • And Duncan," she added, looking round upon the youth with a smile of ineffable innocence, "even our own brave and noble Duncan has escaped without a hurt."†   (source)
  • How she longed for the ineffable sentiments of love that she had tried to figure to herself out of books!†   (source)
  • "Or a haughty gentleman of HIM?" cries mademoiselle, referring to Sir Leicester with ineffable disdain.†   (source)
  • The things she had said were answered only by his scorn, and she could see he was ineffably ashamed of her.†   (source)
  • A gleam of ineffable love lighted his face as he said, "The Lord hath been good to me in many ways; but thou, Esther, art the sovereign excellence of his favor."†   (source)
  • She would come directly, charming, agitated, looking back at the glances that followed her, and with her flounced dress, her gold eyeglass, her thin shoes, with all sorts of elegant trifles that he had never enjoyed, and with the ineffable seduction of yielding virtue.†   (source)
  • On the three pillars only six hundred feet away were fame, increase of fortune, promotions, and a triumph ineffably sweetened by hate, all in store for him!†   (source)
  • Noirtier regarded the lovers with a look of ineffable tenderness, while Barrois, who had remained in the room in the character of a man privileged to know everything that passed, smiled on the youthful couple as he wiped the perspiration from his bald forehead.†   (source)
  • Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form.†   (source)
  • There was in the intonation of that "Oh! no," uttered after that "Oh! yes," an ineffable something which wounded Fleur-de-Lys.†   (source)
  • To the heart divinely original, yet so human in all the better elements of humanity, going with sure prevision to a death of all the inventions of men the foulest and most cruel, breathing even then in the forecast shadow of the awful event, and still as hungry and thirsty for love and faith as in the beginning, how precious and ineffably soothing the farewell exclamation of the grateful woman: "To God in the highest, glory!†   (source)
  • The baroness shrugged her shoulders with an air of ineffable contempt, while her husband, affecting not to observe this unconjugal gesture, turned towards Monte Cristo and said,—"Upon my word, count, I am quite sorry not to have met you sooner.†   (source)
  • It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting.†   (source)
  • The fury which had contracted it was followed by a strange smile full of ineffable sweetness, gentleness, and tenderness.†   (source)
  • The very anticipations of delight to be enjoyed in his forthcoming visits—the bright, pure gleam of heavenly happiness it diffused over the almost deadly warfare in which he had voluntarily engaged, illumined his whole countenance with a look of ineffable joy and calmness, as, immediately after Villefort's departure, his thoughts flew back to the cheering prospect before him, of tasting, at least, a brief respite from the fierce and stormy passions of his mind.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, from her dull eyes there escaped a look, an ineffable look, a profound, lugubrious, imperturbable look, incessantly fixed upon a corner of the cell which could not be seen from without; a gaze which seemed to fix all the sombre thoughts of that soul in distress upon some mysterious object.†   (source)
  • M. Gillenormand's mobile face was no longer expressive of anything but rough and ineffable good-nature.†   (source)
  • Her pure, red lips half smiled; her serene and candid brow became troubled, at intervals, under her thoughts, like a mirror under the breath; and from beneath her long, drooping, black eyelashes, there escaped a sort of ineffable light, which gave to her profile that ideal serenity which Raphael found at the mystic point of intersection of virginity, maternity, and divinity.†   (source)
  • But this painful respiration hardly troubled a sort of ineffable serenity which overspread her countenance, and which transfigured her in her sleep.†   (source)
  • By virtue of something ineffable and melancholy which enveloped him, she felt the look in his eyes which she could not see.†   (source)
  • The old man talked but little, and, at times, he fixed on her eyes overflowing with an ineffable paternity.†   (source)
  • They might have torn out his nails before one of the two sacred syllables of which that ineffable name, Cosette, was composed.†   (source)
  • She contemplated herself from head to foot in a long mirror, then exclaimed, in an outburst of ineffable ecstasy: "There was once a King and a Queen.†   (source)
  • Then she raised her arms to heaven, and her white face became ineffable; her lips moved; she was praying in a low voice.†   (source)
  • The most ineffable accents of the feminine voice employed to lull you, and supplying the vanished universe to you.†   (source)
  • All at once, in the midst of this profound calm, a fresh sound arose; a sound as celestial, divine, ineffable, ravishing, as the other had been horrible.†   (source)
  • Leblanc and his daughter" had just quitted, a handkerchief, a very simple handkerchief, without embroidery, but white, and fine, and which seemed to him to exhale ineffable perfume.†   (source)
  • Only, as he was five and fifty, and Cosette eight years of age, all that might have been love in the whole course of his life flowed together into a sort of ineffable light.†   (source)
  • But at the ineffable moment which she was then passing through, it cast but a slight shadow, a faint cloud, and she was so full of joy that the cloud did not last long.†   (source)
  • On the day when their eyes met at last, and said to each other those first, obscure, and ineffable things which the glance lisps, Cosette did not immediately understand.†   (source)
  • When two mouths, rendered sacred by love, approach to create, it is impossible that there should not be, above that ineffable kiss, a quivering throughout the immense mystery of stars.†   (source)
  • It was what is said in the bower, a prelude to what will be said in the chamber; a lyrical effusion, strophe and sonnet intermingled, pleasing hyperboles of cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a bouquet and exhaling a celestial perfume, an ineffable twitter of heart to heart.†   (source)
  • Jean Valjean was undergoing a new birth; his happiness was reviving in these ineffable rays; the Luxembourg, the prowling young stranger, Cosette's coldness,—all these clouds upon his soul were growing dim.†   (source)
  • His task finished, he returns to ineffable ecstasies, to contemplation, to joys; he beholds his feet set in afflictions, in obstacles, on the pavement, in the nettles, sometimes in the mire; his head in the light.†   (source)
  • She listened in bewilderment, she looked on in affright, and at every word uttered by M. Madeleine she felt the frightful shades of hatred crumble and melt within her, and something warm and ineffable, indescribable, which was both joy, confidence and love, dawn in her heart.†   (source)
  • After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is impossible, even to God.†   (source)
  • An ineffable moment ensued.†   (source)
  • An exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by ingenuousness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as a dazzling and innocent creature who walks along, holding in her hand the key to paradise without being conscious of it.†   (source)
  • She had never been pretty, even when she was young; she had large, blue, prominent eyes, and a long arched nose; but her whole visage, her whole person, breathed forth an ineffable goodness, as we stated in the beginning.†   (source)
  • The point as to which there exists no doubt is, that Sister Simplice, the sole witness of the incident, often said that at the moment that Jean Valjean whispered in Fantine's ear, she distinctly beheld an ineffable smile dawn on those pale lips, and in those dim eyes, filled with the amazement of the tomb.†   (source)
  • O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!†   (source)
  • Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name Ineffable, in heaven hight: K.H., their master, whose identity is no secret to adepts.†   (source)
  • The prohibition of the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meal: the hebdomadary symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots: the circumcision of male infants: the supernatural character of Judaic scripture: the ineffability of the tetragrammaton: the sanctity of the sabbath.†   (source)
  • and thou, ineffable guest and sister!†   (source)
  • One effort more, my altar this bleak sand; That Thou O God my life hast lighted, With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee, Light rare untellable, lighting the very light, Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages; For that O God, be it my latest word, here on my knees, Old, poor, and paralyzed, I thank Thee.†   (source)
  • The ineffable sweetness of your divine gaze Shattered my stout heart and set it ablaze.†   (source)
  • To whom the Son with calm aspect and clear, Lightning divine, ineffable, serene, Made answer.†   (source)
  • Thus while God spake, ambrosial fragrance fill'd All Heaven, and in the blessed Spirits elect Sense of new joy ineffable diffus'd.†   (source)
  • Can a man who by divine meditations is admitted as it were into the conversation of this ineffable, incomprehensible Majesty, think days, or years, or ages, too long for the continuance of so ravishing an honour?†   (source)
  • He said, and on his Son with rays direct Shone full; he all his Father full expressed Ineffably into his face received; And thus the Filial Godhead answering spake.†   (source)
  • ineffable mimics, illusionists, and artistes…   (source)
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