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decrepit
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  • And let me tell you, that old, old, old, decrepit geometry book hit my heart with the force of a nuclear bomb.†   (source)
  • Inside the sealed house, there was no tree; there were no Christmas decorations, not even candles in the windows, not even a decrepit Santa leaning against a table lamp.†   (source)
  • The terrified youngster stood frozen, pointing at the base of the obelisk where a shabby, decrepit drunk sat slumped on the stairs.†   (source)
  • The decrepit Devon endeavor?†   (source)
  • Every building we pass looks decrepit, coated in ash and weeds, but upon closer inspection, there's something much more.†   (source)
  • Leaving the pub felt like stepping into one of those heavily retouched photos that come loaded as wallpaper on new computers: streets of artfully decrepit cottages stretched into the distance, giving way to green fields sewn together by meandering rock walls, the whole scene topped by scudding white clouds.†   (source)
  • lf thirty-two is old and decrepit, what does that make you, old man?†   (source)
  • …of medical records, and the debate surrounding them, see Lori Andrews's "Medical Genetics: A Legal Frontier;" Confidentiality of Health Records by Herman Schuchman, Leila Foster, Sandra Nye, et al.; M. Siegler, "Confidentiality in Medicine: A Decrepit Concept," New England Journal of Medicine 307, no. 24 (December 9, 1982): 1518–1521; R. M. Gellman, "Prescribing Privacy," North Carolina Law Review 62, no. 255 (January 1984); "Report of Ad Hoc Committee on Privacy and Confidentiality,"…†   (source)
  • The pews were decrepit, the bills were once so in arrears the electricity was nearly turned off, and the padre hadn't installed air-conditioning, despite summer temperatures that reach 120 degrees.†   (source)
  • He funneled over a million dollars into it before the first postwar guest ever stepped through its doors, turning a decrepit relic into a showplace.†   (source)
  • They found lodging at the Golden Globe, which was cheap but not decrepit.†   (source)
  • Johnny pointed to one decrepit but oddly elegant structure and said, "The Empire State Building."†   (source)
  • She has a progressive-wasting disease, while he is prematurely aged and decrepit, his hair nearly gone and his nerves shot.†   (source)
  • The jukebox is old and decrepit, no neon lights, no fancy touches.†   (source)
  • I realized how very old and decrepit I must look to this young person.†   (source)
  • Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.†   (source)
  • Not long after that, Adam was complaining about his decrepit guitar, saying he wanted to get a vintage Gibson SG, and I offered to get it for him for his birthday.†   (source)
  • The journey is supposed to take fifty-four minutes, but it rarely does: this section of the track is ancient, decrepit, beset with signalling problems and neverending engineering works.†   (source)
  • It was the woodshed behind my sister's house—a place to stow lawn-mower parts and rusty tools—a decrepit old outbuilding, like something from a slasher movie where campers are slowly killed off.†   (source)
  • When he was not occupied with the administration of his decrepit vessels, still afloat out of sheer distraction on the part of fate, or with the problems of river navigation, which grew more and more critical every day, he devoted his free time to the enrichment of his lyric repertoire.†   (source)
  • I drummed my fingers as I waited for my decrepit computer to wheeze awake; they snapped against the desk, staccato and anxious.†   (source)
  • A few wind-whipped and decrepit Victorian mansions, remnants of a lost era of seagoing optimism, loomed out of the snowfall on the town's sporadic hills.†   (source)
  • You're showing me how youthful and beautiful you are, while I'm already old and decrepit.†   (source)
  • Harald Vanger…I don't know, he seems so decrepit he can hardly walk, and I can't see him sneaking over here last night, catching a cat, and doing all this."†   (source)
  • We raced past other decrepit gods, who all got quite excited.†   (source)
  • The furniture of the den, a cement-floored room that ran the length of the house, consisted almost entirely of examples of his carpentry (shelves, tables, stools, a ping-pong table) and Nancy's needlework (chintz slip covers that rejuvenated a decrepit couch, curtains, pillows bearing legends: happy? and You don't have to be crazy to live here but it helps).†   (source)
  • "Now that you mention it," he said, "I guess you are practically decrepit."†   (source)
  • No matter how decrepit we became, we would have looked after each other, like we always did.†   (source)
  • Amid the decrepit apartment complexes, the soulless strip malls, the gas stations, and the used-car dealerships, there were women walking the streets in chadors and hijabs and others in colorful African robes and headdresses.†   (source)
  • Then one day—it was during a really bleak time in my life—the light was coming in the room differently, snow outside or something, and I realized that old sofa was utterly decrepit, only held together by dust.†   (source)
  • The wall of faded paper took a beating as the wind blew through the fences, ripping some of the more decrepit sheets free and making others flutter like hummingbird wings.†   (source)
  • As they came quite to the foot they saw groups of women and children, with here and there a decrepit man, leaving the cottages and making their way toward the lighted mills.†   (source)
  • "Spacious" homes, meanwhile, are often decrepit or impractical.†   (source)
  • Freshly showered and wearing the uniform that I thought was the least unflattering, I stood in the fluorescent light of the decrepit bathroom and looked at the unfamiliar woman in the mirror.†   (source)
  • The decrepit old highway was crowded with shoppers but moved along at a steady crawl.†   (source)
  • "Seeing as you're the oldest and most decrepit.†   (source)
  • He drifted into a Wyoming county fair, where he found a job working for an obscure firm that supplied decrepit horses to rodeos for use in relay races.†   (source)
  • —from the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica FROM HIS SECOND-STORY hotel room in the decrepit haveli, Mortenson watched the progress of a legless boy, dragging himself through the chaos of the Khyber Bazaar on a wooden skid.†   (source)
  • Cristian remembers it as "a scary-looking, decrepit house" with torn-up shutters and holes in the walls.†   (source)
  • A strip of parking lot, a decrepit diner ("All You Can Eat Wednesdays!†   (source)
  • He's so old, so …. so …. decrepit.†   (source)
  • I'll roll my pants legs up and look down at those decrepit things, my feet, and an awkward minute will pass until e="it becomes clear that I'm waiting for him to slip the booties onto them.†   (source)
  • Though he couldn't prove it, Miles knew that Otis had somehow been responsible, and Miles showed up at the Timson compound—a series of decrepit mobile homes arranged in a semicircle on the outskirts of town—with three other deputies, their guns drawn.†   (source)
  • They followed Keez to an abandoned building in the middle of a scary, decrepit block.†   (source)
  • Who suspects decrepit old men, whether they're beggars or whether they're just holding on to the last remnants of mobility?†   (source)
  • But Stuart had caught "a glimpse of the living spirit shining through the feeble and decrepit body.†   (source)
  • I knew nothing of that watery city, and the decrepit carrack looming alongside the dock looked scarcely seaworthy.†   (source)
  • He was forty-one years old, and he was visiting his decrepit mother at Pine Knoll, an old people's home he had put her in only a month before.†   (source)
  • By the time Deo was traveling with Lonjino, the cow Yaruyange was old and useless, so decrepit you had to lift her with a stick to get her on her feet.†   (source)
  • This is Darius' world he moves feebly decrepit in the candy apple neon glow of Mohammed's Millenium Market Darius clutches brown paper bag all his dreams, packaged at liquor store his eyes are red I tell myself its because he don't sleep at night he's up counting he knows how many stars are in the sky he can hear the ocean lapping at the edge of the world he can tell you how many times it hits the shore but folks don't ask him things like that so he counts dubs, counts 8ths drinks…†   (source)
  • In my weaker moments, I imagine the client as a vastly wealthy voyeur, a decrepit, shut-away xenophobe who keeps a national vigilance on eminent agitators and ethnics.†   (source)
  • The two sailors, who wore decrepit uniforms without insignia, brought up a large metal container with sides that were fogged and covered with droplets.†   (source)
  • "If your parents are really so decrepit—and I must say I find that hard to believe; they're barely in their seventies—they should move to a retirement community.†   (source)
  • I have no need nor desire to learn the magical deceits of his decrepit race!†   (source)
  • This plane was an outrageously decrepit bi-motor built in 1938 as a military training aircraft.†   (source)
  • As I was trying to open the decrepit gate, the cabin door opened a few creaking feet.†   (source)
  • We stared at one another as the car took a right turn and disappeared behind the decrepit rectory of the church.†   (source)
  • My yells over the decrepit telephone brought no response.†   (source)
  • "I am a star at rest, my daughter," answered Ramandu "When I set for the last time, decrepit and old beyond all that you can reckon, I was carried to this island.†   (source)
  • There he commanded a troop of semiinvalids whom instructors as decrepit as themselves took every morning through the drill they had forgotten.†   (source)
  • To her decrepit, sick, and bedrid father;   (source)
  • If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.   (source)
  • He lies upon his bed, an aged man with sunken cheeks, the decrepit shadow of himself.   (source)
  • We end up settling for a few rounds on a decrepit miniature golf course.†   (source)
  • That was good, the decrepit Devon endeavor.†   (source)
  • I winced, remembering how old and decrepit my father looked.†   (source)
  • I was so health-conscious that I felt sure I was becoming utterly decrepit.†   (source)
  • All those decrepit old people who won't even know what they're looking at, and here's me!†   (source)
  • Family after family arrives, each claiming a decrepit ancestor amid high-decibel greetings.†   (source)
  • I round the corner just as Pete slits the throat of a decrepit gray horse.†   (source)
  • We are completely at the mercy of a decrepit tiger-woman with what I can only hope is an all-consuming passion for Snow's death.†   (source)
  • We were used to the Saturday matinees at the decrepit Gravesend movie house, inexplicably called The Idaho—after the faraway western state or the potato of that name, we never knew.†   (source)
  • They must have met during those days when she'd been playing hookey, from her first school in Toronto, and then later, when she was no longer going to school at all; when she was supposed to be cheering up decrepit old paupers in the hospital, dressed in her prissy, sanctimonious little pinafore, and lying her head off the whole time.†   (source)
  • At the head of Miller Bay, beyond the mud flats, lived Captain Jonathan Soderland, who'd plied his decrepit windjammer, the C. S. Murphy, to the Arctic each year on trading expeditions.†   (source)
  • Then his view is obscured by something close up; the recoil has pushed him back behind a decrepit yacht tied up along the side of the channel.†   (source)
  • So here's how it went in God's heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story—how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn't die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games,…†   (source)
  • The taipan suddenly clenched his right hand into a fist, then raised it and crashed it down on the fragile arm of the decrepit chair.†   (source)
  • He was a decrepit man.†   (source)
  • "Decrepit," I interjected.†   (source)
  • The two of them parted for a few seconds as they circumvented a decrepit wagon, and then Arya added, "The most important thing is to keep moving.†   (source)
  • There was the decrepit, mixed-up scent of engine oil and stale beer and animal spray, the waft of which always seems to overrun certain locales and neighborhoods.†   (source)
  • I could see that he was trying to find a solution, a way to outrun them in this decrepit van or a way to evade them–to hide our wide white profile in the low, gaunt brush of the desert–without leading them back to the rest.†   (source)
  • Unloaded from the van, shuffled into an elevator, we were deposited in a filthy, decrepit, and disorganized R&D.†   (source)
  • They were to have been the witnesses when Orfeo lost control and attacked me with my own renovation tools, which would be conveniently nearby when the agitated rhino broke through the decrepit fence between his plot and mine.†   (source)
  • A decrepit chain-link fence formed an oval boundary around the circumference of the field, forcing visitors on their way to the playgrounds and picnic tables on the far side of Milam Park to take a detour around the playing area.†   (source)
  • When he saw her appear in a madapollam nightshirt and with her hair loose over her shoulders, the decrepit parish priest thought that it was a trick and sent the altar boy away.†   (source)
  • Their caution was understandable; it was a district to be avoided, although not necessarily because of unsavory inhabitants, for the Moscow police were ruthlessly thorough in such areas, but because of the stretch of decrepit buildings.†   (source)
  • "I'd like to see one more place that ain't settled before I get decrepit and have to take up the rocking chair.†   (source)
  • The decrepit lawyers dressed in black who during other times had besieged Colonel Aureliano Buendia and who now were controlled by the banana company dismissed those demands with decisions that seemed like acts of magic.†   (source)
  • The fear turned into panic when Melquiades took out his teeth, intact, encased in their gums, and showed them to the audience for an instant-a fleeting instant in which he went back to being the same decrepit man of years past-and put them back again and smiled once more with the full control of his restored youth.†   (source)
  • The decrepit priest, who could no longer string ideas together and who was beginning to startle his parishioners with the wild interpretations he gave from the pulpit, appeared one afternoon at the house with the goblet in which he had prepared the ashes that Wednesday and he tried to anoint the whole family with them to show that they could be washed off with water.†   (source)
  • Those two flats easily held his few decrepit wagons, and because the train cars were already emblazoned with BENZINI BROS MOST SPECTACULAR SHOW ON EARTH, Alan Bunkel retained the name and officially joined the ranks of train circuses.†   (source)
  • Heaving and rocking its way through the bungalow barrens of Queens and Nassau, clashing gears, exuding fumes, the decrepit bus seemed likely to imprison us forever.†   (source)
  • Ah, regardless how decrepit of superstructure, she was splendid.†   (source)
  • The decrepit animal would never pull the hill.†   (source)
  • It is common knowledge that no one writes worse than these defenders of decrepit ideas.†   (source)
  • He turned and perceived a decrepit little woman.†   (source)
  • Oh, Ashley, I'm getting old and decrepit.†   (source)
  • Before long there was a fluttering of wings, and back came the thrush; and with him came a most decrepit old bird.†   (source)
  • Thus, Eugene gathered vaguely but poignantly, that other boys of his age were not only self-supporting, but had for years kept their decrepit parents in luxury by their earnings as electrical engineers, presidents of banks, or members of Congress.†   (source)
  • They were old and decrepit but there were picket fences around them with gates on which Francie longed to swing.†   (source)
  • She inherited a decrepit wooden building — a former temple — and an institution that had had difficulty even feeding its enfeebled inmates, some of whom had had to be sent out foraging for firewood.†   (source)
  • The wrinkled Capuchin, no more decrepit than he had been for a dozen years, persevered in a secret ritual he had evolved, while to the folk of the valley he soon became veiled in mystery, a hermit of uncanny powers who lived alone on that formidable cliff.†   (source)
  • Through its fine plumes specked with little pricked ears of green in spring, of orange in autumn, I saw boats; buildings; I saw hurrying, decrepit women.†   (source)
  • But the French had been too optimistic and thought that when the decrepit old civilizations were busted nothing could stop us from entering the earthly paradise.†   (source)
  • "The time for the enlightenment of the prince Siddhartha draweth nigh," thought the gods; "we must show him a sign": and they changed one of their number into a decrepit old man, broken-toothed, gray-haired, crooked and bent of body, leaning on a staff, and trembling, and showed him to the Future Buddha, but so that only he and the charioteer saw him.†   (source)
  • By now he was accustomed to the terrible scene through which he walked on his way into the city: the large rice field near the Novitiate, streaked with brown; the houses on the outskirts of the city, standing but decrepit, with broken windows and dishevelled tiles; and then, quite suddenly, the beginning of the four square miles of reddish-brown scar, where nearly everything had been buffeted down and burned; range on range of collapsed city blocks, with here and there a crude sign…†   (source)
  • Decrepit families imply decrepit wills, decrepit conduct.†   (source)
  • He lies upon his bed, an aged man with sunken cheeks, the decrepit shadow of himself.†   (source)
  • I lodged with two decrepit old ladies, who looked after me.†   (source)
  • Oh! what a decrepit face, livid and haggard and drawn with the love of gambling and of dice!†   (source)
  • It was extraordinary to see of what a burst of earnestness such a decrepit man was capable.†   (source)
  • The two decrepit leaves which barred it were ornamented with an old rusty knocker.†   (source)
  • Moret was in those days an old-fashioned town of one street at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and the Ecu d'Or was a hotel which still had about it the decrepit air of the Ancien Regime.†   (source)
  • It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures—on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens.†   (source)
  • As she stepped down from the train at the drab and aged chalet which did service for a station, she observed her father in the same old winter overcoat he had worn for a dozen years, waiting for her with the old family conveyance, a decrepit but still whole buggy and a horse as bony and weary as himself.†   (source)
  • In a very short time a decrepit figure had emerged from the opium den, and I was walking down the street with Sherlock Holmes.†   (source)
  • Your wrinkles lied, just as the plump smooth skin of many a stupid girl of 17, with heavy spirits and decrepit ideas, lies about her age?†   (source)
  • His wife seemed better; his daughter Miriam found an excellent piano teacher; the boy Robert entered college that autumn; they had a spacious though decrepit house; the relief from the droning and the annually repeated, inevitable routine of the classroom was exhilarating; and Gottlieb had never in his life worked so well.†   (source)
  • All life seemed to have ebbed away, and even when the sun shone the day was Shrunk and cold, As if her veins were sapless and old, And she rose up decrepitly For a last dim look at earth and sea.†   (source)
  • It seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit and superseded chambers.†   (source)
  • She left the room, and he followed her; in the passage they disturbed an old hag who did the casual cooking of the household, though she was so decrepit as to be hardly able to understand human speech.†   (source)
  • She crossed to an old, faded and somewhat decrepit over-stuffed chair which stood in the center of the room beside a small table whereon lay some nondescript books and magazines—the Saturday Evening Post, Munsey's, the Popular Science Monthly, Bebe's Garden Seeds, and to escape most distracting and searing thoughts, sat down, her chin in her hands, her elbows planted on her knees.†   (source)
  • Because marriage is their only means of escape from these decrepit fiends who hide their selfish ambitions, their jealous hatreds of the young rivals who have supplanted them, under the mask of maternal duty and family affection.†   (source)
  • …of white men and to their courage, trusting the power of their unbelief and the iron shell of their fire-ship, the pilgrims of an exacting faith slept on mats, on blankets, on bare planks, on every deck, in all the dark corners, wrapped in dyed cloths, muffled in soiled rags, with their heads resting on small bundles, with their faces pressed to bent forearms: the men, the women, the children; the old with the young, the decrepit with the lusty—all equal before sleep, death's brother.†   (source)
  • The decrepit father was wheeled in to see Svidrigailov by the tender and sensible mother, who as usual began the conversation with various irrelevant questions.†   (source)
  • Can the wrinkled decrepit hag before thee, whose wrath must vent itself in impotent curses, forget she was once the daughter of the noble Thane of Torquilstone, before whose frown a thousand vassals trembled?†   (source)
  • …ringing, and the wheels were turning round, and when it was no longer any good to look after them, and the dust had settled, and Timofeitch, all bent and tottering as he walked, had crept back to his little room; when the old people were left alone in their little house, which seemed suddenly to have grown shrunken and decrepit too, Vassily Ivanovitch, after a few more moments of hearty waving of his handkerchief on the steps, sank into a chair, and his head dropped on to his breast.†   (source)
  • I don't speak of his capacity as a general, but at a time like this how they appoint a decrepit, blind old man, positively blind?†   (source)
  • "If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit," said Will, with irrepressible quickness.†   (source)
  • Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from whose oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her, in their youth, as a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and solemn aspect.†   (source)
  • At length the decrepit stranger, turning his vacant looks from face to face, made a feeble attempt to rise, while a faint smile crossed his wasted face, like an habitual effort at courtesy, as he said, in a hollow, tremulous voice: "Be pleased to be seated, gentlemen.†   (source)
  • They looked as if they had never known what youth or pleasure was, but had been the offspring of Nature's dotage, and always the gray, decrepit, sapless, miserable creatures, who now sat stooping round the doctor's table, without life enough in their souls or bodies to be animated even by the prospect of growing young again.†   (source)
  • Occasionally the decrepit little body staggered; once she sat down to get her breath; rising shortly, she struggled on with renewed haste.†   (source)
  • He seated himself on a wooden bench, with his back against a decrepit vine; he gazed at the stars, past the puny and stunted silhouettes of his fruit-trees.†   (source)
  • suffered considerable diminution, and grown so decrepit and feeble with old age as to threaten demise altogether.†   (source)
  • Did he see himself, a white-haired decrepit man, bending his hitherto inflexible theories to appointed circumstances; making his facts and figures subservient to Faith, Hope, and Charity; and no longer trying to grind that Heavenly trio in his dusty little mills?†   (source)
  • For example, an uncle—who had sailed for India fifty years before, and never been heard of since—might yet return, and adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and decrepit age, and adorn her with pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls and turbans, and make her the ultimate heiress of his unreckonable riches.†   (source)
  • The insignificant testament, the last dotage of a decrepit grand art falling back into infancy before it dies.†   (source)
  • He could talk sagely about the world's old age, but never actually believed what he said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the world—that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable—as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming.†   (source)
  • Next day the decrepit Kutuzov, having given orders to be called early, said his prayers, dressed, and, with an unpleasant consciousness of having to direct a battle he did not approve of, got into his caleche and drove from Letashovka (a village three and a half miles from Tarutino) to the place where the attacking columns were to meet.†   (source)
  • It was a decrepit little house, sunk on one side, with three windows looking into the street, and with a muddy yard, in the middle of which stood a solitary cow.†   (source)
  • To confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension—as it would never be a measure of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself; and it being hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign—it was my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow grey and decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as the old Inspector.†   (source)
  • To give her pleasure Razumihin told her how Raskolnikov had looked after the poor student and his decrepit father and how a year ago he had been burnt and injured in rescuing two little children from a fire.†   (source)
  • …betrayed unconsciously, and so early, that timid despair which leads so many in our unhappy society, who dread cynicism and its corrupting influences, and mistakenly attribute all the mischief to European enlightenment, to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.†   (source)
  • In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a voluminous funnel; an old pine desk with a three-legged stool beside it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm; and—not to forget the library—on some shelves, a score or two of volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the Revenue laws.†   (source)
  • It was worth while to hear the croaking and hollow tones of the old lady, and the pleasant voice of Phoebe, mingling in one twisted thread of talk; and still better to contrast their figures,—so light and bloomy,—so decrepit and dusky,—with only the counter betwixt them, in one sense, but more than threescore years, in another.†   (source)
  • Razumihin somehow discovered and proved that while Raskolnikov was at the university he had helped a poor consumptive fellow student and had spent his last penny on supporting him for six months, and when this student died, leaving a decrepit old father whom he had maintained almost from his thirteenth year, Raskolnikov had got the old man into a hospital and paid for his funeral when he died.†   (source)
  • The New Building, which was the most cracked and decrepit thing to be seen anywhere in the world, was the weak point in the prison.†   (source)
  • , with chiccory leaves and vermicelli, and all the warts, and all the fungi, which disfigure that decrepit, toothless, and coquettish old architecture.†   (source)
  • In the corner of the room stood an old iron bedstead, which was in a decidedly decrepit state, and which served the sisters as a camp-bed when they were watching with the sick.†   (source)
  • Through it one could confusedly distinguish the front of Notre-Dame, and the decrepit Hôtel-Dieu with some wan invalids gazing down from the heights of its roof all checkered with dormer windows.†   (source)
  • These buildings were so decrepit that, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie and the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie, the fronts were shored up with beams running from one house to another.†   (source)
  • For having made a great cage of wood of solid beams, timbers and wall-plates, measuring nine feet in length by eight in breadth, and of the height of seven feet between the partitions, smoothed and clamped with great bolts of iron, which has been placed in a chamber situated in one of the towers of the Bastille Saint-Antoine, in which cage is placed and detained, by command of the king our lord, a prisoner who formerly inhabited an old, decrepit, and ruined cage.†   (source)
  • —ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS even proved easier for him than for Romeo; Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, Marius had only to use a little force on one of the bars of the decrepit gate which vacillated in its rusty recess, after the fashion of old people's teeth.†   (source)
  • He approached the other door with more hope; it was frightfully decrepit; its very immensity rendered it less solid; the planks were rotten; the iron bands—there were only three of them—were rusted.†   (source)
  • The rambler, if he risked himself outside the four decrepit walls of this Marche-aux-Chevaux; if he consented even to pass beyond the Rue du Petit-Banquier, after leaving on his right a garden protected by high walls; then a field in which tan-bark mills rose like gigantic beaver huts; then an enclosure encumbered with timber, with a heap of stumps, sawdust, and shavings, on which stood a large dog, barking; then a long, low, utterly dilapidated wall, with a little black door in…†   (source)
  • These two vaults, especially the less ancient, that of 1740, were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the belt sewer, which dated from 1412, an epoch when the brook of fresh water of Menilmontant was elevated to the dignity of the Grand Sewer of Paris, an advancement analogous to that of a peasant who should become first valet de chambre to the King; something like Gros-Jean transformed into Lebel.†   (source)
  • …with timber, with a heap of stumps, sawdust, and shavings, on which stood a large dog, barking; then a long, low, utterly dilapidated wall, with a little black door in mourning, laden with mosses, which were covered with flowers in the spring; then, in the most deserted spot, a frightful and decrepit building, on which ran the inscription in large letters: POST NO BILLS,—this daring rambler would have reached little known latitudes at the corner of the Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel.†   (source)
  • At every step that he mounted, it was a frightful spectacle; his white locks, his decrepit face, his lofty, bald, and wrinkled brow, his amazed and open mouth, his aged arm upholding the red banner, rose through the gloom and were enlarged in the bloody light of the torch, and the bystanders thought that they beheld the spectre of '93 emerging from the earth, with the flag of terror in his hand.†   (source)
  • "If you mean to tell me that you're so decrepit you can't manage more than once in a day anymore."†   (source)
  • This article, my liege, yourself must break; For well you know here comes in embassy The French king's daughter, with yourself to speak— A mild of grace and complete majesty— About surrender up of Aquitaine To her decrepit, sick, and bedrid father: Therefore this article is made in vain, Or vainly comes th' admired princess hither.†   (source)
  • An old decrepit wretch, That has no sense, no sinew; takes his meat With others' fingers; only knows to gape, When you do scald his gums; a voice; a shadow; And, what can this man hurt you?†   (source)
  • And they that go about by disobedience, to doe no more than reforme the Common-wealth, shall find they do thereby destroy it; like the foolish daughters of Peleus (in the fable;) which desiring to renew the youth of their decrepit Father, did by the Counsell of Medea, cut him in pieces, and boyle him, together with strange herbs, but made not of him a new man.†   (source)
  • The sun Had first his precept so to move, so shine, As might affect the earth with cold and heat Scarce tolerable; and from the north to call Decrepit winter; from the south to bring Solstitial summer's heat.†   (source)
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