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occult
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  • She seemed an occult figure, more spirit than human.†   (source)
  • His suits fitted as though he had borrowed them from a stout friend, and his face, seldom suggestive of his profession, was now not at all so; it could have been that of an ascetic absorbed in occult pursuits.†   (source)
  • The policeman seemed to take a dim, even a murderous view of this, and, ceasing to wait on occult inspiration, peered commandingly into the bar.†   (source)
  • At five minutes to twelve stood a copy of Dr Faustus, at two lay on Occult Iconography, at six, under Mr Halloway's trailed fingers now, a history of circuses, carnivals, shadow shows, puppet menageries inhabited by mountebanks, minstrels, stiltwalking sorcerers and their fantoccini.†   (source)
  • He did not share Francisco's taste for the occult.†   (source)
  • She went by the name of Hester, was into the occult, and would leave a trail of charms and feathered trinkets made of chicken bones.†   (source)
  • "I happened to be perusing The Acts of Taradas and Other Mysteries of Occult Phenomena as Recorded Throughout the Ages of Men, Dwarves, and the Most Ancient Elves when—".†   (source)
  • A mention of a girl who went "mad as a hatter" after some mysterious involvement in a "diabolical occult ring."†   (source)
  • The history of shamans and the occult garnered our intense intellectual scrutiny.†   (source)
  • Days passed and she asked no questions, though now she was deep into books of the occult, of witches and witchcraft, and of vampires.†   (source)
  • On the weekends when he was allowed to leave his boarding school, he would visit the three Mora sisters in their old mill to study various occult sciences.†   (source)
  • Chief White Halfoat was a handsome, swarthy Indian from Oklahoma with a heavy, hard-boned face and tousled black hair, a half-blooded Creek from Enid who, for occult reasons of his own, had made up his mind to die of pneumonia.†   (source)
  • Seems to be something occult.†   (source)
  • Evidence of her Shadowhunter life lay scattered about as well—a fat copy of The Shadowhunter's Codex with her notes and drawings scribbled into the margins, a shelf of books on the occult and paranormal, her stele atop her desk, and a new globe, given to her by Luke, that showed Idris, bordered in gold, in the center of Europe.†   (source)
  • Her elusiveness and indifference to established habits of behavior reminded him of his mother, who was as stubborn in her pursuits of the occult as the women of Greater Saint Matthew's were in the search for redeeming grace.†   (source)
  • Cuffy Meigs' terror had wider roots, it embraced all of existence; he had lived in chronic terror all his life, but now he was struggling not to acknowledge what it was that he had dreaded: in the moment of his triumph, when he expected to be safe, that mysterious, occult breed-the intellectual —was refusing to fear him and defying his power.†   (source)
  • I wouldn't precisely call it cozy, but it's certainly not what you'd expect from the country's leading author of horror and occult fiction.†   (source)
  • She carries the usual periodicals, creased magazines of home and health and lifestyle, but the books are mostly crime novels and stories of the strange and the occult, all of which soft-spoken Veronica, it seems, has chosen for her selections.†   (source)
  • With its many occultish-looking folds, it also served as the repository for the paraphernalia of a very heavy cigarette smoker and an amateur handyman; two oversized pockets had been added at the hips, and they usually contained two or three packs of cigarettes, several match folders, a screwdriver, a claw-end hammer, a Boy Scout knife that had once belonged to one of her sons, and an enamel faucet handle or two, plus an assortment of screws, nails, hinges, and ball-bearing casters—all…†   (source)
  • I mean, it seems so hard to reconcile the Overlords' science with an interest in the occult.†   (source)
  • At our several get-togethers since then it had given me great pleasure to help interpret Faulkner for Sophie, not only by way of explaining parts of the occult Mississippi vernacular but in showing her some of the right pathways as she penetrated the wonderful groves and canebrakes of his rhetoric.†   (source)
  • He was the only one who'd followed the Old Man's interest in the occult.†   (source)
  • Every spring I teach a course called Occult Symbols.†   (source)
  • I got pencil and paper and wrote down all the occult connections that seemed to lead to thirteen.†   (source)
  • The country's leading author of horror and occult fiction has a child to raise.†   (source)
  • Did she tell you stories about the occult?†   (source)
  • Age and experience had sharpened Clara's ability to divine the occult and to move objects from afar.†   (source)
  • All the reading was on the walls, painted sayings and occult symbols, and this was unexpected.†   (source)
  • He worries that we'll never really have Du to ourselves, that he'll always be attached in occult ways to an experience he can't fathom, and as I take off Bud's shoes, I admit there can be no other way for some of us.†   (source)
  • We were dealing with a child who had been incredibly hateful and desperate— experimenting with drugs, dabbling in the occult, and threatening to commit suicide or run away.†   (source)
  • and even before I'd learned to count I'd been obsessed with learning to read a clock face: desperately studying the occult circle crayoned on the paper plate that, once mastered, would unlock the pattern of her comings and goings.†   (source)
  • To this day, this encrypted wisdom is all around us …. encoded in our mythology, our art, and the occult texts of the ages.†   (source)
  • I went to libraries and bookstores, read magazines and technical journals, watched cable TV, made lists and diagrams, made multicolored charts, made phone calls to technical writers and scientists, talked to a Sikh holy man in Iron City and even studied the occult, hiding the books in the at tic so you and Denise wouldn't find them and wonder what was going on.†   (source)
  • "Sorry, but the word occult, despite conjuring images of devil worship, actually means 'hidden' or 'obscured.'†   (source)
  • One day after Brad picked up Cassie from school he came home uneasy about the occult symbols that seemed to decorate everything her friends were making in art class.†   (source)
  • …on TV with Hobie, about Marilyn Monroe, whom we both loved ("a little springtime ghost") and about poor ruined Montgomery Clift walking around with handfuls of loose pills in his pockets (a detail I hadn't known, and didn't comment upon) and about the death of Clark Gable and how horribly guilty Marilyn had felt for it, how responsible—which somehow, oddly, spiraled into talk of Fate, and the occult, and fortune-telling: did birthdays have anything to do with luck, or lack of it?†   (source)
  • In times of religious oppression, knowledge that was counterdoctrinal had to be kept hidden or 'occult,' and because the church felt threatened by this, they redefined anything 'occult' as evil, and the prejudice survived."†   (source)
  • The legend, as Langdon recalled, never explained exactly what was supposed to be inside the Masonic Pyramid—whether it was ancient texts, occult writings, scientific revelations, or something far more mysterious—but the legend did say that the precious information inside was ingeniously encoded …. and understandable only to the most enlightened souls.†   (source)
  • Occult symbols!†   (source)
  • One of the pages seemed to be marked; when Clary reached to open the book, she realized that what she'd thought was a bookmark was a black-handled dagger carved with occult symbols.†   (source)
  • Vivaldo suddenly raised his arms and laughed—and the policeman moved directly behind him, glowering, seeming to wait for an occult go-ahead signal—and covered the space between himself and Eric and threw both arms around him.†   (source)
  • For a few precarious seconds, the chaplain tingled with a weird, occult sensation of having experienced the identical situation before in some prior time or existence.†   (source)
  • He's fishing but Mademoiselle LeFarge can't see that he's interested in more than her preoccupation with the occult.†   (source)
  • But the chaplain's impression of a prior meeting was of some occasion far more momentous and occult than that, of a significant encounter with Yossarian in some remote, submerged and perhaps even entirely spiritual epoch in which he had made the identical, foredooming admission that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him.†   (source)
  • He'd agreed to the stop in Sedona already, but he wasn't interested in taking flattering, commercial pictures of the occult king and his family.†   (source)
  • "But I do believe in the power of young girls' minds to conjure all sorts of hobgoblins that have nothing to do with the occult and everything to do with very real mischief.†   (source)
  • It was my feeling then, as it is now, and forgive the sexism, that the most rational-seeming females are pushovers for such harmlessly occult frissons, but I let it slide and said nothing; the augury seemed to give Sophie great joy and I could not help but start to share her sunny mood.†   (source)
  • To his mother's circumspect inquiries, Aunt Bertha had at first explained that there was much work being done on her teeth, work of a subtle and occult nature, a delicate prying and adjusting that could only be felt but hardly demonstrated.†   (source)
  • When the Herod figure (the extreme symbol of the misgoverning, tenacious ego) has brought mankind to the nadir of spiritual abasement, the occult forces of the cycle begin of themselves to move.†   (source)
  • It wasn't in my nature to fatigue myself with worry over being born to this occult work, even though some of my friends and playmates would turn up in the middle of these mobs to trap you between houses from both ends of a passageway.†   (source)
  • I asked him if he thought they had any occult or medicinal way of prolonging life or preserving youth, and he said they were supposed to have a great deal of very curious knowledge about such things, but he suspected that if you came to look into it, it was rather like the Indian rope trick--always something that somebody else had seen.†   (source)
  • You have only some occult motive for driving me away.†   (source)
  • Unseen and occultly, the gods still gripped with their power and would not let her go.†   (source)
  • There is something of the occult about Naphta, too— I find him more than a little intriguing.†   (source)
  • His occult breathings to her might be solvable by his course in that respect.†   (source)
  • There was something occult in all this, no doubt; for what is the strength of ropes and of men's arms?†   (source)
  • With this one, all the forces of nature that are occult and deep and strong must have worked together in some wonderous way.†   (source)
  • The Chaldeans had noses like that, too, and they were damn sharp people, and not just when it came to occult sciences.†   (source)
  • Morel never in his life played cards, considering them as having some occult, malevolent power—"the devil's pictures," he called them!†   (source)
  • Thinking that Beauty—in the order of feminine elegance—was governed by occult laws into the knowledge of which they had been initiated, and that they had the power to realise it, I accepted before seeing them, like the truth of a coming revelation, the appearance of their clothes, of their carriages and horses, of a thousand details among which I placed my faith as in an inner soul which gave the cohesion of a work of art to that ephemeral and changing pageant.†   (source)
  • They drew aside as he passed down the village, and when he had gone by, young humourists would up with coat-collars and down with hat-brims, and go pacing nervously after him in imitation of his occult bearing.†   (source)
  • In another moment the higher of the villas that had clambered up the hill from Burdock had occulted the running figure.†   (source)
  • Doubtless, there is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces which work for physical life in strange way, and in himself were from the first some great qualities.†   (source)
  • And the shadows were very real around us, but Jim by my side looked very stalwart, as though nothing—not even the occult power of moonlight—could rob him of his reality in my eyes.†   (source)
  • From the man's distorted body and twisted mind, in occult ways, like mists rising from malarial marshes, came emanations of the unhealth within.†   (source)
  • The strict charges meant a deepening and broadening of the order's traditions, a transference of its historical origins back to an occult world, to the so-called Dark Ages.†   (source)
  • 'In any one else it might have been an evidence of boredom, a sign of indifference; but he, in his occult way, managed to make his immobility appear profoundly responsive, and as full of valuable thoughts as an egg is of meat.†   (source)
  • The realm of the subconscious, the "occult" realm in the etymological sense of the word, very quickly turns out to be occult in the narrower sense as well and forms one of the sources for phenomena that emerge from it and to which we apply that same makeshift term.†   (source)
  • It was, moreover, the period when Rosicrucianism infiltrated the lodges—a very strange brotherhood, which, you should note, united the purely rational, sociopolitical goals of improving the world and making people happy with a curious affinity for the occult sciences of the East, for Indian and Arabic wisdom and magical knowledge of nature.†   (source)
  • When Doctor Kimble gave physic, it was natural that it should have an effect; but when a weaver, who came from nobody knew where, worked wonders with a bottle of brown waters, the occult character of the process was evident.†   (source)
  • The French lawyer is simply a man extensively acquainted with the statutes of his country; but the English or American lawyer resembles the hierophants of Egypt, for, like them, he is the sole interpreter of an occult science.†   (source)
  • The admission costs her historian a pang, but Henrietta, despairing of more occult things, was now paying much attention to the outer life.†   (source)
  • The poets related that stone walls, and iron swords, and leathern thongs had an occult sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that the belt which Ajax gave Hector[122] dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels of the car of Achilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax fell.†   (source)
  • The aid of the Jewish physicians was not the less eagerly sought after, though a general belief prevailed among the Christians, that the Jewish Rabbins were deeply acquainted with the occult sciences, and particularly with the cabalistical art, which had its name and origin in the studies of the sages of Israel.†   (source)
  • I can do this miracle; I shall do this miracle; yet I do not try to conceal from you that it is a miracle to tax the occult powers to the last strain.†   (source)
  • I began to think of genii, sylphs, gnomes, in short, of all the ministers of the occult sciences, until I laughed aloud at the freaks of my own imagination.†   (source)
  • His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.†   (source)
  • One day a man with his beard worn like a collar and with an Italian accent mounted a stone post at the door of a liquor-seller in the Marche Lenoir, and read aloud a singular document, which seemed to emanate from an occult power.†   (source)
  • "Oh, I am aware of that," said Madame de Villefort; "but I have a passion for the occult sciences, which speak to the imagination like poetry, and are reducible to figures, like an algebraic equation; but go on, I beg of you; what you say interests me to the greatest degree."†   (source)
  • And the sense of occult rivalry in suitorship was so much superadded to the palpable rivalry of their business lives.†   (source)
  • We have his recorded convictions on those questions which knock for answer at every heart,—on life and death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and the ways whereby we come at them; on the characters of men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science, and which yet interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours.†   (source)
  • The whitewashed walls; the little pews where well-known figures entered with a subdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice and then another, pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at once occult and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; the pulpit where the minister delivered unquestioned doctrine, and swayed to and fro, and handled the book in a long accustomed manner; the very pauses between the couplets of the hymn, as it was given out, and the…†   (source)
  • Behold, I am even now busied with trial of the powerfulest enchantment known to the princes of the occult arts in the lands of the East; an it fail me, naught can avail.†   (source)
  • If Marius had been familiar with the occult institutions of Paris, he would instantly have recognized upon the back of the visitor whom Basque had just shown in, the statesman's suit borrowed from the pick-me-down-that shop of the Changer.†   (source)
  • I did but play this little jest with hope to surprise you into some display of your art, as not doubting you would blast the guards with occult fires, consuming them to ashes on the spot, a marvel much beyond mine own ability, yet one which I have long been childishly curious to see.†   (source)
  • A wholesale arrest of malefactors, like that in the Jondrette garret, necessarily complicated by investigations and subsequent incarcerations, is a veritable disaster for that hideous and occult counter-society which pursues its existence beneath public society; an adventure of this description entails all sorts of catastrophes in that sombre world.†   (source)
  • It was feared that the vanquished might have taken to them for refuge, and Prefect Gisquet was to search occult Paris while General Bugeaud swept public Paris; a double and connected operation which exacted a double strategy on the part of the public force, represented above by the army and below by the police.†   (source)
  • Perhaps it was an attitude they shared, a pragmatism that regarded the occult as merely a collection of phenomena like the weather.†   (source)
  • —People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of Russell warned occultly.†   (source)
  • What public advertisement would divulge the occultation of the departed?†   (source)
  • My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!†   (source)
  • Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos.†   (source)
  • Something occult: symbolism.†   (source)
  • First, saved from waters of old Nile, among bulrushes, a bed of fasciated wattles: at last the cavity of a mountain, an occulted sepulchre amid the conclamation of the hillcat and the ossifrage.†   (source)
  • And while I paus'd it came to me that what he really sang for was not there only, Nor for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes, But subtle, clandestine, away beyond, A charge transmitted and gift occult for those being born.†   (source)
  • You occult deep volitions, You average spiritual manhood, purpose of all, pois'd on yourself, giving not taking law, You womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence life and love and aught that comes from life and love, You unseen moral essence of all the vast materials of America, age upon age working in death the same as life,) You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould the New World, adjusting it to Time and Space, You hidden national will lying in…†   (source)
  • …all,) The tale of Alexander on his warlike marches suddenly dying, On one side China and on the other side Persia and Arabia, To the south the great seas and the bay of Bengal, The flowing literatures, tremendous epics, religions, castes, Old occult Brahma interminably far back, the tender and junior Buddha, Central and southern empires and all their belongings, possessors, The wars of Tamerlane,the reign of Aurungzebe, The traders, rulers, explorers, Moslems, Venetians, Byzantium, the…†   (source)
  • …elements! utterance to my heart beyond the rest—and this is of them,) So sweet thy primitive taste to breathe within—thy soothing fingers my face and hands, Thou, messenger—magical strange bringer to body and spirit of me, (Distances balk'd—occult medicines penetrating me from head to foot,) I feel the sky, the prairies vast—I feel the mighty northern lakes, I feel the ocean and the forest—somehow I feel the globe itself swift-swimming in space; Thou blown from lips so loved, now…†   (source)
  • After much debate, they concluded unanimously, that I was only relplum scalcath, which is interpreted literally lusus naturae; a determination exactly agreeable to the modern philosophy of Europe, whose professors, disdaining the old evasion of occult causes, whereby the followers of Aristotle endeavoured in vain to disguise their ignorance, have invented this wonderful solution of all difficulties, to the unspeakable advancement of human knowledge.†   (source)
  • Wherefore one race rules, and the other languishes, pursuant to her judgment, which is occult as the snake in the grass.†   (source)
  • "Ay, and aughts," replied Sancho; and shaking his fingers he washed his whole hand in the river along which the boat was quietly gliding in midstream, not moved by any occult intelligence or invisible enchanter, but simply by the current, just there smooth and gentle.†   (source)
  • Ignorance An Occult Cause And in many occasions they put for cause of Naturall events, their own Ignorance, but disguised in other words: As when they say, Fortune is the cause of things contingent; that is, of things whereof they know no cause: And as when they attribute many Effects to Occult Qualities; that is, qualities not known to them; and therefore also (as they thinke) to no Man else.†   (source)
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