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tarnish
in a sentence
grouped by contextual meaning

show 9 more with this conextual meaning
  • The cleaner removes tarnish on contact.
    tarnish = undesired loss of shine or spotting on a metal surface
  • Inside the carton, wrapped in tissue paper, was an old army-issue compass in a brass case, tarnished green-gray with age.   (source)
    tarnished = with an undesired loss of shine and spotting
  • "One last thing," she said, and she drew out a small oval picture frame of tarnished silver.   (source)
    tarnished = with an undesired loss of shine or spotting
  • Mae Tuck climbed out of bed and began to dress: three petticoats, a rusty brown skirt with one enormous pocket, an old cotton jacket, and a knitted shawl which she pinned across her bosom with a tarnished metal brooch.   (source)
    tarnished = with a loss of shine or with spots
  • The following week the knot-hole yielded a tarnished medal.   (source)
    tarnished = undesired loss of shine or spotting on a metal surface
  • In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous rubbish.   (source)
  • …had looked grim and gruesome enough, but now, some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns, when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance, when the time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined.   (source)
  • My imagination was a tarnished mirror.   (source)
    tarnished = with a loss of shine or with spots
  • Here, before his own wife has greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed ship-master, just in port, with his vessel's papers under his arm in a tarnished tin box.   (source)
    tarnished = with a loss of shine
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show 5 more with this conextual meaning
  • The law school's good name was tarnished by the failure of so many students to pass the Bar Exam.
  • There is a strong program beneath the tarnish of recent neglect.
    tarnish = damage
  • But we have been at war, and you know how that can tarnish even the best men.   (source)
  • My family's name has been tarnished beyond recognition by my son's treatment at the hands of this…this…boy!   (source)
    tarnished = damaged (made to look worse)
  • Elizabeth also wept and was unhappy, but hers also was the misery of innocence, which, like a cloud that passes over the fair moon, for a while hides but cannot tarnish its brightness.   (source)
    tarnish = dim
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show 10 more examples with any meaning
  • Stood in the silver tarnish of a half-moon and glanced up to a sky riddled with stars.†   (source)
  • Or he could wait until things are well underway and the courtier is deaf to the outside world, and slide out the door; but then, the honour of the assassins as a group — as a guild, if you like — would be tarnished.†   (source)
  • The hood of the Impala was tarnished, and that was a shame.†   (source)
  • Judging by the black tarnish, people were still traveling by horse and buggy the last time these pieces were cleaned.†   (source)
  • It was an old-fashioned box made of silver, tarnished but intricately decorated.†   (source)
  • The BBC producers loved Teabing's hot premise, his research, and his credentials, but they had concerns that the concept was so shocking and hard to swallow that the network might end up tarnishing its reputation for quality journalism.†   (source)
  • Anything that threatened to tarnish his reputation had to go; he had dedicated his whole life to becoming Minister of Magic.†   (source)
  • The smallest of the men reached into his wicker basket and brought out a tarnished pair of silver scissors.†   (source)
  • Mama'd get cross with her about a tarnished spoon and Constantine would serve her toast burned up for a week.†   (source)
  • Their armor, while tarnished, was well crafted from copper and leather.†   (source)
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show 190 more examples with any meaning
  • A dull, yellowish bruise, the sheen of tarnished silver, marked Owen's cheek—where the Brinker-Smiths' mobile bed had struck him—giving him a cadaver's uneven color.†   (source)
  • An old handgun, a box of certificates, a stack of tarnished silver coins.†   (source)
  • They're tarnishing."†   (source)
  • Had getting caught for shoplifting just tarnished the perfect, controlled, ubercool Hanna everyone had come to know?†   (source)
  • Tarnished.†   (source)
  • Made of the same steel as her hand and equally tarnished, it felt like an extension of her.†   (source)
  • Two other doors with tarnished brass pulls faced the hall.†   (source)
  • Either way, by 1951, when Henrietta Lacks's cells began growing in the Gey lab—just five years after the widely publicized "death" of Carrel's chicken heart—the public image of immortal cells was tarnished.†   (source)
  • "Most of all," Drew continued, "we certainly don't need our image tarnished by spies, do we, Piper?"†   (source)
  • But even in the tarnished old photograph, it glowed in its own isolated and oddly modern light.†   (source)
  • An elaborate set of scales had gathered equal amounts of dust in its tarnished brass pans.†   (source)
  • She probably wouldn't want to tarnish her reputation by being seen with us.†   (source)
  • Here was a tangible remnant of the Riders' glory, tarnished though it was by the relentless pull of time.†   (source)
  • I stood on that burnt-up field with the taste of ashes in my mouth, ashes in my eyes, on my hair and my dress, all stained and tarnished.†   (source)
  • One of his fondest memories of her was the long afternoons she had spent under the front porch when she was about two, digging in the loam, ignoring spiders and googlepeds, rushing into the house to show off every plastic plate and tarnished pfennig she had excavated, demanding to know where it had come from, what were the people like who had left it there?†   (source)
  • At this point, Burnham believed, nothing could tarnish the fair's triumph or his own place in architectural history.†   (source)
  • Her eyes glittered like tarnished dimes.†   (source)
  • It looked as if it was bound in tarnished metal.†   (source)
  • It is made of tarnished, dull metal, an Abnegation wedding band.†   (source)
  • The water was so clear that he saw him moving below like a tarnished shark among the blue ones that crossed his path without touching him.†   (source)
  • It'd be cruel to tarnish the spot they both loved best.†   (source)
  • To begin with, she wouldn't even consider tarnishing her reputation with a string of danna, but might instead have only one or two in her entire life.†   (source)
  • A city like a tarnished heirloom, pleasing—from the outside looking in, at least—in the half decay of its sculpted cornices, arcades, and porticoes, and loveliest in the warm, windy evenings, when the waves crashed against the seawall, raining spray on lovers along the Malecón.†   (source)
  • Brass wires were bent roughly into a circle for the Ferris wheel and twisting loops for the roller coaster; flat sheets of tarnished metal formed the Magic Carpet ride.†   (source)
  • The cornices had once been new, had once gleamed as brightly as now they sulked in shame, all tarnished and despised.†   (source)
  • "Now you can look at this picture and not have to have your memory of fifth grade tarnished," she said.†   (source)
  • So tarnished, I might not have noticed it.†   (source)
  • The brass was tarnished.†   (source)
  • I had to be relentlessly on my toes to avoid anything that could possibly tarnish my image, my family's image, or the country at large.†   (source)
  • Freestanding gaslights housed in tarnished copper fixtures followed the sidewalk that ran parallel to the huge red brick and black rock building.†   (source)
  • The tins had been on the shelves so long they'd tarnished and the labels faded.†   (source)
  • Whatever Aro's goal, I don't think he's ready to tarnish the Volturi's reputation for it.†   (source)
  • Dee snuck in twice, in the dead of night, so as not to tarnish her reputation.†   (source)
  • They put cracked vases in with the dead, or chipped cups and tarnished bracelets.†   (source)
  • Led to believe that Howard had very different conditions in mind, Swope had already sent Belmont officials scurrying to arrange a meeting between the two horses, and if the deal fell through now, his reputation within the organization might be tarnished.†   (source)
  • But he took a handful of tamburok, an herbal-tasting green mountain tea, from a tarnished brass urn and filled the blackened teapot from a ten-gallon plastic gasoline container of river water.†   (source)
  • Its beauty was like to that of common silver, but the beauty of mithril did not tarnish or grow dim.†   (source)
  • The pattern forged on it was a bit tarnished, but still gleamed with visible detail.†   (source)
  • Not even a tarnished light shone in a garret window.†   (source)
  • To Adrienne, it seemed as if Amanda had become convinced that moving forward would somehow tarnish her memories of Brent, and she'd made the decision not to allow that to happen.†   (source)
  • The mermaid fountain was still there in the center of the room, spurting water, but it looked tarnished, and the steps that led up to it were crowded with people, many sporting bandages.†   (source)
  • He knew his reputation would be tarnished, that his family would curse his name, but he didn't care.†   (source)
  • I stooped and starting replacing the articles: a bent Masonic emblem, a set of tarnished cuff links, three brass rings, a dime pierced with a nail hole so as to be worn about the ankle on a string for luck, an ornate greeting card with the message "Grandma, I love you" in childish scrawl; another card with a picture of what looked like a white man in black-face seated in the door of a cabin strumming a banjo beneath a bar of music and the lyric "Going back to my old cabin home"; a…†   (source)
  • He did it to keep something good in her life from being tarnished.†   (source)
  • Salander was extremely aggravated by the time he had finished, but she held back; she was exhausted and decided it would be better to keep quiet than to tarnish her stay at Sahlgrenska with a fight.†   (source)
  • Envy nips not their buds, calumny destroys not their fruits, nor does ingratitude tarnish their colors.†   (source)
  • She gathered up Felicia's nightgown with the blue roses, Tía Alicia's tarnished peacock brooch (which Celia 'ad given to Felicia for her fifteenth birthday), a stump of orange lipstick, two unraveling stretch shorts, and her daughter's santería clothing.†   (source)
  • Nothing tarnishes a hero as much as failure.†   (source)
  • A tarnished circlet crowned his head; an open band of thick silver encircled his neck.†   (source)
  • She examined the tarnished tubes and odd-shaped connections.†   (source)
  • If he was bringing in stovewood and noticed a silver spoon that was tarnished, he'd say, "You know, white folks, 'ligion be jes lak dis here silver.†   (source)
  • I will not allow trench-mouthed swine to tarnish the good name of the Institute.†   (source)
  • He tarnishes.†   (source)
  • Each one, tarnished or bright, would push him back to a time that he found both too painful and too beautiful to remember, and he had never wanted to be one of the many old men who, like absinthe drinkers, are lost in dreams.†   (source)
  • Oz took this in stride, his optimism barely tarnished.†   (source)
  • The telescope was pushed to one side of the table making room for a decanter half full of rum and two glasses on a tarnished silver tray.†   (source)
  • Her finger was marred by a dark, almost black circle, as if the ring were tarnished brass, or its inside sooty.†   (source)
  • From its fittings—its badly worn but still comfortable seats, the ornate and now tarnished chandeliers—Sophie could tell that the venerable coach had once carried people first-class; save for a singular difference, it might have been one of those cars of her girlhood in which her father—always the stylish voyager—had taken the family to Vienna or Bozen or Berlin.†   (source)
  • That book felt very tarnished now, with the paper brown at the edges, the red letters on the paper spine almost bleached away—something dead, a relic.†   (source)
  • She slung her head toward some twirly, tarnished racks holding jars of salt and pepper and vinegar and mustard.†   (source)
  • The dirty snow looked as if it shone through crepe, and the firs behind the churchyard railings, wet and dark like tarnished silver, seemed to be in deep mourning.†   (source)
  • There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell; and the carbon lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were started, and the fire flies were out, and a few frogs were flopping in the dewy grass, by the time the fathers and the children came out.†   (source)
  • She drew out as well a piece of needlepoint, square and tarnished, which she spread over her pretty arm and hung before their eyes.†   (source)
  • Church returned with a compact nodule of tarnished steel and placed it on the counter alongside the money.†   (source)
  • Let nothing tarnish your memories of Albus Dumbledore!†   (source)
  • The bird's deceptively dark color was the result of Rome's pollution tarnishing the original bronze.†   (source)
  • Her left hand was steel, tarnished and dark between the joints as if it needed a good cleaning.†   (source)
  • The tarnish is clogging the micro-lattice, and that reduces the surface area.†   (source)
  • Only her eyes, those tarnished dimes, were fully alive under the shelf of her brow.†   (source)
  • The claddagh charm, its details obscured by tarnish, becomes three-dimensional again.†   (source)
  • Oh, she'd keep their secrets; it would tarnish her reputation otherwise.†   (source)
  • Becky came out carrying a tarnished silver teapot and a stack of china cups and plates.†   (source)
  • Doge is right, how can you let these people tarnish your memories of Dumbledore?†   (source)
  • "Yes, if the rate of tarnishing doesn't increase."†   (source)
  • It was a large black volume entitled The Walking Dead in tarnished silver letters.†   (source)
  • One way or another, they're definitely tarnishing.†   (source)
  • The air in the jar smelled of stale breath and tarnished metal.†   (source)
  • Underneath, his hands were the color of tarnished bronze.†   (source)
  • In the dark the iron could pass for tarnished silver.†   (source)
  • And you were wrong to tarnish his reputation.†   (source)
  • The wooden door was darkly stained, with a panel of cloudy glass and tarnished brass numbers: 304B.†   (source)
  • It was a large apple, its wrinkled, moldy skin marbled with many veins of tarnished gold.†   (source)
  • It's nearly black with tarnish, but I prefer it that way; it draws less attention.†   (source)
  • He looked at the paper of the manuscript and at the rusty tarnish of the motor.†   (source)
  • And it was as if my own footsteps were being erased behind me, the footsteps I'd made as a child on the beaches and pathways of the land I'd left, and the footsteps I'd made on this side of the ocean, since coming here; all the traces of me, smoothed over and rubbed away as if they had never been, like polishing the black tarnish from the silver, or drawing your hand across dry sand.†   (source)
  • Harry, who had expected something much more exciting, saw a mess of small, everyday objects: a yo-yo, a silver thimble, and a tarnished mouth organ among them.†   (source)
  • Despite being sealed in a dark stone cube for over a century, the capstone had not faded or tarnished in any way.†   (source)
  • The china, which bore the Black crest and motto, was all thrown unceremoniously into a sack by Sirius, and the same fate met a set of old photographs in tarnished silver frames, all of whose occupants squealed shrilly as the glass covering them smashed.†   (source)
  • The weather was getting colder and wetter, the nights darker, but no amount of mud, wind, or rain could tarnish Harry's wonderful vision of finally winning the huge, silver Quidditch Cup.†   (source)
  • Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, are raised at Children's House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Viktoriastrasse whose rooms are populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying of newborns and battered trunks inside which drowse the last possessions of deceased parents: patchwork dresses, tarnished wedding cutlery, faded ambrotypes of fathers swallowed by the mines.†   (source)
  • They were crammed with an odd assortment of objects: a selection of rusty daggers, claws, a coiled snakeskin, a number of tarnished silver boxes inscribed with languages Harry could not understand and, least pleasant of all, an ornate crystal bottle with a large opal set into the stopper, full of what Harry was quite sure was blood.†   (source)
  • If the fair failed, Burnham knew, the nation's honor would be tarnished, Chicago humiliated, and his own firm dealt a crushing blow.†   (source)
  • From time to time he would take it out and polish the dust or tarnish from it, amazed at how it had weathered the years.†   (source)
  • Yet on two of these occasions someone realized that he and his presumptive male companion did not go to the bar but to a room, and the already tarnished reputation of Florentino Ariza received the coup de grace.†   (source)
  • Inside, the first thing he noticed was the tarnished gray milk can, tipped over, and the scrap of small bolts, nuts, hinges, nails, and washers fanned out across the floor, all coated with an orange powder of rust.†   (source)
  • Langdon occasionally ribbed Peter that the lone tarnish on his sterling pedigree was his diploma from a second-rate university—Yale.†   (source)
  • But in the fall of '59, when Owen and I began our tenth-grade year at the academy, Owen was regarded as especially gifted—by our peers—because he was dating a college girl; that Hester was a cow-college girl did not tarnish Owen's reputation.†   (source)
  • He pushed open a door, and I followed him down a crowded hallway lined with tarnished mirrors and old pictures.†   (source)
  • Towards the middle of the lawn, close to a tarnished bronze statue of Eros, two young men lay on their backs watching the spectacle.†   (source)
  • The keyhole was the old-fashioned sort, reminding Paul of John Tenniel's Alice in Wonderland drawings, set in the middle of a tarnished keyplate.†   (source)
  • As opposed to what his corpulence might suggest, Lotario Thugut had the rosebud genitals of a cherub, but this must have been a fortunate defect, because the most tarnished birds argued over who would have the chance to go to bed with him, and then they shrieked as if their throats were being cut, shaking the buttresses of the palace and making its ghosts tremble in fear.†   (source)
  • He beckoned to Harry and led him out of Kingsley's cubicle, through a second set of oak doors, into another passage, turned left, marched along another corridor, turned right into a dimly lit and distinctly shabby corridor, and finally reached a dead end, where a door on the left stood ajar, revealing a broom cupboard, and a door on the right bore a tarnished brass plaque reading: Misuse of Muggle Artefacts.†   (source)
  • At the back of the room a wall of tarnished old mirrors, hung frame to frame, glowed with the silvered light of old ballrooms and candlelit salons.†   (source)
  • The fair buildings were complete and all exhibits were in place, but just as surely as silver tarnishes, the fair became subject to the inevitable forces of degradation and decline—and tragedy.†   (source)
  • His last image of his father suddenly appeared to him, as he was giving him the music box—the beautiful keepsake that his daughter now treasured so much she even clutched it in her sleep, although the silver had long since tarnished.†   (source)
  • Through the dusty windows I saw Staffordshire dogs and majolica cats, dusty crystal, tarnished silver, antique chairs and settees upholstered in sallow old brocade, an elaborate faience birdcage, miniature marble obelisks atop a marble-topped pedestal table and a pair of alabaster cockatoos.†   (source)
  • The tarnished chandeliers were no longer hung with cobwebs but with garlands of holly and gold and silver streamers; magical snow glittered in heaps over the threadbare carpets; a great Christmas tree, obtained by Mundungus and decorated with live fairies, blocked Sirius's family tree from view, and even the stuffed elf-heads on the hall wall wore Father Christmas hats and beards.†   (source)
  • Slughorn strode over to a corner cupboard and, after a moment's foraging, emerged with two very battered-looking copies of Advanced Potion-Making by Libatius Borage, which he gave to Harry and Ron along with two sets of tarnished scales.†   (source)
  • Seizing the chipped bust of an ugly old warlock from on top of a nearby crate, he stood it on top of the cupboard where the book was now hidden, perched a dusty old wig and a tarnished tiara on the statues head to make it more distinctive, then sprinted back through the alleyways of hidden junk as fast as he could go, back to the door, back out onto the corridor, where he slammed the door behind him, and it turned at once back into stone.†   (source)
  • Far beyond the last, one lonely ball of ice and rock twirling in dead darkness about a sun that glittered no brighter than a tarnished penny.†   (source)
  • It had a cover of tarnished gold, etched with hieroglyphs and the profile of an ibis-headed man—the Egyptian god himself.†   (source)
  • There wasn't much else in sight except for more palm trees, a few tarnished farm tools, and a weathered plywood sign lying on the ground.†   (source)
  • Ser Kevan had made his views plain during his last visit; her shame must not be allowed to tarnish the honor of Casterly Rock.†   (source)
  • In all of his life he could never have been as frightened as at that moment, but he had a dignity and presence that spared him from humiliation and a genuine elegance that was defeated only by tarnished hands and nails that had been shattered by rough work.†   (source)
  • The sentinels glanced at him with disbelief, their upturned faces tinted the color of tarnished brass by the variegated light.†   (source)
  • Eragon hesitated, reluctant to tarnish Orik's enjoyment of his triumph, but then he asked, "Do you really have the support you need to win the throne?†   (source)
  • The dried corsages were thrown out long ago, the diplomas and class pins and photos must be down in my mother's cellar, in the steamer trunk along with the tarnishing silver.†   (source)
  • She also gave up cigarettes and alcohol and began to lead a healthy, orderly existence; she put on weight, cut her hair, made up her large eyes again, and went back to wearing her tinkling necklaces and bracelets in a pathetic attempt to remove the tarnished image of herself.†   (source)
  • They had found a chamber full of skulls and yellowed bones, and four sacks of tarnished silver coins from the reign of the first King Viserys.†   (source)
  • …lips, seeking out the alleys in which he could see like a cat, the darkened bars in which sailors slept with their heads on the table, great high-ceilinged hotel rooms where a lone figure might sit, her feet upon an embroidered cushion, her legs covered with a lace counterpane, her head bent under the tarnished light of a single candle, never seeing the great shadow move across the plaster flowers of the ceiling, never seeing the long white finger reached to press the fragile flame.†   (source)
  • …card with a picture of what looked like a white man in black-face seated in the door of a cabin strumming a banjo beneath a bar of music and the lyric "Going back to my old cabin home"; a useless inhalant, a string of bright glass beads with a tarnished clasp, a rabbit foot, a celluloid baseball scoring card shaped like a catcher's mitt, registering a game won or lost years ago; an old breast pump with rubber bulb yellowed with age, a worn baby shoe and a dusty lock of infant hair tied…†   (source)
  • As Tradd approached me I turned my back toward him and found myself facing an antique mirror that reflected our three images in tarnished, distorted tones.†   (source)
  • She felt he would be tarnishing his skills by putting into words the visions of others, substituting stories from his soul with those that would earn the most dollars.†   (source)
  • Looking down, he saw that the flat stones that formed the surface of the road seemed to be set within tarnished silver, the veins of which formed an irregular, cobweb-like pattern.†   (source)
  • I want to say that he was a family man, that being Korean and oldfashioned made him cherish and honor the institution, that his family was the basic unit of wealth in his life, everything paling and tarnished before it.†   (source)
  • This Eragon was garbed like a prince, in fine cloth and armor-though tarnished by the grime of war-and in his right hand he wielded a blade of iridescent red.†   (source)
  • He longed to be with her, but she had rejected his advances, and that tarnished his affection with hurt and anger, and also frustration, for while Eragon refused to accept that his suit was hopeless, he could not think of how to proceed.†   (source)
  • You warned me about Glaedr, but I was too proud to see the truth in your words…… I have failed to be a good companion for you, betrayed what it means to be a dragon, and tarnished the honor of the Riders.†   (source)
  • I reach for my mother's tarnished armlet, wrapped around my bicep, and touch the familiar pattern for strength.†   (source)
  • Higher up, the clouds were the color of tarnished silver, while the very tops were a pure, blinding white and appeared as solid as the flanks of Tronjheim.†   (source)
  • Mobile homes appeared, set into the hills like tarnished dime-store jewelry, turquoise and silver and yellow faded to the color of cream.†   (source)
  • The streets and alleyways were cloaked in shadows the color of tarnished silver, and the water in its stone-lined channel was dark and dismal and laced with streaks of blood.†   (source)
  • A few massive chairs—upholstered with leather fastened with rows of tarnished brass tacks—stood scattered about the table, but neither Nasuada nor the dozen people who bustled around her deigned to use them.†   (source)
  • Mr. Randel and I had an unwritten, unspoken law that we would never cross swords professionally, that our friendship was too intense and personal to be tarnished in some abortive, temporal crusade concerning our jobs.†   (source)
  • Of all those who had so foully tarnished the image of the modern South he was a leading mischief-maker, not really typical of Southern politicians but because of his blabbermouth and prominence rendering himself, in the eyes of the credulous, an archetypal image of the Southern statesman and thus polluting the name of whatever was good and decent and even exemplary in the South as surely and as wickedly as those anonymous sub-anthropoids who had recently slaughtered Bobby Weed.†   (source)
  • Mrs Biddulph Martin was tarnished perhaps by some connection with women's rights.†   (source)
  • On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.†   (source)
  • The tarnish of shame and guilt that enveloped her spread to him as well.†   (source)
  • It was Thorin, but you could only have told it by his golden chain, and by the colour of his now dirty and tattered sky-blue hood with its tarnished silver tassel.†   (source)
  • The azalea scent, so fragrant and delicate in the air, had turned stale inside the wardrobe, tarnishing the silver dresses and the brocade, and the breath of it wafted towards me now from the open doors, faded and old.†   (source)
  • …over long enough, to be old but with old eyes, with unkempt hair and faces gaunt and weathered as if cast by some spartan and even niggard hand from bronze, in worn and patched gray weathered now to the color of dead leaves, the one with the tarnished braid of an officer, the other plain of cuff, the pistol lying yet across the saddle bow unaimed, the two faces calm, the voices not even raised: Don't you pass the shadow of this post, this branch, Charles; and I am going to pass it,…†   (source)
  • Nothing was dull or tarnished.†   (source)
  • In a sky swept crystal-clear by the night wind, the stars showed like silver flakes, tarnished now and then by the yellow gleam of the revolving light.†   (source)
  • Thomas Archbishop, Thomas our Lord, leave us and leave us be, in our humble and tarnished frame of existence, leave us; do not ask us To stand to the doom on the house, the doom on the Archbishop, the doom on the world.†   (source)
  • ]] So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked.†   (source)
  • The chill of the tarnished railing under his palm, the chill and the memory of its lustre and the flat taint of its corruption.†   (source)
  • That was now the only room I used; it had all the furniture I needed: a brass bedstead, a dressing table, some cane chairs whose seats had more or less caved in, a wardrobe with a tarnished mirror.†   (source)
  • Over the way was a stockyards siding, dusty animals bawling in the waiting cars, putting red muzzles to the slats; truck wheels sucked through the melting tar, the coal split and tarnished on the piles, the burdocks died on the stalk.†   (source)
  • They rose when she entered—a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head.†   (source)
  • …and jaded horse on which he did not seem to sit but rather seemed to project himself ahead like a mirage, in some fierce dynamic rigidity of impatience which the gaunt horse, the saddle, the boots, the leaf-colored and threadbare coat with its tarnished and flappingbraid containing the sentient though nerveless shell, could not keep up with, which seemed to precede him as he dismounted and out of which he said 'Well, daughter' and stooped and touched his beard to Judith's forehead, who…†   (source)
  • A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured.†   (source)
  • He stood with military straightness in his old uniform, his pistol in its worn holster, his battered scabbard smartly slapping his high boots, his tarnished spurs dully gleaming—Major Ashley Wilkes, C.S.A. The habit of command sat upon him now, a quiet air of self-reliance and authority, and grim lines were beginning to emerge about his mouth.†   (source)
  • In her hat were large silk roses, coloured like tarnished gold.†   (source)
  • "Got it at last!" said Huck, ploughing among the tarnished coins with his hand.†   (source)
  • There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name.†   (source)
  • His mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished.†   (source)
  • —a tarnished shilling in the waistcoat pocket.†   (source)
  • Over the west hung the wasting moon, now dull and greenish-yellow, like tarnished brass.†   (source)
  • The white had turned to yellow, and the gilding was tarnished.†   (source)
  • His doublet and trunks were of rich material, but faded and threadbare, and their gold-lace adornments were sadly tarnished; his ruff was rumpled and damaged; the plume in his slouched hat was broken and had a bedraggled and disreputable look; at his side he wore a long rapier in a rusty iron sheath; his swaggering carriage marked him at once as a ruffler of the camp.†   (source)
  • Alan was well enough pleased to see his finery so fully remembered and set down; only when he came to the word tarnish, he looked upon his lace like one a little mortified.†   (source)
  • His shoulder-straps were a bit tarnished, his clean-shaved cheeks were large and sallow; he looked like a man who would be given to taking snuff—don't you know?†   (source)
  • His mind, in the vesture of a doubting monk, stood often in shadow under the windows of that age, to hear the grave and mocking music of the lutenists or the frank laughter of waist-coateers until a laugh too low, a phrase, tarnished by time, of chambering and false honour stung his monkish pride and drove him on from his lurking-place.†   (source)
  • Swimming away, Nicole saw that the cloud of Dick's heart-sickness had lifted a little as he began to play with Rosemary, bringing out his old expertness with people, a tarnished object of art; she guessed that with a drink or so he would have done his stunts on the swinging rings for her, fumbling through stunts he had once done with ease.†   (source)
  • The pale cast of thought was with her a breath rather than a tarnish, a breath that leaves the colours all the more vivid when it has been wiped away.†   (source)
  • …seemed to be striving to draw the river down into the tangle of its seaweeds; Pont-Aven, the snowy, rosy flight of the wing of a lightly poised coif, tremulously reflected in the greenish waters of a canal; Quimperle, more firmly attached, this, and since the Middle Ages, among the rivulets with which it babbled, threading their pearls upon a grey background, like the pattern made, through the cobwebs upon a window, by rays of sunlight changed into blunt points of tarnished silver?†   (source)
  • But," he added, suddenly, another thought as to whether his own reputation in this community was in any way being tarnished by rumor of anything he had done in the past coming to him, "just how did you happen to come to me, anyhow?"†   (source)
  • Then they all rode home in one of the largest wagons, in the company of a broad tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the eastwards, its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten Tuscan saint.†   (source)
  • But from the middle shell, the old man took a heavily tarnished, round silver bowl set on a silver plate and showed the boy both pieces, separating them and turning them both about in his hands, all the while reciting a story he had told many times before.†   (source)
  • The dark panelling, the massive, tarnished gold of the cornice, the mahogany tables, gave the room an air of sumptuous comfort, and the leather-covered seats along the wall were soft and easy.†   (source)
  • It has been humbled since by the supercilious modesty of the vast Hotel Thornleigh; dirty now is its tessellated floor and all the wild gilt tarnished, and in its ponderous leather chairs are torn seams and stogie ashes and horse-dealers.†   (source)
  • The peculiarities of lighting, the masses of dingy red and tarnished gold, the heaviness of the shadows and the decorative lines, offered a new theme; and half the studios in the Quarter contained sketches made in one or other of the local theatres.†   (source)
  • The fact that such preparations as these meant additional delay and expense, or that Clyde might not marry her after all, or that this proposed marriage from the point of view of both was the tarnished and discolored thing that it was, was still not sufficient to take from the thought of marriage as an event, or sacrament even, that proper color and romance with which it was invested in her eyes and from which, even under such an unsatisfactory set of circumstances as these, it could…†   (source)
  • Alan was advertised as "a small, pock-marked, active man of thirty-five or thereby, dressed in a feathered hat, a French side-coat of blue with silver buttons, and lace a great deal tarnished, a red waistcoat and breeches of black, shag;" and I as "a tall strong lad of about eighteen, wearing an old blue coat, very ragged, an old Highland bonnet, a long homespun waistcoat, blue breeches; his legs bare, low-country shoes, wanting the toes; speaks like a Lowlander, and has no beard."†   (source)
  • It had left him hopelessly behind with a few poor gifts: the iron-grey hair, the heavy fatigue of the tanned face, two scars, a pair of tarnished shoulder-straps; one of those steady, reliable men who are the raw material of great reputations, one of those uncounted lives that are buried without drums and trumpets under the foundations of monumental successes.†   (source)
  • There was the huge Italian cassone, with its fantastically-painted panels and its tarnished gilt mouldings, in which he had so often hidden himself as a boy.†   (source)
  • He knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption, and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that, of the lives that had crossed his own, it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame.†   (source)
  • "Neither ought nor shall be tarnished by circumstances over which he has had no control," Duncan warmly replied.†   (source)
  • Edmond, my friend, do not compel me to tarnish that noble and pure image reflected incessantly on the mirror of my heart.†   (source)
  • But if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing.†   (source)
  • On his feet were deerskin moccasins, ornamented with porcupines' quills, after the manner of the Indians, and his limbs were guarded with long leggings of the same material as the moccasins, which, gartering over the knees of his tarnished buckskin breeches, had obtained for him among the settlers the nickname of Leather-Stocking.†   (source)
  • What money would be drawn out of Tellson's henceforth, and what would lie there, lost and forgotten; what plate and jewels would tarnish in Tellson's hiding-places, while the depositors rusted in prisons, and when they should have violently perished; how many accounts with Tellson's never to be balanced in this world, must be carried over into the next; no man could have said, that night, any more than Mr. Jarvis Lorry could, though he thought heavily of these questions.†   (source)
  • I thought you a broken toy that had lasted its time; a worthless spangle that was tarnished, and thrown away.†   (source)
  • If you have ever contemplated your father's poor position with a feeling of pride, you may rest assured that he will do nothing to tarnish it.†   (source)
  • Between two of the bookcases hung a looking-glass, presenting its high and dusty plate within a tarnished gilt frame.†   (source)
  • I am indisposed to matrimony in general, and more especially to all admixture of the varieties of species, which only tend to tarnish the beauty and to interrupt the harmony of nature.†   (source)
  • There was a great fire, and that was all the light in the huge apartment, whose floor had grown a uniform grey; and the once brilliant pewter-dishes, which used to attract my gaze when I was a girl, partook of a similar obscurity, created by tarnish and dust.†   (source)
  • His hat was a little napless, his feather was a little faded, his gold lace was a little tarnished, his laces were a trifle frayed; but in the obscurity of the church these things were not seen, and Porthos was still the handsome Porthos.†   (source)
  • There was a volume of Pope, with the Rape of the Lock in it, and another of the Tatler, and an odd one of Dryden's Miscellanies, all with tarnished gilding on their covers, and thoughts of tarnished brilliancy inside.†   (source)
  • There was nothing about him in the way of decoration but a watch, which was lowered into the depths of its proper pocket by an old black ribbon, and had a tarnished copper key moored above it, to show where it was sunk.†   (source)
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