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torpor
in a sentence

show 61 more with this conextual meaning
  • Thomas feels something crack inside, releasing him from the torpor that stifled his movements and slowed his thoughts.†   (source)
  • Delegate William Hooper of North Carolina, another signer of the Declaration of Independence, described a prevailing "torpor" in Congress.†   (source)
  • The plan had been to feed the beasts and chain them in their torpor, just as the queen had done.†   (source)
  • There wasa general slowdown; it was a time of patience, of hard yet productive reflection, and a vast torpor that ate away at the part of me that was excessive, cynical, life-affirming, and curious to a fault.†   (source)
  • Coming in from his work, he gorged himself on fried food and went to bed and to sleep in the resulting torpor.†   (source)
  • They slept much of the time and often did nothing, in animal-like torpor.†   (source)
  • Louisa awoke from a torpor, and her eyes languidly opened on her old bed at home, and her old room.   (source)
    torpor = deep sleep or unconsciousness
  • At length the death-stricken old man lay quietly in the torpor of mental and bodily exhaustion, with an imperceptible pulse, and breath that grew fainter and fainter, except when a long, deep, and irregular inspiration seemed to prelude the flight of his spirit.   (source)
    torpor = inactivity
  • Harry looked right and received a surprise to shake him out of his torpor.†   (source)
  • Seabiscuit floated along in a state of contented, bovine torpor.†   (source)
  • She could hear echoes of what Miss Milhouse had told her back in the fall when she wouldn't get up in the morning: Really, Miss Wellington, you must expunge yourself of this torpor.†   (source)
  • A sense of torpor and resignation had entered the room and infected us spiritually with that species of painless despair which comes when you have accepted the inevitable and know how things inexorably must end.†   (source)
  • They shared in the torpor of the town and in its puerile agitations.†   (source)
  • The town, under the stimulus of the holidays and the returning students, had wakened momentarily from its winter torpor: warm brisk currents of life seethed over the pavements.†   (source)
  • In the fresh pre-natal morning they began their route, walking down the steep hill of Valley Street into tropical sleep, past the stabled torpor of black sleepers, past all the illicit loves, the casual and innumerable adulteries of Niggertown.†   (source)
  • Little by little she sank into a torpor—she fell silent.†   (source)
  • At the sight of another human being my torpor passed, and I leaned out of the window eagerly.†   (source)
  • The bodies prone in them seemed startled out of their torpor by his movement.†   (source)
  • Here lived in bulky torpor His Excellency the Governor of St. Hubert, Colonel Sir Robert Fairlamb.†   (source)
  • "For Peppino!" cried Andrea, who seemed roused from the torpor in which he had been plunged.†   (source)
  • Scarcely had I finished my repast, when I felt myself sink by degrees into a strange torpor.†   (source)
  • Bazarov did not get up again that day, and passed the whole night in heavy, half-unconscious torpor.†   (source)
  • —sleep broken by nervous spasms, excitation of the brain, torpor of the nerve centres.†   (source)
  • Morrel, overpowered, turned around in the arm-chair; a delicious torpor permeated every vein.†   (source)
  • A dull torpor of the soul or the dullness of the thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of God?†   (source)
  • He was soggily sleepy, after two country drives on muddy roads, and in his torpor he gave her an overdose of strychnin, which so shocked and stimulated her that she decided to be well.†   (source)
  • …attempt, would take the glasses from his nose and wipe them; and he told himself that he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough later on, and settled back into his corner with as little curiosity, with as much torpor as the drowsy traveller who pulls his cap down over his eyes so as to get some sleep in the railway-carriage that is drawing him, he feels, faster and faster, out of the country in which he has lived for so long, and which he vowed that he…†   (source)
  • My brother woke from his torpor of astonishment and lifted her up, speaking gently to her, and carried her to Miss Elphinstone.†   (source)
  • …one of those days on which she had been invited to a party, she had given it up in order to come to me in the Champs-Elysees; I acquired more confidence in the vitality, in the future of a friendship which could remain so much alive amid the torpor, the solitude, the decay of our surroundings; and while she dropped pellets of snow down my neck, I smiled lovingly at what seemed to me at once a predilection that she shewed for me in thus tolerating me as her travelling companion in this…†   (source)
  • I know all your sisters have done for me since — for I have not been insensible during my seeming torpor — and I owe to their spontaneous, genuine, genial compassion as large a debt as to your evangelical charity.†   (source)
  • It was the invigorating breath of a fresh outward atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life.†   (source)
  • …wish well to both and find no fault with either not the least, it may be withering to know that ere the hand of Time had made me much less slim than formerly and dreadfully red on the slightest exertion particularly after eating I well know when it takes the form of a rash, it might have been and was not through the interruption of parents and mental torpor succeeded until the mysterious clue was held by Mr F. still I would not be ungenerous to either and I heartily wish well to both.'†   (source)
  • The thought of a duty unfulfilled shook off his torpor, and he hurried from the abode of drunkenness.†   (source)
  • But at last the roar of a bigger and nearer break than usual brought her out of her torpor, and she looked up, and her practiced eye fell upon that telltale rush of water.†   (source)
  • How long I was sunk in this torpor I cannot estimate; but when I awoke, it seemed as if the sun were settling toward the horizon.†   (source)
  • The same torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study.†   (source)
  • When there she threw herself on the bed with her clothes on, and lay in apparent torpor, as she had done once before on a memorable day of grief.†   (source)
  • A torpor seized her; she stopped.†   (source)
  • Worse still will be the case if the government really believes itself interested in preventing all circulation of ideas; it will then stand motionless, and oppressed by the heaviness of voluntary torpor.†   (source)
  • But under this torpor there was a fierce battle of emotions, such as Maggie in all her life of struggle had never known or foreboded; it seemed to her as if all the worst evil in her had lain in ambush till now, and had suddenly started up full-armed, with hideous, overpowering strength!†   (source)
  • The dark trunks of the trees rose from the pure white of the snow in regularly formed shafts, until, at a great height, their branches shot forth horizontal limbs, that were covered with the meagre foliage of an evergreen, affording a melancholy contrast to the torpor of nature below.†   (source)
  • Elizabeth alone had the power to draw me from these fits; her gentle voice would soothe me when transported by passion and inspire me with human feelings when sunk in torpor.†   (source)
  • But the complete torpor came at last: the fingers lost their tension, the arms unbent; then the little head fell away from the bosom, and the blue eyes opened wide on the cold starlight.†   (source)
  • There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the soul, neutralized by torpor, a stranger to that which may be designated as the business of living, receives no impressions, either human, or pleasant or painful, with the exception of earthquakes and catastrophes.†   (source)
  • A condition of healthy life so nearly resembling the torpor of death is a noticeable thing of its sort; to exhibit the inertness of the desert, and at the same time to be exercising powers akin to those of the meadow, and even of the forest, awakened in those who thought of it the attentiveness usually engendered by understatement and reserve.†   (source)
  • But soon recalling herself to the necessities of the situation, with an effort she shook off the torpor of her memories, and began stammering a few hurried words.†   (source)
  • Sometimes, indeed, I felt a wish for happiness and thought with melancholy delight of my beloved cousin or longed, with a devouring maladie du pays, to see once more the blue lake and rapid Rhone, that had been so dear to me in early childhood; but my general state of feeling was a torpor in which a prison was as welcome a residence as the divinest scene in nature; and these fits were seldom interrupted but by paroxysms of anguish and despair.†   (source)
  • Clifford, too, had long forgotten it; but found it again now, as he slowly revived from the chill torpor of his life.†   (source)
  • Maggie, all this time, moved about with a quiescence and even torpor of manner, so contrasted with her usual fitful brightness and ardor, that Lucy would have had to seek some other cause for such a change, if she had not been convinced that the position in which Maggie stood between Philip and her brother, and the prospect of her self-imposed wearisome banishment, were quite enough to account for a large amount of depression.†   (source)
  • …born in an aristocratic age, in the midst of a nation where the hereditary wealth of some, and the irremediable penury of others, should equally divert men from the idea of bettering their condition, and hold the soul as it were in a state of torpor fixed on the contemplation of another world, I should then wish that it were possible for me to rouse that people to a sense of their wants; I should seek to discover more rapid and more easy means for satisfying the fresh desires which I…†   (source)
  • I was wondering what could have caused this urgent need for sleep, when I felt a dense torpor saturate my brain.†   (source)
  • The feeling was not like an electric shock, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on my senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor, from which they were now summoned and forced to wake.†   (source)
  • For the most remarkable aspect of the affair was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor.†   (source)
  • But between these two extremes of the history of nations is an intermediate period—a period as glorious as it is agitated—when the conditions of men are not sufficiently settled for the mind to be lulled in torpor, when they are sufficiently unequal for men to exercise a vast power on the minds of one another, and when some few may modify the convictions of all.†   (source)
  • On certain days she chatted with feverish rapidity, and this over-excitement was suddenly followed by a state of torpor, in which she remained without speaking, without moving.†   (source)
  • Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a period little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences about that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the sufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably behind the accident that stupefied him.†   (source)
  • X The Pyncheon Garden CLIFFORD, except for Phoebe's More active instigation would ordinarily have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair till eventide.†   (source)
  • In that hour no one could have perceived in Agamemnon a moment's torpor or malingering, but fiery ardor for the battle-test that brings honor to men.†   (source)
  • For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.†   (source)
  • I had been paying little attention to our surroundings, as I dreamily enjoyed the growing warmth of the sun, but suddenly my eye struck a familiar rock formation and I started out of my torpor.†   (source)
  • FLORRY: (Sinking into torpor, crossing herself secretly) The end of the world!†   (source)
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