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intangible
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  • Kroc had succeeded, like his old Red Cross comrade, at selling something intangible to children, along with their fries. kid kustomers†   (source)
  • Looking at those pictures had given him a feeling which was strange yet eerily intangible--it had been like looking at photographs of his own imagination, and he knew that from that moment on, whenever he tried to imagine Misery's little combination parlor and study, Mrs Roman D. ('Virginia') Sandpiper's Polaroids would leap immediately into his mind, obscuring imagination with their cheery but one-dimensional concreteness.†   (source)
  • Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable.†   (source)
  • Secret, maybe, inside, intangible.†   (source)
  • There was something intangible about her.†   (source)
  • It also gave me the first sure sign of how certain intangible barriers might be crossed.†   (source)
  • Patch was an X factor: intangible, scary, and unknown.†   (source)
  • Although most people laughed when Lacy told them her husband's job involved putting a price on joy, it was simply what economists did-find value for the intangibles in life.†   (source)
  • Something intangible had changed in the atmosphere.†   (source)
  • She often said that perhaps it was not the souls of the dead, wandering in another dimension, but rather beings from other planets who were trying to establish a relationship with earthlings but who, because they were made of an intangible matter, could easily be confused with souls.†   (source)
  • Merely something incorporeal, intangible?†   (source)
  • But she'd come to value the intangibles: the position she had grown to in the city where she was "Matron" to everyone, even to herself; the resourcefulness she'd discovered that allowed her to make a cozy hospital—an East African Eden, as she thought of it—grow out of a disorganized jumble of rudimentary buildings; and the core group of doctors whom she'd recruited and who by long association had evolved into her Cherished Own.†   (source)
  • Suddenly and for the first time, she felt the screen, not as the most intangible, but as the most grimly absolute barrier in the world.†   (source)
  • But now, for some intangible reason, Lee felt as though she had a point to prove.†   (source)
  • Not that cosmic, intangible spirit-in-the-sky that Mama told me as a little boy "always was and always will be.†   (source)
  • I kept at him anyway, using the biggest words I knew, whether they made sense or not, school words like "socioeconomic" and "intangible," anything I could lift from my dizzy burning thoughts and hurl against him, until my mother, who'd been perfectly quiet the whole time, whacked me hard across the back of the head and shouted in Korean, Who do you think you are?†   (source)
  • "We are fighting for matters real and tangible …. our property and our homes," wrote a Texas private in 1864, "they for matters abstract and intangible."†   (source)
  • He longed for the freedom of the open tundra, where he could stretch his arms up high to the warmth of the sun or to the intangible pull of the moon.†   (source)
  • It was something else, abstract and remote, intangible yet worrisome to my spirit.†   (source)
  • He had clobbered my father's life with two wars, one of which we weren't allowed to win—and thereby made it tough for me to get through college quite aside from what a father may be worth in spiritual intangibles to his son (I didn't know, I never would know!†   (source)
  • The probe is actually sensitive enough to spot something as intangible as an Accelerationist attitude?†   (source)
  • When it comes to the intangible, the marginal choices, we understand each other.†   (source)
  • Metallic and misty together, tangible and intangible, splendid and fairylike, the haze of his invisible wings mysterious, like the ring around the moon-had anyone ever tried to catch him?†   (source)
  • While the finish score gave an idea of how well a dog fared in testing, there were intangibles to consider.†   (source)
  • What drew people to him was something intangible, an air about him.†   (source)
  • But how could she translate something so intangible into a few clean, pragmatic sentences?†   (source)
  • What if it stole right through my intangible protection?†   (source)
  • For the same intangible reason, she felt she had to prove it to him as much as to herself.†   (source)
  • After they'd led their team to victory, people pointed to their air of confidence, their cool under pressure, and the other intangible virtues of the presumably born leader.†   (source)
  • The intangible quality of a true warrior, the sixth sense that allows him to sense unseen danger, had come into play.†   (source)
  • His face was such a long upper-lipped Irish prototype that it verged on a joke, and he exuded sadness—something intangibly rumpled, exhausted and resigned that caused me to reflect with a twinge of pain on these lonesome office drinking bouts, the twilight sessions with Yeats and Hopkins, the bleak subway commute to Ozone Park.†   (source)
  • His captivity, his dependence, were not different from other forms of compulsion in life, which are often equally invisible and intangible, and seem to be nonexistent and merely a figment of the imagination, a chimera.†   (source)
  • The relationship, therefore, is quite intangible, and interesting primarily on levels of speculative metaphysics.†   (source)
  • From that moment on, I felt about me and within my dark body an invisible, intangible swarming.†   (source)
  • Undermines that intangible feeling of confidence, you know.†   (source)
  • It is the world intangible that he has never touched — yet more his own than something he has owned forever.†   (source)
  • Thus, the entire landscape, the whole physical background of his life, was now dappled by powerful prejudices of liking and distaste formed, God knows how, or by what intangible affinities of thought, feeling and connotation.†   (source)
  • After I had outlived the shocks of childhood, after the habit of reflection had been born in me, I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair.†   (source)
  • Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people.†   (source)
  • It was the same intangible, unspectacular courage that all the Wilkeses possessed, a quality which Scarlett did not understand but to which she gave grudging tribute.†   (source)
  • The love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague intangible and an unessential.†   (source)
  • The day was like gold and sapphires: there was a swift flash and sparkle, intangible and multifarious, like sunlight on roughened water, all over the land.†   (source)
  • …In this day and age, when the world is torn by gigantic problems, seeking an answer to questions that hold the survival of man in the balance—this man attached to such a vague intangible, such an unessential as his artistic opinions sufficient importance to let it become his sole passion and the motivation of a crime against society.†   (source)
  • And she did not weep for herself, but for him: the hour after his birth she had looked in his dark eyes and had seen something that would brood there eternally, she knew, unfathomable wells of remote and intangible loneliness: she knew that in her dark and sorrowful womb a stranger had come to life, fed by the lost communications of eternity, his own ghost, haunter of his own house, lonely to himself and to the world.†   (source)
  • Of late there had been other signs of her disfavour, as intangible but more disquieting.†   (source)
  • Everything he said sounded intangibly appropriate.†   (source)
  • A strange, intangible sense of time, distance, of something far behind weighed upon him.†   (source)
  • But there was something strange, intangible, immense about him.†   (source)
  • After I got away, it was all too delicate, too intangible, to write about.†   (source)
  • Yet she owed something intangible and inscrutable to herself.†   (source)
  • And there was something else, vague and intangible, that might have been fear.†   (source)
  • The obvious dead, the intangible alive, and no connection at all between them!†   (source)
  • Intangibly fleeting, unrememberable hours.†   (source)
  • Cold and intangible were all things in earth and heaven.†   (source)
  • The fathers, as far as he was concerned, were as intangible as myths.†   (source)
  • But why did that intangible dread hang on to her soul?†   (source)
  • The change that had begun subtly, intangibly, was now a terrible and glaring difference.†   (source)
  • All was destroyed, except something intangible yet powerful and indestructible.†   (source)
  • The night had come on apace; it had grown pitch-dark where we were, so that without stirring she had faded like the intangible form of a wistful and perverse spirit.†   (source)
  • For Carley admitted to herself that there was something amiss, something incomprehensible, something intangible that obtruded its menace into her dream of future happiness.†   (source)
  • He admitted the improbability of her existence, but lost nothing of the persistent intangible hope that drove him.†   (source)
  • Therefore she could not rest; she wanted to go and see; she was no longer chasing phantoms; it was a hunt for treasure that held aloof, as intangible as the substance of dreams.†   (source)
  • He was no longer afraid of minor things, and much of his timidity had vanished, though the unknown never ceased to press upon him with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and ever-menacing.†   (source)
  • All during the first year Louise tried to make her husband understand the vague and intangible hunger that had led to the writing of the note and that was still unsatisfied.†   (source)
  • They were troubled and feverish hours, disturbed with dreams that were intangible, that eluded her, leaving only an impression upon her half-awakened senses of something unattainable.†   (source)
  • There was something ominous about it, and in intangible ways one was made to feel that the worst was about to come.†   (source)
  • Of course Bocklin strains, because he wants something—beauty and all the other intangible gifts that are floating about the world.†   (source)
  • Meanwhile, abiding a day of judgment, she fought ceaselessly to deny the bitter drops in her cup, to tear back the slow, the intangibly slow growth of a hot, corrosive lichen eating into her heart.†   (source)
  • There was a garret above, pierced with a scuttle over his head; and down through this scuttle came a cat, suspended around the haunches by a string; she had a rag tied about her head and jaws to keep her from mewing; as she slowly descended she curved upward and clawed at the string, she swung downward and clawed at the intangible air.†   (source)
  • There were intervals of oblivion, then a time when the stars blinked in his eyes; he heard the wind, Silvermane's bell, the murmur of voices, yet all seemed remote from him, intangible as things in a dream.†   (source)
  • While his mind had been pursuing its intangible phantoms and turning in irresolution from such pursuit he had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things.†   (source)
  • As to a boy, that name stirred and thrilled and sang to her of nameless, sweet, intangible things, mysterious and all of adventure.†   (source)
  • …by the beauty; it was encouraging too, for where the returned Anglo-Indian sat by rights (he knew crowds of them) in the Oriental Club biliously summing up the ruin of the world, here was he, as young as ever; envying young people their summer time and the rest of it, and more than suspecting from the words of a girl, from a housemaid's laughter—intangible things you couldn't lay your hands on—that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immovable.†   (source)
  • Following a walk marked by an intangible mist of bloom that followed the white border stones she came to a space overlooking the sea where there were lanterns asleep in the fig trees and a big table and wicker chairs and a great market umbrella from Sienna, all gathered about an enormous pine, the biggest tree in the garden.†   (source)
  • No definite image survived; at the Birth it was questionable whether a silver doll or a mud village, or a silk napkin, or an intangible spirit, or a pious resolution, had been born.†   (source)
  • After she realized the passing of those hours she had an intangible and indescribable feeling of what Dale had meant about dreaming the hours away.†   (source)
  • Unlike man, whose gods are of the unseen and the overguessed, vapours and mists of fancy eluding the garmenture of reality, wandering wraiths of desired goodness and power, intangible out-croppings of self into the realm of spirit—unlike man, the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to the fire find their gods in the living flesh, solid to the touch, occupying earth-space and requiring time for the accomplishment of their ends and their existence.†   (source)
  • With the last half-conscious sense of a muffled throb at her ear, a something intangibly sweet, deep-toned, and strange, like a distant calling bell, she fell asleep with her head on Stewart's breast.†   (source)
  • The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life.†   (source)
  • I, too, was busy, trying to reason out how he was aware of the existence of so intangible a thing as a shadow.†   (source)
  • To make a name of this heretofore intangible man, to give him an identity apart from the crowd, to be able to recognize him—that for Shefford would be fatal.†   (source)
  • The memory of Paradise Park seemed only a dream, sweeter and more intangible as time passed, and fuller of vague regrets.†   (source)
  • Here was loneliness and solitude vastly different from that of Oak Creek Canyon, yet it held the same intangible power to soothe.†   (source)
  • Like Balancing Rock, which waited darkly over the steep gorge, ready to close forever the outlet to Deception Pass, that nameless thing, as certain yet intangible as fate, must fall and close forever all doubts and fears of the future.†   (source)
  • The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time—time that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights.†   (source)
  • Venters sought his own bed of fragrant boughs; and as he lay back, somehow grateful for the comfort and safety, the night seemed to steal away from him and he sank softly into intangible space and rest and slumber.†   (source)
  • He held his love as a thing aloof, and, as such, intangible because of the living death she believed she lived, it had no warmth and intimacy for them.†   (source)
  • Shefford imagined there was some resemblance in her to the lily—the same whiteness, the same rich gold, and, more striking than either, a strange, rare quality of beauty, of life, intangible as something fleeting, the spirit that had swiftly faded from the plucked flower.†   (source)
  • Joan had seen many men in different attitudes of thought, but here was a man whose mind seemed to give forth intangible yet terrible manifestations of evil.†   (source)
  • If that secret, intangible power closed its toils round her again, if that great invisible hand moved here and there and everywhere, slowly paralyzing her with its mystery and its inconceivable sway over her affairs, then she would know beyond doubt that it was not chance, nor jealousy, nor intimidation, nor ministerial wrath at her revolt, but a cold and calculating policy thought out long before she was born, a dark, immutable will of whose empire she and all that was hers was but an…†   (source)
  • Great criminals may undoubtedly brave its intangible rigor, but ordinary offenders will dread it as a condemnation which destroys their position in the world, casts a blight upon their honor, and condemns them to a shameful inactivity worse than death.†   (source)
  • The enemy ceased firing, and that stern, threatening, inaccessible, and intangible line which separates two hostile armies was all the more clearly felt.†   (source)
  • If not the thing itself, it is marvellously like it, and the more so for that ethereal and intangible quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an introspection.†   (source)
  • But these are intangible points.†   (source)
  • Nice cutting is her function: she divides With spiritual edge the millet-seed, And makes intangible savings.†   (source)
  • Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or herself felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the minister.†   (source)
  • He would let her see, all those six years of intangible ethereal courtship, how little care he had for anything but as it bore upon the consummation.†   (source)
  • Tom was not given to inquire subtly into his own motives any more than into other matters of an intangible kind; he was quite sure that his own motives as well as actions were good, else he would have had nothing to do with them.†   (source)
  • The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.†   (source)
  • That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it.†   (source)
  • One beholds floating, either in space or in one's own brain, one knows not what vague and intangible thing, like the dreams of sleeping flowers.†   (source)
  • The uncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have polluted the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost insupportable.†   (source)
  • *z Lastly, if the same individual is guilty of one of those intangible offences of which human justice has no cognizance, he annually appears before a tribunal from which there is no appeal, which can at once reduce him to insignificance and deprive him of his charge.†   (source)
  • This image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child herself.†   (source)
  • …experience he knew, and with the wisdom of age understood, that it is impossible for one man to direct hundreds of thousands of others struggling with death, and he knew that the result of a battle is decided not by the orders of a commander in chief, nor the place where the troops are stationed, nor by the number of cannon or of slaughtered men, but by that intangible force called the spirit of the army, and he watched this force and guided it in as far as that was in his power.†   (source)
  • Whether from commiseration for a woman of so miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many hours as she saw fit to occupy with…†   (source)
  • Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air, and might vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence and goes we know not whither.†   (source)
  • But when we watch the ants round their ruined heap, the tenacity, energy, and immense number of the delving insects prove that despite the destruction of the heap, something indestructible, which though intangible is the real strength of the colony, still exists; and similarly, though in Moscow in the month of October there was no government and no churches, shrines, riches, or houses—it was still the Moscow it had been in August.†   (source)
  • The preordained frangibility of the hymen: the presupposed intangibility of the thing in itself: the incongruity and disproportion between the selfprolonging tension of the thing proposed to be done and the selfabbreviating relaxation of the thing done; the fallaciously inferred debility of the female: the muscularity of the male: the variations of ethical codes: the natural grammatical transition by inversion involving no alteration of sense of an aorist preterite proposition (parsed…†   (source)
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