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inscrutable
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  • Chang gave him an inscrutable smile.†   (source)
  • For though the officers of the KGB were trained to be inscrutable, gestures, language, and facial expressions have a fundamentally unruly syntax.†   (source)
  • Her eyes wet but inscrutable, cast inward to private thoughts.†   (source)
  • Crookshanks wandered over to them, leapt lightly into an empty chair, and stared inscrutably at Harry, rather as Hermione might look if she knew they weren't doing their homework properly.†   (source)
  • The family itself was inscrutable—except for the clear possession of a shared but unequal rage, which appeared to manifest itself the least in a slope-shouldered, slow-looking man in a short-sleeved shirt with a string tie.†   (source)
  • The inscrutable Swedes.†   (source)
  • This ghost had been summoned not by Lola imitating Hermione, or the inscrutable twins disappearing into the night.†   (source)
  • They feel hard, unwinking, like the shells of beetles: black, polished, inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Jack lifted his head and stared at the inscrutable masses of creeper that lay across the trail.†   (source)
  • Mazer's face went inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Nicholson glanced round, his face inscrutable against the light.†   (source)
  • Brom remained silent throughout it, his face inscrutable.†   (source)
  • I hugged him good-bye, this rather inscrutable tribesman who had risked his life for me.†   (source)
  • The very next comment by Marlow, the narrator, is that Jim was "inscrutable at heart."†   (source)
  • Father never felt more present to Abdullah, more vibrant, revealed, more truthful, than when he told his stories, as though the tales were pinholes into his opaque, inscrutable world.†   (source)
  • Farid lowered his head and gazed inscrutably at his bare toes.†   (source)
  • But now her expression was inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Fate was sometimes inscrutable.†   (source)
  • The inscrutability of all this was the kind of inscrutability you have when you suddenly enter a room where a furious argument has just ended.†   (source)
  • Perhaps for inscrutable reasons God has looked down and allowed the accused man to come to this pass, where his very life lies in your hands.†   (source)
  • It must all seem quite inscrutable and uncanny.†   (source)
  • One year later he did catch a freight, but because of his youth and the inscrutable ways of fate, he didn't find California and his Mother Dear—he got stranded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for two weeks.†   (source)
  • The old man's expression was inscrutable as he stared out of the window.†   (source)
  • All goods were sold by the kilo, and metrics were as inscrutable to me as Farsi.†   (source)
  • Eric nearly dropped the glass he was holding, for Vivaldo had thrown him off balance; he grinned up into Vivaldo's grinning face; and was aware, behind Vivaldo, of Ida, inscrutably watching, and the policeman, waiting.†   (source)
  • It seemed to emerge out of the stillness of an implacable force brooding on an inscrutable intention.†   (source)
  • A hint of his quizzical, inscrutable smile was upon it as he answered.†   (source)
  • His expression was intense but inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Her dad's expression as he watched him go was inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Thomas Jefferson noted this while reflecting on the tiny incentive that led to the Boston Tea Party and, in turn, the American Revolution: "So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants."†   (source)
  • Mortenson sat up and saw first the pink, inscrutable eyes of the white chickens regarding him blankly, then the Kohistanis standing on the bridge, firing their Kalashnikovs in the air.†   (source)
  • The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor…. but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique.†   (source)
  • And Claudia gazed on this with inscrutable liquid eyes.†   (source)
  • They had no documents that proved they were human beings, and they were silent, stubborn, and inscrutable.†   (source)
  • When he turned to his teammates, he encountered a reef of curious, reflective faces all gazing at him woodenly with morose and inscrutable animosity.†   (source)
  • I no longer read interviews about myself; but when I used to, words like inscrutable were often used.†   (source)
  • Faces hovered above me like inscrutable fish peering myopically through a glass aquarium wall.†   (source)
  • She brought herself back and thought she caught a flicker of smug condescension in those inscrutable eyes.†   (source)
  • Now you are inscrutable.†   (source)
  • The universe, he told John Quincy, was "inscrutable and incomprehensible."†   (source)
  • His gray eyes regarded me, inscrutable as pieces of smoky glass.†   (source)
  • Fang shot a sideways glance at me, his eyes dark and inscrutable, as always.†   (source)
  • The girl had never relaxed her grip on her spear; her dark, inscrutable eyes remained fixed on him with unsettling intensity.†   (source)
  • Pat Logan, the engineer, a short, sinewy man with graying hair and a contemptuously inscrutable face, posed in a manner of amused indifference.†   (source)
  • He weighed well over three hundred pounds and had no visible neck, just a monumental round head, proud and fierce and inscrutable, resting on an enormous body.†   (source)
  • Philon's gaze is inscrutable.†   (source)
  • His face remained inscrutable but inside he glowed with pleasure.†   (source)
  • He is looking down at me with the most inscrutable expression I have ever seen—halfway between a smile and a frown.†   (source)
  • Did I detect an increase in bland inscrutability?†   (source)
  • Some weeks later one of the secretaries at External who was in the habit of lunching with a senior man in my department told him the story, and, in the telling, casually mentioned that the inscrutable message was signed VARLET MONFAT.†   (source)
  • …I have from the very beginning responded warmly to Jews, my first love having been Miriam Bookbinder, the daughter of a local ship chandler, who even at the age of six wore in her lovely hooded eyes the vaguely disconsolate, largely inscrutable mystery of her race; and then later I experienced a grander empathy with Jewish folk which, I am persuaded, is chiefly available to those Southerners shattered for years and years by rock-hard encounter with the anguish of Abraham and…†   (source)
  • He smiled to himself, the expression that is called inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Ashe looked worried, not offended, and Kiever as inscrutable as before.†   (source)
  • If she tries to tell me it's God's inscrutable mercy, he said to himself, I'll have to leave the room.†   (source)
  • He stood back, a peculiar flash of interest or of something more inscrutable, like resignation, in his lowered eyes.†   (source)
  • She was inscrutable.   (source)
  • The werecat followed them with inscrutable eyes.†   (source)
  • Now it was Blomkvist's turn to look inscrutable.†   (source)
  • The uncle is a silent, inscrutable presence in the room.†   (source)
  • They could have used his face for one of their propaganda films—he's that inscrutable."†   (source)
  • And yet here was one of the most ambiguous, inscrutable styles Phaedrus had ever read.†   (source)
  • And what does that mean, my inscrutable husband and number eighty-seven lover?†   (source)
  • Downy heads bobbed; inscrutable eyes glistened like wet pebbles.†   (source)
  • Neither revelation caused her inscrutable expression to change.†   (source)
  • Throughout, Arya listened with an inscrutable expression.†   (source)
  • Hedström stared into space with an inscrutable expression and the hint of a sad smile.†   (source)
  • David said nothing; his expression remained inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Many at the top of the inscrutable political ladder were fat, but few in the fields were starving.†   (source)
  • Kekrops turned those inscrutable dark eyes on her.†   (source)
  • I looked about me, at their still, passive faces, those inscrutable smiles.†   (source)
  • He tapped his fingers together, inscrutable as always.†   (source)
  • She sits straight, eyes ahead, her expression as inscrutable as the Sphinx's.†   (source)
  • Bewildered, Eragon glanced at Oromis, but the elf remained quiet, his face inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Yossarian leaned forward and peered closely into Orr's inscrutable mask of contradictory emotions.†   (source)
  • The elf stared at Eragon for a moment, his yellow eyes inscrutable, then he bowed his head slightly.†   (source)
  • Pregnant, inscrutable silence reigns over all.†   (source)
  • It watched, and by not being what it should have been, the house was inscrutable.†   (source)
  • His face was inscrutable.†   (source)
  • The prophecy could have referred to either of them, yet, for his own inscrutable reasons, Voldemort had chosen to believe that Harry was the one meant.†   (source)
  • It is commendable to wish to relieve human suffering, but surely the insane, like idiots and cripples, owe their state to Almighty Providence, and one should not attempt to reverse decisions which are certainly just, although inscrutable to us.†   (source)
  • I've heard the word "inscrutable."†   (source)
  • But almost before Harry had registered what he had seen, Filch had turned and shuffled away, muttering under his breath; Malfoy h ad composed his face into a smile and was thanking Slughorn for his generosity, and Snape's face was smoothly inscrutable again.†   (source)
  • Inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Murtagh's eyes became inscrutable orbs.†   (source)
  • As always their demeanor was formally respectful; they took the law seriously and felt its majesty emanating toward them from the bench where Lew Fielding sat with his eyes half-shut, inscrutable and meditative, and from the way in which the jurors sat ruminating in rows on their elevated podium.†   (source)
  • The bald man's face became inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Then the man blinked and Chamberlain realized that there was nothing inscrutable here; the man was exhausted.†   (source)
  • But the incident no doubt confirmed his conviction that the ways of the white man are indeed inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Working this hard to improve life in their village, rather than chasing the inscrutable goals of foreign climbers, was a pleasure, Twaha told Mortenson, grinning up from under the yoke beside his father.†   (source)
  • She is trying, nevertheless, to gain some understanding, however limited, of the inscrutable circumstances in which she finds herself.†   (source)
  • Intuition warned him that he was drawing close to some immense and inscrutable cosmic climax, and his broad, meaty, towering frame tingled from head to toe at the thought that Yossarian, whoever he would eventually turn out to be, was destined to serve as his nemesis.†   (source)
  • Glancing at the other boat, Eragon watched Arya paddle, her back perfectly straight, her face inscrutable as she floated through webs of mottled light beneath the mossy trees.†   (source)
  • He accepted my excuses with the inscrutable silence of his Eskimo ancestors, but he evidently passed on my explanation to Ootek, who, whatever he may have thought about it and me, reacted in a typical Eskimoan way.†   (source)
  • And a power within me seemed to answer that power, not with resistance but with an inscrutable, chilling strength.†   (source)
  • Her voice was soft and inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Their pace quickened, and he felt as though he were flying along with his feet off the ground as they trotted in resolute cadence up the wide marble staircase to the upper landing, where still two more inscrutable military policemen with hard faces were waiting to lead them all at an even faster pace down the long, cantilevered balcony overhanging the immense lobby.†   (source)
  • To make the problem even more inscrutable, the wolves seemed reasonably well fed; and to baffle me to the point of near insanity, the two male wolves went off hunting every night and returned every morning, but never appeared to bring anything home.†   (source)
  • …dwarf with flaxen hair who was nodding with approval at Galdhiem's thundering speech; to Havard, who was using a dagger to clean under the fingernails of the two remaining fingers on his right hand; to Vermund, heavy-browed but otherwise inscrutable behind his purple veil; to Gannel and Ûndin, who sat leaning toward each other, whispering, while Hadfala, an elderly dwarf woman who was the clan chief of Durgrimst Ebardac and the third member of Gannel's alliance, frowned at the sheaf…†   (source)
  • Tents, camp stoves, sleeping bags, and a bundle of seven axes ( to this day I do not know why seven, for I was going to a treeless land where even one would have been superfluous ), skis, snowshoes, dog harness, a radio transceiver and innumerable boxes and bales whose contents were as inscrutable to me as to the pilot, followed in due course.†   (source)
  • And a power within me seemed to answer that power, not with resistance but with an inscrutable, chilling strength.†   (source)
  • They all simply stared at me with their inscrutable expressions that collectively said that they were in the hands of a madman who asked impossible questions.†   (source)
  • That when they come to understand this thing which in Thy inscrutable wisdom Thou hast brought to pass, they may know and reverence Thy will.†   (source)
  • Anna simply shook her head negatively and smiled her beautiful, inscrutable, profoundly silent smile.†   (source)
  • It was a wavering, inscrutable face.†   (source)
  • Zeke Skimberry, who had also fallen under Peter's spell, went along with us to fix the inscrutable water pump.†   (source)
  • Then all that he felt move in his heart at the sight of the inscrutable river went out in hope for the two men and their genius that he sheltered.†   (source)
  • Jack watched him inscrutably through his paint.†   (source)
  • The littluns watched him inscrutably over double handfuls of ripe fruit.†   (source)
  • The Polizei scrutinize my inscrutables, then let me go.†   (source)
  • I looked at him and shook my head as he watched me inscrutably.†   (source)
  • And when he accused her of unwinding her stitches at night like Penelope just so that he would have to read her another volume of verse, she would smile inscrutably.†   (source)
  • I am darkness, mystery, inscrutability.†   (source)
  • They wandered through fields with the wind blowing their thin dresses against their thighs, and gazed inscrutably.†   (source)
  • They pondered a while over their mother's inscrutable ways.†   (source)
  • One seemed alone with an inscrutable society.†   (source)
  • His face is black, still, also quite inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Light floods the room and drives shadow beyond shadow to where they hang in folds inscrutable.†   (source)
  • His face remained completely inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Then his face smoothed again, inscrutable.†   (source)
  • The line of secrecy that he had begun to map out grew sharper, but only to reveal an inscrutable background.†   (source)
  • And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's.†   (source)
  • There was purpose and conviction behind their inscrutable reserve; something active and quick, something with an edge.†   (source)
  • For an hour she had watched Rhett hold the yarn Melanie was winding for knitting, had noted the blank inscrutable expression when Melanie talked at length and with pride of Ashley and his promotion.†   (source)
  • But by some inscrutable law of my being sovereignty and the possession of power will not be enough; I shall always push through curtains to privacy, and want some whispered words alone.†   (source)
  • Our Ford–or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters–Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life.†   (source)
  • But his eyes were open (his face had never been hidden or even lowered) and his face was quite calm; calm, peaceful, quite inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.†   (source)
  • Brisen, standing rigid, as she had stood to bear Sir Lancelot's glare, looked at the closed door with an inscrutable expression.†   (source)
  • The moment I spoke I regretted my words, for the secret, inscrutable look came back in his eyes again, and once again I suffered the intolerable discomfort that floods one after lack of tact.†   (source)
  • Through this exercise his spirit is purged of its infantile, inappropriate sentimentalities and resentments, and his mind opened to the inscrutable presence which exists, not primarily as "good" and "bad" with respect to his childlike human convenience, his weal and woe, but as the law and image of the nature of being.†   (source)
  • He was an inscrutable old man, with the yellow stain on his beard, and his poetry, and his puzzles, sailing serenely through a world which satisfied all his wants, so that she thought he had only to put down his hand where he lay on the lawn to fish up anything he wanted.†   (source)
  • Rieux replied that one could only hope it wouldn't, and the magistrate replied that one must never lose hope, the ways of Providence were inscrutable.†   (source)
  • His father looked at him - the inscrutable face, the shaggy brows beneath which the gray eyes glinted coldly.†   (source)
  • …in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs.†   (source)
  • Let worlds heave and freeze, he remained the same-always the thin inscrutable mouth, always the harsh pride of taut nostrils, heavy lidded eyes.†   (source)
  • …more above faces a little more darkly swaggering than any Henry had ever seen before: and the mentor, the man for whose sake he had repudiated not only blood and kin but food and shelter and clothing too, whose clothing and walk and speech he had tried to ape, along with his attitude toward women and his ideas of honor and pride too, watching him with that cold and catlike inscrutable calculation, watching the picture resolve and become fixed and then telling Henry, 'But that's not it.†   (source)
  • The emanations are represented also as the branches of a cosmic tree, which is upside down, rooted in "the inscrutable height."†   (source)
  • He looked at her oddly, still inscrutable and as she hurried on she could not tell if he were amused or repelled.†   (source)
  • For just as the figments of a dream derive from the life energy of one dreamer, representing only fluid splitting and complications of that single force, so do all the forms of all the worlds, whether terrestrial or divine, reflect the universal force of a single inscrutable mystery: the power that constructs the atom and controls the orbits of the stars.†   (source)
  • …it—and I (my body) not stopping yet (yes, it needed the hand, the touch, for that); selfmesmered fool who still believed that what must be would be, could not but be else I must deny sanity as well as breath, running, hurling myself into that inscrutable coffee-colored face, that cold implacable mindless (no, not mindless: anything but mindless. his own clairvoyant will tempered to amoral evil's undeviating absolute by the black willing blood with which be had crossed it) replica of…†   (source)
  • It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes.†   (source)
  • He leaned back carelessly in his chair and looked into her tense face and his own dark face was inscrutable.†   (source)
  • Mammy, who was waiting just inside the door, gave her an inscrutable look and followed her, puffing, up the stairs to the bedroom.†   (source)
  • He saw it as soon as he entered, lying square and white and profoundly inscrutable against the dark blanket.†   (source)
  • …or deny the friend for whom he had already repudiated home and kin and all; the bewildered, the (for that time) helpless, who wanted to believe yet did not see how he could, being carried by the friend, the mentor, through one of those inscrutable and curiously lifeless doorways like that before which he had seen the horse or the trap, and so into a place which to his puritan's provincial mind all of morality was upside down and all of honor perished—a place created for and by…†   (source)
  • And he had gone too far now, but it was too late to stop; he sat there and looked at that still face which had no more expression that Judith's, nothing of hope nor pain: just sullen and inscrutable and looking down at the calloused womanish hands with their cracked nails which held the money while your grandfather thought how he could not say 'Miss Judith', since that would postulate the blood more than ever.†   (source)
  • With an aged an inscrutable midnight face she seems to contemplate him with a detachment almost godlike but not at all benign.†   (source)
  • He was looking at the man, with on his face an expression a little placative and baffled though not alarmed, watching the man's inscrutable and monklike face.†   (source)
  • But I will get there first; accumulating ahead of you I will arrive first, lifting, sloping gently upward under hooves and wheels so that you will find no destination but will merely abrupt gently onto a plateau and a panorama of harmless and inscrutable night and there will be nothing for you to do but return and so I would advise you not to go, to turn back now and let what is, be; he (Quentin) agreeing to this, sitting in the buggy beside the implacable doll-sized old woman…†   (source)
  • …fury of all the pariah-interdict and all the doomed—a little island set in a smiling and fury-lurked and incredible indigo sea, which was the halfway point between what we call the jungle and what we call civilization, halfway between the dark inscrutable continent from which the black blood, the black bones and flesh and thinking and remembering and hopes and desires, was ravished by violence, and the cold known land to which it was doomed, the civilised land and people which had…†   (source)
  • He would do it deliberately, feeling, even watching, his white chest arch deeper and deeper within his ribcage, trying to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of negroes, with each suspiration trying to expel from himself the white blood and the white thinking and being.†   (source)
  • Clytie, not inept, anything but inept: perverse inscrutable and paradox: free, yet incapable of freedom who had never once called herself a slave, holding fidelity to none like the indolent and solitary wolf or bear (yes, wild half untamed black, half Sutpen blood and if 'untamed' be synonymous with 'wild; then 'Sutpen' is the silent unsleeping viciousness of the tamer's lash) whose false seeming holds it docile to fear's hand but which is not, which if this be fidelity, fidelity only…†   (source)
  • Probably some wise, inscrutable motive was to be served thereby.†   (source)
  • For some inscrutable reason it served Miriam right.†   (source)
  • When Hanson came home he wore the same inscrutable demeanor.†   (source)
  • The desert lay indistinct in the foreground, inscrutable beyond; the canyon lost its line in gloom.†   (source)
  • Is it possible that such a luckless devil should be so tormented by blind and inscrutable destiny?†   (source)
  • But the moor with its mysteries and its strange inhabitants remains as inscrutable as ever.†   (source)
  • Should he leave these reasonably comfortable quarters and fly from this inscrutable horror?†   (source)
  • Was there a slight, inscrutable, mocking light in his eyes, or was it only her imagination?†   (source)
  • It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable!†   (source)
  • That must be Nature's inscrutable design.†   (source)
  • Brown preserved a stern and inscrutable demeanour.†   (source)
  • It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.†   (source)
  • She stood with her hands behind her back, looking up at him in a heavy, inscrutable fashion.†   (source)
  • He had looked at her, and the old burning, inscrutable fire, the darkness, had left his eyes.†   (source)
  • Yet she owed something intangible and inscrutable to herself.†   (source)
  • The starlight shone full upon the dark, inscrutable face of the Indian.†   (source)
  • I repeat, Senora, the ways of God are inscrutable.†   (source)
  • The Navajo, dark, stately, inscrutable, faced the sun—his god.†   (source)
  • He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.†   (source)
  • Death and decay were just as important to her inscrutable design.†   (source)
  • Madeline felt there was something inscrutable changing her soul.†   (source)
  • Never had the Indian seemed so dark, inscrutable of face.†   (source)
  • Madeline was sure she caught the old, inscrutable, mocking smile fleeting across his lips.†   (source)
  • There was still another peculiarity of this inscrutable charm.†   (source)
  • He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.†   (source)
  • In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable infinite something.†   (source)
  • She chiefly communicates with us by means of telegrams, and her telegrams are rather inscrutable.†   (source)
  • An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight!†   (source)
  • Newman felt that taking her measure was not easy; she was a formidable, inscrutable little woman.†   (source)
  • About herself he had gained no knowledge; she was imperturbable, inscrutable, impenetrable.†   (source)
  • "You're perfectly inscrutable, and that's what makes me think you've something to hide.†   (source)
  • Suddenly, however, he looked beyond and behind him, into the distance, and in a flash that smile of courteous, brotherly deference common to them all vanished from his beautiful, finely chiseled, almost childlike face, and, without so much as a frown, it took on a grave expression, an inscrutable blank look of deathlike reserve, as if it were made of stone— which hardly reassured Hans Castorp and sent a shiver of fear over him, tinged with a vague premonition as to what it might mean.†   (source)
  • But worse—there, in that cell directly opposite him, a sallow and emaciated and sinister-looking Chinaman in a suit exactly like his own, who had come to the bars of his door and was looking at him out of inscrutable slant eyes, but as immediately turning and scratching himself—vermin, maybe, as Clyde immediately feared.†   (source)
  • It came at the end of his speeches like a seal applied on the words to make the meaning of the commonest phrase appear absolutely inscrutable.†   (source)
  • For an hour or more he was at work, returning at last with his feet heavy with snow and his features as inscrutable as ever.†   (source)
  • It had led him from strife to peace, and through death into the innermost life of the people; but the gloom of the land spread out under the sunshine preserved its appearance of inscrutable, of secular repose.†   (source)
  • She tried to put out of her mind a dawning sense that this close-to-the-earth habitation, this primitive dwelling, held strange inscrutable power over a self she had never divined she possessed.†   (source)
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